Chapter 52
JASSYN
Elashor shoved between Jassyn’s shoulders, driving him to his knees as the portal spat him out. Breath already thinning, manicured grass caught his palms.
The garden exhaled around him, trilliums and lilies reeking with sweetness so cloying that his stomach lurched. The perfume pressed into his lungs, sugared and wet, until bile crept up his throat.
No.
The voiceless denial died as his gaze dragged toward the arches ahead.
The Vallende estate.
Dread cinched his chest as Elashor’s rift sealed shut.
White roses bound marble pillars like shackles, captive veins of Essence seeping through the stone. Caged canaries trilled in melodic patterns while fountains released bubbled sighs.
The courtyard wore the mask of serenity, but Jassyn already knew what prowled beneath the lie.
Less than an hour ago, a harpoon had torn through his wing, yanking him from the sky.
The sea had broken his fall, but everything after had dissolved into a fractured haze.
He’d ripped off his tether hoping to give Vesryn a sense of their location but the soldiers hauled him from the water, their Essence stitching him whole.
Hands steered him through portal after portal until he staggered into a war camp buried in an unfamiliar rainforest. Vines slick with moisture had groped his shoulders as they marched him straight to Elashor.
Something had happened there.
He felt a chilling absence where the bond with Vesryn should’ve glimmered—severed completely, though he wasn’t tethered. Whether the connection had been sundered by another’s hand—if such a thing were even possible—or worse, because Vesryn himself had fallen…
The thought broke apart before Jassyn could follow it to its end.
What remained of his memories had vanished so cleanly he couldn’t even trace the shape of the loss. He didn’t know how or why—unless his mind had already begun to retreat, knowing what waited ahead.
Elashor’s armor flashed with radiance where he stood at the garden’s edge, his golden hair glinting in the midday sun.
“Welcome home,” he drawled, his voice smooth as silk twisted into a noose. His smirk curved as his gaze lingered where Jassyn knelt. “She’ll be delighted you’ve returned.”
Fury ripped through Jassyn. He surged to his feet, beastblood roaring for violence. He lunged, arm snapping toward Elashor’s throat as the memory of driving a golden blade into that collarbone burned down his muscles.
But his fingers never touched.
He froze mid-motion, body locked as though sculpted from stone. Captive and posed, no different from the statues scattered throughout the courtyard.
Art, she’d called it.
Jassyn plunged inward for Essence and slammed into a solid barricade, his Well sealed off. He clawed for Cinderax’s flame still flickering in his chest, but the fire slipped away, heat without purchase.
He bared his teeth at Elashor. Elements then.
Lashing his awareness outward, Jassyn reached for the fountains behind the general, to the pulse of water. He tried to seize it, twist it, drown the stars-cursed bastard in his own reflection.
The water refused him. The garden did too. No vines stirred at his call, no roots coiled, no breath of air bent to his will.
Desperation mounting, Jassyn flailed for his wings—for the ache of freedom, the memory of sky.
Nothing answered.
Instead, numbness spread across his back, the shift severed as if flight had never belonged to him at all.
“Coercion is a double-edged sword,” Elashor mused, boots whispering through the grass as he paced a slow orbit. “Perhaps you thought yourself clever—slipping into my mind, breaking past my walls. But you left the door to yours cracked open.”
He stopped directly before Jassyn, eyes glittering with a predatory gleam, and lifted a hand. Threads of telepathy unspooled between his fingers before driving their hooks deep into Jassyn’s skull.
“And I made sure you’ll never remember how I stepped through.”
Pulse racing, Jassyn swallowed the rising horror, drawing in the garden’s sickening air through lungs that refused to fill. He remembered the last time their roles had been reversed—when he’d stripped the breath from Elashor’s chest, watched him choke in the dirt.
The memory flared, then guttered.
Now he was the string pulled taut, nothing more than an instrument held at pitch. Worse, an old instinct had already begun to stir. The survival script etched too deeply to erase. The one that whispered please them quickly, and maybe it will end sooner.
That instinct hadn’t died when he’d left this estate. It had only gone quiet, buried beneath fire and rebellion and the fragile belief that he might one day belong to himself.
And for a breath in time, he had. He’d believed power could cauterize the wound, that wings and defiance and choosing Lykor might mean freedom.
But obedience didn’t vanish. It only hibernated, waiting for the command that would wake it.
Jassyn knew how to hollow himself out. How to offer the shape of his body with his will already molded into another’s want. Submission became armor when breaking wasn’t an option. A practiced stillness that made endurance resemble devotion.
His chest hitched as he dragged himself back into the moment, arm suspended in a strike that would never land. Every tendon drew tight from the strain of holding nothing at all, the effort pointless.
Elashor leaned in close. His breath brushed the point of Jassyn’s ear, obscene in its familiarity. “She’s never going to let you go.”
Terror rose rather than rage. Jassyn’s stomach heaved as his body refused even the smallest flinch.
“No Stardust this time,” Elashor murmured, reaching out to trail his fingers along Jassyn’s jaw.
“You’ll feel it all. Every touch. Every time she calls you her pet.
You’ll want it. You’ll beg for it.” His hand closed around Jassyn’s chin, thumb pressing against his lower lip.
“Because you’ll have no choice but to please her. ”
The pull came then, sudden and absolute, snaring deep inside Jassyn’s mind. As the final threads of coercion knotted into place, Elashor chuckled softly.
“No one will find you. I destroyed that bond myself.” His voice shifted, as if addressing a trained hound. “Come. Let’s not keep your mistress waiting.”
Jassyn’s body fell into step behind Elashor, surrender dictated with every measured stride.
Crystal chimes shivered in broken harmony as they passed, ushering them onward while the estate unfurled.
The cruel splendor pressed in until memory split open like a festering wound, leaking rot into his gut.
Smile for me, she’d purred in the smothered hush of night, her mouth damp against his ear. Let the bruises remind you who you belong to.
The ghost of her touch still scored his skin—the bite of teeth at his throat, her nails scoring down his spine. Echoes lingering like scars.
Elven-blooded servants glided through the garden in translucent silks that veiled nothing, perfection in motion. They bowed to Elashor without hesitation, gazes sliding over Jassyn. Appraising.
They knew who he was.
A silver tray swept past, cheeses shaved, fruit sliced to bleed across mirrored glass. At its center lay a pomegranate, cracked open like a heart.
And beside it, a knife.
Jassyn lunged.
His fingers clamped around the hilt, wrenching the blade upward in a blur. Steel flashed as he drove the point straight toward his eye. Not the throat—Elashor would heal that before his life spilled out. It had to be deeper, driven into the skull. A strike so swift no magic could mend the wound.
And in that feral clarity he understood Rimeclaw’s plight. To crave an ending. The need to reclaim the last choice left to him.
But before the blade could plunge—before he could seize that final mercy—Elashor crooked a finger.
The knife halted, quivering a hair’s breadth from Jassyn’s eye, its gleam flooding his vision. His lungs splintered. Every breath shattered into shards as the hold locked him fast.
The tang of pomegranate clung to the blade, the scent dragging up other memories.
Steaming baths. Cashmere sheets that suffocated more than they soothed.
Her hand tipping his chin as fruit bled down his neck.
Laughter, soft and indulgent, as her mouth sealed over his pulse where the stain glistened.
Jassyn’s throat closed, though all he wanted was to scream. He fought to drive the knife inward, to prove that something—anything—still belonged to him. Even if it was only the manner of his ending.
But the coercion’s grip ran deeper than his will.
Then the whispers returned.
You’ve always been so good at listening, she crooned into the hollow of his memory, her voice stroking grooves worn deep by repetition. Show them again how sweet you can be, darling.
Praise and command lingered in his skull, coaxing surrender into devotion until obedience itself glittered like a prize. Every muscle trembled as he battled the blade, denying the echo of the voice that had taught him how to bend.
Elashor clicked his tongue and plucked the knife from Jassyn’s grip. He tossed it aside, the clatter ringing finality.
“There now,” he said, smoothing the front of Jassyn’s armor. “We can’t have our trophy marring itself, can we?”
Jassyn couldn’t even blink when telepathy shimmered again, the filaments sliding into his temple.
“You will never raise a hand against yourself or others,” Elashor said, the order sinking barbs into Jassyn’s mind. “You will serve. You will stay devoted. That’s all you were ever made for.”
The command arrived without thunder or pain, carrying only the faint sensation of threads drawing tight, a weave knotted and pulled until no seam remained.
When Elashor turned and beckoned over his shoulder, Jassyn’s body obeyed again. They passed through a corridor of hedges clipped into rigid symmetry, every wild branch disciplined into order.