Chapter 27
Tess
Lucien didn't give him time to calculate.
"Thank you, Instructor Blackwell. I'll take it from here.
" Lucien's tone was warm. Collegial. The kind of warmth that made you understand the person speaking had never in their life been told no.
He turned to the team—Theron's team—as if he'd been running it all along.
"We'll run the same scenario with modified pairings. Anya, I'd like you on Talven. Valen—"
"I'll take Thalon."
Valen's voice cut in smooth and immediate, as if he'd been waiting for this.
His red eyes found mine, and the expression on his face was the one that made my blood sing with the urge to hit something—cooperative on the surface, triumphant underneath.
He turned to Lucien with the deference of a grandson addressing a family friend.
"If the goal is to assess bond adaptability, a soul-bonded dragon would provide the most valuable data point. "
"Excellent initiative," Lucien said. Like he hadn't planned exactly this.
Thalon's reaction slammed through the soul bond before the words had finished landing—confusion, then resistance, then a burn that wasn't pain but wrongness. My stomach dropped and kept dropping.
Valen on Thalon. Not a random assignment. A volunteer. He'd wanted this—access to my soul-bonded dragon, the most intimate magical relationship a Rider could have, and he'd asked for it in front of everyone like he was selecting a horse for a morning ride.
Draven's head turned. Not toward Valen—toward me. The look was fast, barely a flicker before his expression locked down, but I caught it. Fierce. Furious. Aware of exactly what was being taken.
"Tess and Raze, you'll observe from the ground," Lucien continued, pleasant and unhurried. "Same scenario, same objectives. Draven and Lunessa, you'll maintain your current pairings."
Same scenario. Same objectives. Two riders pulled. Two specific riders—me, and the teammate whose loyalty to me had been visible since day one. Draven and Lunessa untouched.
This wasn't about adaptability. It was about me.
Across the debrief circle, Theron's eyes found mine. The professional mask was intact, but beneath it I saw raw concern—the kind that understood exactly what was happening and couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.
He looked away before anyone else could read it.
Raze made a low sound beside me. Then he moved—not toward Talven, but toward Anya.
"Hey." He fell into step beside her as she walked toward Talven, and his voice shifted into the register I'd heard him use exactly twice before, funny on the surface, dead serious underneath.
"So, quick orientation. Talven's love language is compliments.
If you skip the flattery, she gets petty, and petty Talven is a weather event nobody wants. "
Anya's laugh was strained, but real. "Compliments. Got it."
"She pulls left on descents—it's a quirk, not a problem, just compensate. And when you're channeling through her, don't fight the storm energy. It's not like earth magic where you shape it. You ride it. Let it build and then aim the release." He paused. "You'll be fine. Talven likes you."
"Talven doesn't know me."
"Talven knows you're not an asshole. For Talven, that's basically a marriage proposal."
Anya smiled, and Raze squeezed her shoulder once before stepping back. But I'd seen his face when he turned away from her—the smile gone like it had never existed, replaced by fury, hard and bright.
He walked back toward me, and his voice dropped low enough that only I could hear it.
"This is targeted." Not a question. His eyes were on the observation platform where Lucien stood, pleasant and immovable. "He didn't shuffle the whole team. He pulled you and me out and put Valen on your dragon. That's not training."
"I know."
"If that vampire puts one scratch on Talven, I'm going to—"
"I know, Raze."
He exhaled hard through his nose. His fists were clenched at his sides, and the effort of standing still was visible in every line of his body. Raze was built to move, to act, to throw himself at the problem teeth-first. Making him watch was its own kind of cruelty.
"This is so screwed up," he muttered.
Across the field, Valen was walking toward Thalon. My dragon stood rigid, every scale pulled tight, his eyes burning molten gold as Malrec Beaumont's grandson approached the saddle where I should have been.
"I will not give them a weapon against you, little one."
The words moved through the bond like fire held in check. Images, understanding, the tactical assessment of a creature who'd lived centuries—if he refused, if he resisted, that was ammunition. Evidence that dragon bonds were dangerous. Evidence the Omnium needed more control.
"He gets nothing from me. But I will carry him."
I felt the cost of that choice in my chest. The effort it took for an ancient dragon of fire and will to stand passive while the enemy mounted.
"This changes nothing. You know that."
I did. The bond was there—bright, unbroken, golden. Whatever Valen catalogued from Thalon's saddle, whatever he reported to Malrec, the bond was mine.
Valen settled in. Adjusted his grip. His hands moved along the edges of the bond seat with careful, cataloguing attention—the same way he'd watched us during drills since Week One. Gathering data. Only now he was gathering it from inside the most sacred space a Rider had.
I looked away.
"Mount up," Theron said. His voice was barely recognizable.
The team launched—Draven on Amrion, Lunessa on Kaelthar, Valen on Thalon, Anya on Talven, Theron on Yrden. The sky filled with dragons that should have carried different riders, and Tess Whittaker stood on the ground beside a werewolf who was vibrating with rage and watched.
Footsteps behind us. Measured. Unhurried.
Lucien Voss came to stand near us—not between Raze and me, but close enough that the three of us formed a loose cluster facing the sky. Close enough for conversation. The positioning was deliberate, the way everything Lucien did was deliberate.
Beside me, Raze went very still. Not calm—coiled. I felt the heat rolling off him, the barely leashed tension of a wolf forced to stand beside the thing he wanted to tear apart.
"Impressive team you've got, Ms. Whittaker," he said. Warm. Conversational. The tone of a man making small talk at a function. "The cohesion is genuinely notable. Councilor Blackwell must be pleased with the progress."
I said nothing.
"It will be instructive to see how the dynamic shifts with different riders," Lucien said mildly.
Above us, the exercise was running.
I could see it—Draven and Amrion sweeping the scenario zone, Lunessa and Kaelthar locking down the perimeter, the familiar patterns of a team executing a drill. Valen on Thalon approached the extraction zone, and even from the ground I could see the difference.
Thalon flew correctly. He followed the approach vector, descended to the extraction point, held position while Valen directed the ground recovery. Mechanical. Precise. A dragon executing commands instead of anticipating his Rider's thoughts.
Anya on Talven was trying hard—I could see the effort from here, the way she was wrestling with storm energy that wanted a channel she couldn't provide. Talven cooperated, but the aerial cover was scattered where it had been crisp, tentative where it had been fierce.
The exercise was working.
That was the part I couldn't look away from. The civilians were being extracted. The scenario was progressing. Slower, sloppier, missing the thing that had made it sing twenty minutes ago—but functional. Adequate. The machine ran without me.
The thought landed like a fist to the sternum.
Not the political implications—not yet. Something older and smaller.
The voice I'd carried since childhood, the one that whispered, You were never the part that mattered.
Maybe Lucien was right. Maybe the bond was extraordinary and I was just—the person standing next to it.
The replaceable variable. The human who got lucky.
I killed the thought before it could root. Shoved it down hard, the way I'd learned to shove things down. But the dread stayed, humming in my chest.
"Don't you think, Ms. Whittaker?"
The drop in my gut hit before the thought formed, the tightening across my shoulders following a beat later. Lucien was talking about operational flexibility. Bonds as interchangeable, riders as replaceable, connection as a variable to be optimized or overridden.
Raze's knuckles brushed the back of my arm. Brief. Deliberate. Not comfort—a reminder. I didn't look at him. I couldn't, or I'd crack.
Today Thalon could resist from the inside. Carry Valen and give him nothing. Keep his bond with me burning bright through the soul link even while someone else sat in his saddle.
"The program benefits from flexibility," Lucien said, as if he were summarizing a report. "Bonds are extraordinary tools. But we do our Riders a disservice if we treat them as irreplaceable."
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs and held.
The exercise was finishing. Above us, Theron's voice came through—Raze still had his earpiece in, and I caught the tinny edge of the command calling the team back to the landing zone. The dragons began their descent.
Lucien watched them come down—Thalon's shifting obsidian scales catching the light, Valen riding easy in the saddle, and said, almost to himself, "Promising. Very promising."
Then he turned to me. Pleasant. Warm. "Thank you for the productive morning, Ms. Whittaker. Your team is a credit to the program."
He walked away.
I stood there. The pressure he'd left behind was wrong—the way a room stays wrong after someone dangerous leaves. My pulse was too loud in my ears. Raze shifted beside me, and I heard him exhale—ragged, controlled, the sound of someone who'd been holding his breath for the entire conversation.
I couldn't speak yet. Couldn't move. So I looked up.
The dragons were descending. My hands were still pressed against my thighs, fingers aching from how hard I'd been holding them still. I could feel Thalon through the bond—fierce and furious and mine, the golden thread between us burning brighter with every wingbeat that closed the distance.
My eyes stung. My chest hurt. I tipped my face toward the sky and watched him come, and my body did the thing it always did when the bond surged—leaned forward, weight shifting to the balls of my feet, like some part of me believed I could meet him halfway if I just reached far enough.
He was coming back.
Across the landing zone, Theron was dismounting Yrden.
His eyes found mine before his boots hit the ground, and what I saw there stopped me.
Not the professional mask. Not the controlled fury from when he'd given the order.
This was rawer. A look that said he'd seen what Lucien did, seen all of it, and they were not done with this.
Relief cracked open in my chest—not the bond, not magic, just the unbearable relief of being seen by someone who understood.
He held my gaze for a beat longer than he should have. Then he looked away.
Thalon was twenty feet above me, wings spread, slowing.
I tried to tell myself the things that should have been true.
The bond was intact. Thalon was mine. Nothing had changed.
But the words felt hollow, because what I'd just watched wasn't a failure.
It was a proof of concept. The exercise had worked.
The machine had run. And somewhere in the architecture of power, someone was taking notes.
Thalon landed before me.
But all I could see was how easily they'd taken him away.