Chapter 12
JASSYN
“Don’t think this is over,” Elashor snarled. He ripped a portal open just outside Ayla’s chambers. “I will have the product of your bloodlines.”
Jassyn hadn’t yet gathered himself enough to breathe before Elashor shoved him through the rift.
He stumbled through darkness to the other side, his boots scraping against a marble path.
The portal sealed shut behind him, cutting off Elashor’s fury with it as the world lurched back into the silken hush of the Vallende estate.
He caught himself before his knees folded, Farine’s court attire hanging disheveled on his body.
His wing claws kept curling and releasing. Curling and releasing. Every limb haunted by the shape of what had almost unfolded. He stood frozen in place, some conditioned instinct waiting for Elashor to return.
This would never stop. As long as he remained prisoner inside these walls, one command would follow another, each taking more of him until nothing remained that still knew how to resist.
Bile surged, searing and acidic, his body rejecting what his mind kept trying to survive. Jassyn forced it down, but pieces of the morning and the night before blurred through him.
Farine’s perfume lodging in his lungs. Serenna’s cheek pressing to his, her voice cracking on It’s Elashor, not you while his body strained toward compliance.
Nobles reclining in the Drowned Spires, their laughter ripe with indulgence, wine sweetened by desire and control.
Their hands. Their entitlement. His own smile, rehearsed and obedient.
There was no line anymore. No moment untouched. No part of him that still belonged to himself.
Jassyn flinched when a voice lashed in from the left. “Get back to the estate, half-breed.”
Jassyn turned slowly toward the guard, morning sunlight glinting off the male’s armor. One of the newer staff, a ‘half-breed’ himself, though the distinction hardly mattered. His gaze raked over Jassyn, clear and alert, untouched by coercion or the haze of Stardust.
Jassyn knew that look. Willing and devoted. Cruel by choice. He’d seen it before, on the faces of those who watched his body obey the pleasures Farine arranged.
Jassyn said nothing. His wings folded tight to his spine as he scanned the portaling courtyard. Morning mist veiled the marble, curling low around his ankles. Beyond it, the estate crouched beneath its polished quiet. Farine likely wouldn’t leave her chambers for at least another hour.
He had time.
But this area stood too open for what he needed to do.
If this guard knew anything of the Heart of Stars—where Elashor kept it, what door guarded it, what traps the Vallendes had built around it—Jassyn would extract that knowledge where the hedges could hide the damage.
The night before, he’d threaded coercion through the nobles’ sighs, sinking stupor into minds already dulled by wine and Stardust. One by one, those who touched him had slackened beneath his reach, desires blunted. Farine included.
It hadn’t saved him, only shortened the night. Farine had reached for him later in the dark, but he’d driven oblivion into her skull before her hand ever found skin.
A victory too thin to trust. But a start.
Unclenching his fists from his sides, Jassyn returned his focus to the guard. He could do this. If obedience was the cage they’d locked him in, coercion—shaped by his own hand—was the key.
He stepped forward, igniting Essence. A sliver of telepathy slipped from him, fine as a needle. The male’s eyes barely began to widen before Jassyn sank hooked barbs into his mind.
“Follow me,” he said, cinching the command tight.
Resistance rose, panicked and reflexive, but Jassyn sheared through it before the guard’s instinct could harden into defiance. The mind under his grip shuddered once, then yielded.
Jassyn turned and traced a path through the Vallendes’ maze of clipped hedges and ornamental lies, toward the hidden center where Blossom slept beneath their curated paradise.
No one would glance twice at a guard escorting Farine’s pet through the grounds. And those who looked too long could be made to look away. Besides, if Jassyn was discovered, his body had already forgotten how to imagine a punishment worse than being kept alive for use.
The hedges along the path stirred as Jassyn passed, branches bending beyond their manicured shapes. Flowers split open at the marble’s edge, petals reaching for his boots.
Jassyn glanced back over his shoulder. The guard followed without question, gaze blank, limbs slack with the weight of Jassyn’s command.
He remembered coercing Lykor in a hot spring, long before they shared anything else.
That had been desperation, a weapon drawn blind in the dark.
Lykor had looked at him after as if Jassyn had proven himself monstrous, and Jassyn had apologized until his voice gave out, frantic to make Lykor believe otherwise.
Now?
If this guard broke, if his thoughts unraveled like frayed thread, Jassyn wouldn’t mourn it. Maybe this male held no secrets, had nothing worth ripping free behind his eyes.
It didn’t matter. This was war. Jassyn was rotting alive in this estate, and the decay needed somewhere to go.
If Elashor dragged him back to Serenna, if the general forced another command through him…
Jassyn would lose himself. Entirely. The end would arrive in increments—a command obeyed faster, the need to please beginning to feel like his own—until his body no longer waited for permission to betray him.
He hadn’t meant to act today. Not like this. He wasn’t ready.
But if he found the Heart of Stars, he could free Blossom. If he could crack Elashor’s hold on his mind…
No. One lock at a time. Free Blossom first. Then find a way to free himself. Before obedience became instinct. Before coercion rewrote him completely.
There wasn’t time to plan anything else. No path remained except the one in front of his feet. Alone or not, he had already begun walking it.
At the center of the hedge maze, Jassyn stopped. Beneath the greenery, he sensed where Blossom lay buried, her hunger pressing through the earth.
Jassyn turned to face the guard. His hands remained loose at his sides as he tightened the command already planted in the male’s mind. Another spear of telepathic Essence lashed across the space between them, narrow and vicious, driving deeper.
The guard jerked, a startled sound escaping his throat, but all gentleness fell away. Jassyn tunneled through the breach until thought and memory ruptured behind the male’s eyes, spilling without order.
Training yards slick with sweat and blood. The Vallende sigil stamped into loyalty until it became indistinguishable from pride. Fragments blurred past—servants, other guards, whispered jokes about the half-breed pet.
The satisfaction of enforcing obedience. Cruelty made easy by permission.
The guard whimpered, eyes unfocused and leaking blood. Coercion burrowed through him, buckling resistance until the male’s thoughts submitted with horrifying speed.
“This is how it feels,” Jassyn hissed into the guard’s mind, “to be the one who can’t make it stop.”
The last of the male’s defenses disintegrated. Jassyn rifled through everything, coercion responding with a sickening readiness, eager for whatever shape he gave it. He hunted for what mattered—the Heart of Stars.
Corridors unfurled. Patrol rotations. Orders spoken low behind closed doors.
The Starvault—the innermost sanctum of the Vallende estate, hoarding bottled Essence and mountains of Stardust. Buried deep in the manor, a cathedral dome of glass cupped a stolen view of the night sky.
Other soldiers lined the approach, motionless as statues along the halls, but the path existed.
When Jassyn withdrew, the guard sagged forward with a broken sound, blood pouring from his nose.
The hedges around them rustled, leaves trembling as ivy curled tighter across marble columns and vines slipped between cracks in the stone.
Jassyn’s scales erupted across his skin as a deep rumble rolled underfoot.
The flower bed split apart.
Soil rose in dark curtains, roots snapping as dirt fell. Blossom’s massive snout breached the surface, veined with living thorns. Moss rippled from her jawline as her crystalline eyes opened in the morning light. The ground heaved as she hauled herself free, the earth crumbling beneath her claws.
Blossom’s hunger rolled through Jassyn, cracking memory against the inside of his skull—elves crushed in her fangs, vines dragging bodies into her maw, bone splitting so violently his stomach turned.
Then her nostrils flared, attention pinning on the guard.
Jassyn felt the shift through the earth as every ancient part of her narrowed toward the beating pulse. Her fangs gleamed wet. Tendrils writhed behind them, barbed and slick with sap.
Blossom lowered her neck, and Jassyn understood then that she wanted the kill.
Her body coiled to lunge.
The command struck first.
Jassyn sensed it seize through her jaw, muscles locking under scales, hunger snarling against a binding she couldn’t uproot.
Images bloomed in his mind. She’d tested the leash the day before, when the female reeking of floral rot made her grow the garden for show. Feral hunger had thrashed, but the star-defiled chains had clamped her jaws shut.
Just like now.
Remain on these grounds. Do not hunt those who dwell within the estate. Obey the Vallende line, or bleed.
“You’re not allowed to hunt,” Jassyn whispered.
Hunt meant pursuit, prey running and resisting.
The guard stood where Jassyn had left him, glassy-eyed and breathing, waiting for the next order.
The thought rose before conscience could catch it, logic already justifying the horror.
Blossom would need her strength if they were to escape.
Still, Jassyn swallowed, his throat gone to dust. “What if they offer themselves?”
Blossom’s nostrils flared with a low chuff, vines thickening between her claws.
Willing prey had never been forbidden.
Jassyn turned to face the guard. The male stared blankly ahead, lips parted, sweat clinging to his brow. Blood crusted under his nose and tracked in thin crimson trails from the corners of his eyes.
Jassyn reached into what remained of the male’s mind and speared compulsion through the wreckage, filling the ravaged places with purpose.
His voice found a ruthless stillness he’d only ever heard from Lykor.
“Remove your weapons,” he ordered. “Your armor. Kneel before her.”
The guard’s hands moved without resistance, loosening buckles, sliding straps free. Metal struck earth piece by piece—gauntlets, dagger, sword, the slow disarming of a male who no longer had a choice.
Blossom wrapped her tail tight around herself, the spikes along her jaw flattening. She didn’t move, but her ribcage expanded in slow, weighted shudders, each exhale stirring Jassyn’s curls.
The discarded armor and blades lay by Jassyn’s feet. His pulse ticked faster. He didn’t know how to shape Blossom’s gift, not truly, but the garden was already waiting.
He reached for the bloom in his chest and power rushed through him. The ground shifted under the metal as he willed it, swallowing each piece into the loam as though the estate had decided to hide the evidence.
No trace. No trail.
The guard took a step forward.
Then another.
Blossom’s lips peeled back from her fangs. Barbed tendrils lashed from her maw, puncturing the guard’s chest in a single strike.
His body jerked once.
Then split.
The vines wrenched him free of the ground, hauling what remained toward her jaws.
Revulsion should’ve found Jassyn.
Nothing came.
He didn’t flinch when bones cracked like timber, when tendons snapped with a wet grind. And when it ended—when the guard vanished down Blossom’s throat, when the vines withdrew and only blood remained, dripping from her fangs—Jassyn didn’t look away.
He listened to the silence that followed.
Blossom stretched before him, talons flexing into the churned soil, dirt shedding from her plated hide as she shook her scales. Flowers unfurled in a riotous bloom, color spilling in every direction. A pulse of her satisfaction pressed into Jassyn’s chest, too rough and wild to be gratitude.
Jassyn turned toward the estate.
Behind him, Blossom followed, each footfall shaking the earth.
Another surge of her awareness split open behind his eyes, fierce and bolstering.
The taste of honey. The sting of venom. Beehives swollen in summer heat, every worker humming with blind devotion. Blossom’s meaning sharpened.
To unmake a colony, hunt its edges. Whisper first. Infect quietly. One by one, strangle the workers with roots. Starve the hive of its servants.
Then burn the queen.