Chapter 54
FIFTY-FOUR
EMMA
Empty.
And numb.
There was too much to feel, too much to mourn, too much to hold inside one body without shattering. Breaking Caden’s heart. Saoirse’s execution. Nino strapped to a chair. And now, bonding with James.
It was too much.
So I shut it all off. Every emotion. Every thought. Every scream clawing its way up my throat.
The High Chief sounded distant, as if he were speaking from underwater. “Please proceed.”
I blinked twice, slow and mechanical, then lifted my head to face James. “Let’s do this.”
His hands balled into tight fists—white-knuckled for a brief, telling moment—before he forced his posture into something cold, controlled, almost careless. “Fine,” he said, voice steady. “Let’s do this. But not here.”
“Mister Walker,” the High Chief began, irritation creeping in, but James lifted a hand, silencing him with the simple gesture.
“I don’t trust Colt not to intervene,” he said, the words clipped, calculated, but there was something else beneath them, something urgent.
“We should move out to the Human World. Make sure there are no Healers nearby who can undo it in the first few minutes of the bond. And if there are, in the Human World we’ll at least be able to see their translation, and we can counteract it. ”
My heartbeat—wild and frantic seconds ago—began to slow.
A fraction.
Enough for the meaning to sink in.
A True Bond could be undone.
By a Healer.
Whose translation would be visible in the Human World.
Except for mine.
Which the United Chiefs didn’t know, because they had no idea I was also a Healer.
The numbness inside me cracked, letting in a sliver of possibility, a sliver of hope.
I gave him a small nod, indicating I understood. “James is right. We shouldn’t risk anyone interfering.”
The High Chief hesitated—a single, calculating beat—before inclining his head.
“All right,” he said, voice clipped. “You may portal out with Walker’s Nexus…but keep this connection open at all times.”
The portal snapped open with a harsh crack of green energy, the edges jagged and unstable—like even the magic itself sensed how wrong this was—then the world yanked sideways.
Cold hit me first.
A brutal, slicing cold that stabbed needles straight through my skin. Snow whipped hard across an empty stretch of abandoned farmland, the wind howling like it wanted to tear us apart molecule by molecule. My boots sank into frost-crusted drifts up to my calves.
James stepped out right beside me, shoulders squared against the storm.
I kept my Nexus raised, its glow trembling in my palm, not from the cold, but from the images flooding through it.
Saoirse.
Broken. Headless. Slumped in that chair, her body robbed of everything that made her alive.
Nino.
Beaten to hell, blood drying on her collar, eyes swollen but still blazing with fury through the screen.
And between them: the High Chief.
Smirking like he’d already won. Like we were his puppets standing exactly where he wanted us.
Wind whipped my hair across my face as I tightened my grip on the Nexus, forcing my shaking hand to hold steady. The blizzard raged around us, snow swirling and snarling, stinging my cheeks until they burned.
James stepped closer, not touching me, but close enough the heat from his body was a small, stubborn shield against the cold. His breath fogged in the air, his jaw was locked tight, and every line of his posture was braced.
“We’re in the clear,” he murmured, barely audible over the wind. “No Healers will translate here and undo the bond.”
The reminder of our plan sent a tremor down my spine.
It would all come down to me undoing what we were about to do. No room for failure.
The High Chief’s image was distorted by the storm, but it was still dripping with authority.
“Now,” he said. “Begin to form the bond.”
Snow hammered against my back. My fingers numbed around the Nexus. My heart slammed harder, like it was trying to tear its way out.
James shifted again, attention fully on me. There was something fierce and broken and determined in him.
“You ready?” he asked quietly. Not gently. Not kindly. But firmly, like every part of him was saying: We do this together or not at all.
I took a breath. It felt like inhaling glass.
“Yeah,” I whispered, the word almost lost in the wind. “Let’s do this.”
In the middle of the freezing human world, with death looming through the screens before me, James reached for me, and the world held its breath.
The empty farmland stretched out around us like a white void, the snow whipping sideways in frantic, punishing gusts until I finally forced my voice up through the numbness lodged in my throat.
“What do I do?” I whispered, the words scraped raw by cold and grief and terror.
James didn’t look away from me—not once—and something steadier than the storm settled into him.
“You focus,” he said, his breath drifting between us in a thin trail of white that the wind immediately tore apart. “You think about wanting to bond with me. Not as an order. Not as a performance. As a choice.”
“A choice,” I echoed, though the word seemed foreign, impossible.
He nodded once, stepping closer. “You picture yourself opening to me, fully. Your mind, your heart, your magic…every single part of you. You let me in. And I do the same. It’s trust. The most absolute form of it our kind has.”
The wind roared, carrying shards of ice across the ground like broken glass, and the swirling snow caught in his hair, in the dark blue glow already building beneath his skin.
Trust. I had to trust James Walker for this plan to work. Can someone spell irony?
“And then?”
“And then,” he said softly, “you release your beautiful scarlet haze, for all of us to see.”
The words dropped between us heavy and undeniable. He must have seen the panic ripple through me, because he stepped even closer, close enough that the outline of his magic reflected faintly in his eyes.
“Emma,” he murmured, and it wasn’t a dismissal or a plea, it was a promise. “You can trust me.”
I blinked a few times, before realizing after everything we’d been through, the lies, the deceit, the fights, and now this…I did trust him with my life.
The Nexus screens flickered violently in my hand—Saoirse’s ruined body, Nino’s trembling breaths, the High Chief’s cold face—all of them floating ghostlike above the snow.
“You ready?” James asked.
I clenched my jaw and rolled my shoulders.
Warrior Emma: time to rise, bitch.
I gave him a solid nod.
“On three,” he said, threading through the chaos and tethering me to something still sane. “You release your haze. Don’t hold it back. Don’t restrain it. Let it surround you. Let it reach me. Let it meet mine.”
My hands were shaking so hard it almost hurt.
“One…”
The storm seemed to pause, as if listening.
“Two…”
I took a deep breath in.
“Three.”
I exhaled—not gently, not gracefully, but like I was ripping open a seam inside myself—and my now visible red haze surged outward in a stunning, violent burst from beneath my skin.
It roared out of me like fire catching wind, a luminous, molten red cloud that illuminated the snow around us, turning the frozen air into a storm of blood-colored light. The ground glowed beneath it.
At the same moment, James let go of his haze.
His cerulean magic ripped free in a cold, brilliant wave—bright as fractured ice, sharp as lightning, shimmering with depths only Leaders carried—and the two hazes collided mid-air with a crackling sound that vibrated across my bones.
For a heartbeat, they didn’t blend.
They fought, swirling, snapping, testing each other like two storms meeting.
Then, slowly, impossibly, beautifully, they twisted.
Red and blue spiraled together, tendrils weaving into one another, curling upward in thick, luminous streams. The colors wrapped around us, circling our bodies in widening loops until they formed a perfect, glowing horizontal eight—an infinite loop of scarlet and cerulean—shimmering and alive and pulsing with heat and power.
The snow melted where the haze touched it.
The air warmed. Magic filled my lungs like breath.
The symbol of a True Bond surrounded us, cocooned us, sealed us inside a world of blinding color and humming power.
Through the Nexus, the High Chief leaned in.
Nino’s eyes widened.
Even Saoirse’s executioner froze.
James’s haze brushed against mine—gentle, grounding, impossibly steady—and in the swirling light, I felt the truth of his intent, felt it pulse straight into my chest:
You’re not trapped.
We’re in this together. And you’ll get us out of it.
And then—exactly like Julian’s voice once had—James’s actual voice rang clear and quiet in my mind, slipping seamlessly through the magic tether between us.
“Don’t panic. We have a few minutes. They’ll test us, we’ll pass with flying colors, and then you’ll undo the bond with your healing haze.”
That was it.
The True Bond had settled.
It was done.
“Well, well,” the High Chief drawled, sounding far too pleased for a man who’d orchestrated murder.
“I am glad rational thinking prevailed tonight. Now, Mister Walker, if you’d be so kind.
We sent you something through your Nexus.
Don’t say it out loud; shoot it through the bond, and we’ll hear from Ms. Thompson what it is. ”
James’s cerulean haze tightened around him like a coil. “After which you’ll let Nino go.”
The High Chief nodded, self-satisfied to the point of nausea. “Ms. Ramos has nothing to fear from us again, if you prove the existence of the bond.”
James didn’t move.
Not a twitch. Not a single sign to the Chiefs that anything was happening at all.
But I felt it.
A subtle shift in the air between us, like the magic surrounding my ribs drew in a breath of its own, and then something warm pressed against the inside of my mind: his presence, his intention focused.
“Coming to you,” he murmured through the bond, the words brushing along the edges of my consciousness like fingertips on glass.
I braced myself.
Then a pulse hit.
Not physical. Not magical in the way haze was. But a thought—wrapped in his magic, shaped by his will—shot straight through the bond and struck the center of my mind with a soft, ringing clarity.
It wasn’t words so much as an image.
A single, crystal clear impression.
A white feather.
Long. Clean. Edges sharp as paper. Weightless, almost glowing.
With a crimson drop of blood in the middle.
It drifted in the darkness of my mind like something suspended underwater.
The High Chief leaned even closer, hungry for confirmation.
“Go on, Ms. Thompson,” he demanded smoothly. “Tell us what Mister Walker sent to you.”
“A feather,” I said. “My bonded mate sent me a white feather, tainted by a single drop of blood.”
“Undo the bond, Emma! Now!” James commanded me the second the words left my mouth, firm and steady beneath the veneer of calm. “Focus on your healing haze. Keep it invisible. Heal us of this.”
I forced myself to keep my focus razor-sharp as I reached inward for that thread of healing magic buried beneath my panic.
The High Chief’s eyes widened, gleaming with triumph and sick satisfaction, his expression tightening with barely masked excitement. “Very good,” he purred. “Well, that concludes our business for tonight. Ms. Ramos, you are free to go.”
Faster than instinct, faster than fear, diving past the shaking edges of my unraveling mind until I found it, that coil of golden healing haze buried beneath everything else.
Warm.
Luminous.
Alive.
I seized it like a lifeline.
The High Chief was still speaking but the words were a distant, useless buzz, because all of my attention, all of my magic, all of me was already wrapped around the bond pulsing between James and me.
I felt Nino jerk on the screen as her restraints released. I saw her collapse forward, bloody and trembling but moving, alive, gods, alive, but I didn’t let myself falter, didn’t let myself blink.
The golden haze unspooled through my veins and rushed outward, silent and invisible, slipping around the new bond like a soft ribbon of light.
I didn’t push it gently.
I didn’t coax the bond apart.
I strangled it.
Undo it, undo it, undo it.
The mantra beat through me with every pulse of magic, my healing haze tightening around the connection until it vibrated with the pressure.
Behind the Nexus feed, the High Chief continued, smug and oblivious. “I hope you both have a wonderful night, and I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
My haze surged.
Once.
Twice.
And then it cut the bond clean through.
A ripping sensation snapped through my skull, quick enough to steal the air from my lungs. Energy recoiled through my chest like a shockwave.
Beside me, James exhaled—a tiny, controlled release of breath no one but I could have sensed—relief vibrating faintly through the ghost of what had been our connection.
The bond was gone.
No roots.
No residue.
Nothing for the Chiefs to detect.
Nothing left but the echo of their mistake.
I pulled the golden haze back into myself in one swift, practiced motion, locking it down, hiding every glimmer of its glow before the Nexus flickered.
Saoirse’s empty chair.
Nino stumbling into someone’s arms.
And the High Chief’s satisfied smile... All flashed once before the connection snapped shut.