Chapter 26
Imani no longer needed the parchment for the trust spell.
Before burning it in Vathis, she had repeated the sequence until every step was fixed in her memory, including how to form the question, hold the relevant person in mind, press the wand to the sigil, speak the incantation, and let the Divination decide where to go.
Destroying the page had only removed the risk of anyone else using it against her.
She still held the instruction in her mind, though.
In her rooms, she prepared with a surgical focus she rarely applied to Divination magic.
She stripped the incantation to its bare essentials, tracing the familiar pattern she remembered.
Unlike her previous casting in Vathis, she knew exactly what to expect.
I’m using it the way the elf witch intended, she told herself, taking several deep breaths.
Divination magic could go incredibly wrong. Imani knew that more than anyone.
But before the parley, she needed information on Kiran’s state along with his intentions, and no path was more direct than this one. She would observe, extract what was useful, and detach on her terms. Emotion had derailed her once, but it would not do so again.
Sweeping the Drasil through the air, she chanted the incantation until a sphere of raw magic hung suspended before her. With a decisive flick of her wand, she drove the magic into the hearth.
Flames devoured the spell, flaring a violent, unnatural green. Then, it seized her before she could brace herself. The heat surged, the room warped, and then it yanked her forward—faster, rougher than before, as if the magic had learned her taste and stripped away all pretense of gentleness.
That was wrong, she thought, rubbing her brow.
The first casting had kept distance between her and whatever the spell chose to show her. This one did not. Imani repeated the same sequence, used the same question, and followed the spell exactly as she remembered.
Nothing she had done should have changed the result this drastically, but she had no time to understand why, because a sickening lurch pitched her stomach, and then her lungs filled with air she hadn’t commanded.
She looked down.
These are not my hands.
Dark hair dusted the knuckles, and faint bloodstains colored the fingertips.
Imani tried to look up but couldn’t. Finally, her head moved, and she took in the space. She tried to gasp, but the body gave her no voice.
She knew this room. She knew the scent of these sheets.
Imani wasn’t watching Kiran like last time.
She was inside him. No pane of magical glass separated the observer from the observed.
But when Imani tried to lift his head, nothing happened.
She tried again, pushing uselessly against the impulse to move, but Kiran’s body remained exactly where he had left it.
She could not turn his face, raise a hand, force a word through his mouth, or warn him that she was there.
His limbs were hers to feel, but never hers to command.
His breathing reached her as sensation, each inhale and exhale dictated by him.
She was in his mind without possessing any part of him. An observer trapped behind his senses.
The dim light and cold stone walls of his chamber filtered directly through his senses. A metallic tang of drying blood mingled with the earthy rot of crushed herbs scattered across the floor.
Eventually, Imani discerned that Kiran lay sprawled across the bed, stripped of his usual coiled tension, his posture slack and unguarded. She could see through his half-lidded eyes and felt his mouth curve into a languid, drug-heavy smile—the dreamy aftershocks of a flesh magic ritual.
The door clicked shut, and Kiran whipped his head to the sound. Zadie stood beyond the threshold. Her mouth thinned as she took in the wreckage—the blood, the spent herbs, his slack form.
“Speak or get out,” Kiran mumbled.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard again,” she said. “This isn’t power, Kiran. It’s erosion. She wouldn’t want this for you.”
“I don’t care what she would want,” he slurred.
“Lies,” Zadie spat. Her posture shifted, reprimand hardening into grim purpose. “You need to hear this,” she continued, her voice dropping. “Imani has chosen a new mate. It’s Ellisar.”
Since Kiran didn’t move, Imani became trapped in his stillness.
His heart accelerated and his muscles locked beneath the skin, but she could do nothing with the body carrying those reactions.
She could only endure them as they happened.
His breath hitched, then deepened, chest rising harder as his heart rate drove faster beneath it.
Heat climbed up his neck and into his face as his jaw clenched.
Muscles pulled tight through his shoulders and arms, hands flexing once at his sides as if deciding between reaching to choke Zadie or holding himself back.
Undeterred, Zadie continued, “It’s done,” she announced. “Not a rumor. Not a negotiation. The court declared it publicly. She has aligned herself with the High Sentinel of the Norn. The mating is real.”
The world narrowed to a single, suffocating pinpoint. Tension locked his jaw like a vise as he lay there, unblinking. His silence carried more weight than a scream.
Then the dam broke, and Kiran’s emotions threatened to drown her.
Betrayal slashed deep, instantly swallowed by a tide of white-hot, consuming rage. But beneath the fury coiled something far more terrifying: possession. It was a primal, unyielding claim over what was his. And the horror of it was that Imani felt it too, the want for him, bleeding into her soul.
Then, in a sudden burst of movement, Kiran lunged to his feet and drove a fist through the nearest table, splintering solid wood and sending glass vials erupting across the stone floor.
He seized the heavy bed frame and wrenched it sideways, snapping the posts and slamming the mattress against the wall.
A violent sweep of his arm cleared a dresser—blades, bowls, and herbs scattering.
He tore a heavy tapestry from its iron hooks and slammed his fists into the stone, leaving blood behind where it tore his knuckles.
Kiran’s First Witch should have intervened, but she remained rooted to the floor as if she’d expected this all along.
He moved with brutal, unthinking immediacy, shredding the room to kindling.
He couldn’t slow down. A shockwave of magic erupted from his wand, tearing through the chamber.
Shelves exploded. A mirror spiderwebbed and rained jagged glass.
A heavy cabinet ruptured at its seams, the stone behind it cracking under the concussive force.
Zadie finally flinched, throwing up an arm to shield her face as she backed toward the door. Kiran didn’t even see her despite looking her way.
Another pulse of magic hit the room, harder, wilder, leaving nothing untouched.
Trapped in his skull, Imani watched with mounting terror. It was raw, unfiltered instinct. Kiran was a force of nature, entirely unpredictable and impossible to negotiate with.
He pivoted and stalked toward the window, crossing the ruined chamber in three massive strides. He tore the latch free and shoved the heavy frame open to the biting wind. For a fraction of a second, he braced against the stone sill, chest heaving, staring at the lethal drop below.
Then, her heartmate threw himself into the void. The floor vanished. The sickening rush of gravity seized them, and Imani’s heart plummeted as the wind roared in their ears—he had just jumped to his death.
But the shift struck from the inside out, violent and agonizing.
Bones cracked and lengthened, joints popping and locking into monstrous new alignments.
His spine bowed, tearing the flesh of his back as dark, iron-hard scales erupted and sealed over the muscle.
His shoulders wrenched apart with a sickening tear as massive wings burst free, catching the rushing air in a single, thunderous snap.
Imani was a helpless passenger to the restructuring, suffocating under the pressure as the transformation cemented just before they hit the ground. She could neither resist the transformation nor influence it. Each movement belonged to Kiran, yet each sensation still reached her.
The colossal wings flared, dragging his immense, heavy bulk out of the fatal dive. He was a titan of scale and muscle. Every beat of his wings warped the air with sheer, concussive force. He wielded his raw power like a weapon, entirely driven by the storm in his blood.
In this monstrous form, his emotions hit Imani with crushing density.
Fury became a relentless, driving engine.
His control was gone, replaced by a territorial instinct that claimed her, narrowing the world until nothing remained but the urge to hunt, to destroy, to keep.
It flooded her veins as if it belonged there, shattering her boundaries.
She wanted to roar, to rage alongside him—
Then, the tether snapped.
One second, the immense, violent motion suspended her, and the next, her own mortal flesh slammed her back. Imani gasped, choking on the sudden silence of her own room. Her hands clawed at her knees, trembling violently. Her pulse hammered a frantic, beastly rhythm against her ribs.
Sucking in deep breaths, Imani wondered how she could have gotten the spell so wrong that she invaded his mind. It had been intimate, wearing his rage like a second skin, with no distance to protect her.
Kiran remained an impossible answer. Imani could list a dozen reasons she should distrust him, and the spell had ignored every one of them, which disturbed her more than her obvious failure.
Divination had only been wrong before when she misunderstood what it was showing her.
And as she sat shivering in the quiet, the most unnerving truth crashed over her… the connection hadn’t faded entirely. A phantom echo of his monstrous, possessive hunger still lingered beneath her skin, refusing to let go.
Was it his? Or hers?
* * *
By the next morning, she attended the briefing as queen, moving through the palace with feigned calm and appearing outwardly unchanged.
Yet, underneath her composed exterior, a sense of unease persisted.
The feeling from the experience hadn’t fully gone away.
Indeed, her need for Kiran was coiling under her skin like a sickness.
An advisor stood to open the meeting, wringing his hands with urgency.
“There was an incident near the Riverlands border,” he reported.
“A dragon briefly crossed into our territory—without a prolonged fight or attempt to hold ground—but it caused considerable damage before leaving.” He looked down at the report in his hands.
“A part of the forest was obliterated, with uprooted, scorched, and flattened trees.”
Imani tapped her fingers on the armrest, thinking. The timing matched her recent experience perfectly, too exact to be mere coincidence. The destruction, its sudden appearance and vanishing, and the scale all pointed to him. Her vision had been in real-time, or close enough to feel like it.
She continued deliberating as the discussion moved around her.
“If it crossed that far in, it was testing the boundary,” one advisor said.
“Or sending a message,” another countered.
Esa’s voice interrupted. “Dragons didn’t even exist in the Mesial realm before Kiran brought the Under Horde here.”
“Then we treat it as directed action by the Niflheim monarch, not an anomaly,” Ellisar replied in a distant tone.
But none of it felt distant to Imani. They were talking about an event she had already lived through.
Imani stayed frozen at the head of the table, her face showing no sign as the discussion went on around her. She kept tapping lightly on the chair, trying to hide the terrible foreboding simmering in her blood.
Her heartmate was hatching a horrible plan for her now that he knew about Ellisar. Of this, she was certain.
Imani swallowed hard, knowing their mating ceremony would take place the next evening. It made her feel ill because while the room saw a queen in control, Kiran was secretly unraveling her.