8. Leo
LEO
Ihaven’t slept.
I tell myself it’s the storm. The dome groaning over the resort all night like a held breath. The thing under the floor that I can feel now, a low pressure behind my teeth, ancient and patient.
It’s not the storm.
It’s her.
I stand at the window of the suite I’ve barely used and watch the lake churn silver under a sky that won’t stop bruising, and all I can think about is the way she looked at me last night.
After. When the shadow-thing was a smear on the greenhouse floor and my claws were still out and my wolf was a roar I could barely hold inside my own skin.
She should have run.
But she looked at me like she wanted to come closer.
I close my hand into a fist. The half-healed cuts across my knuckles split and seal again in seconds. Blood Shifter. We don’t carry our wounds long. It’s the other kind of damage that lingers.
“You look terrible,” Evander says.
I don’t turn. “Knock.”
“I did. You didn’t hear me. That’s the third time this week your hearing’s been off.” He steps inside, quiet as he does everything. “Your hearing is never off.”
“It’s the storm.”
“It’s the bond.”
There it is.
I face him. Evander doesn’t flinch from much, but he’s watching me the way he watches a problem that won’t factor cleanly. Dark eyes, too still.
“It’s accelerating,” he says. “I ran the resonance numbers off the foyer chandeliers. A bond that registers that hot, that fast, between two people who met three days ago. It’s not normal, Leo. It’s not even rare. It’s wrong.”
“Then it’s a malfunction.”
“You keep saying that.” He sets a folded paper on the table between us. Equations. Curves climbing toward a vertical line. “Malfunctions don’t have a slope. This does. Whatever’s happening between you and this girl is following a curve toward something. And the curve ends soon.”
I look at the page.
The resort thinks she’s someone different. That’s what she let everyone believe.
I know better. I’ve known since the villa, since I caught the scent under her skin, old and bright and unmistakable. Covenant blood. The kind of blood my family bound itself to seven hundred years ago and then spent centuries pretending it didn’t need.
And that’s the part that won’t let me sleep.
If someone wanted her gone, she’d be gone. Quiet. Clean. A girl like her disappears between one lunar storm and the next and nobody writes it down.
They didn’t do that.
They moved her into the guest wing. Into my path. They lit the bond and stood back to watch it climb.
You don’t grow a thing you want buried.
Whoever did this doesn’t want her dead. They want her bonded. And I can’t work out why that’s so much worse.
I haven’t told Evander. I haven’t told anyone.
I should. He’s the one who reads corruption. He’d know what it means faster than I do.
I fold the page back up and hand it to him. “Keep watching the numbers.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
He studies me a beat too long. Then he tucks the paper away. “Mom wants you at the compatibility ceremony. Midday. The whole resort’s confined under the dome, so she’s decided we may as well be entertained.”
“I’m not getting on that platform.”
“She’s not asking, Leo. She’s announcing.”
Of course she is.
The ceremony hall is the oldest room at the Eclipse Resort. I feel it the second I walk in, the weight of the place, stone that predates the resort’s pretty marble skin by centuries. Black columns. A floor inlaid with a circle of symbols I don’t recognize and don’t like.
In the center stands the Oracle.
She’s small and old and wrapped in grey, and her eyes are filmed over white, and she doesn’t look at anyone with them. She looks past. Through. The resort keeps her the way you keep a relic, because once, supposedly, the Oracles of Eclipse could read a bond down to its root.
Guests ring the hall. Confined, restless, hungry for a show. My brothers cluster near the front like they’re at a sporting event.
“Twenty bucks says the chandeliers go red again,” Dominic murmurs.
“No bet,” Tristan says. “That’s free money.”
Brynn is already there.
She’s at the edge of the circle, pale, arms wrapped around herself, and the sight of her does something to my chest. She didn’t sleep either.
I can see it. I can also see the way her gaze finds me the instant I enter, like a compass swinging north, and I hate how much I needed her to do exactly that.
Evelina sweeps to the dais in silver.
“Since the storm insists we stay,” she says, “we shall make use of the gift Eclipse is famous for. The Oracle will read the bond that has so charmingly disrupted my son’s week.”
“Mom.” My voice is flat. Warning.
She smiles at me. “Stand in the circle, Leopold. You too, Miss Fairmont. It’s only a reading. It can’t make anything true that isn’t already.”
That’s the part she doesn’t understand. That’s the part that terrifies me.
It already is.
I step into the circle. Brynn steps in across from me. The symbols under our feet begin, very faintly, to glow.
“Closer,” the Oracle rasps. First words she’s spoken. “The bond is read between joined hands, not joined eyes.”
Brynn’s throat works. “We don’t have to.”
“We don’t,” I agree.
Evelina arches one brow. The hall waits.
And because I am, apparently, no longer in control of my own body around this woman, I hold out my hand.
Brynn looks at it. Then at me. Something passes between us, fear and challenge and something warmer underneath, and she puts her hand in mine.
The circle ignites.
It’s not light. It’s not painful. It’s falling.
The hall drops away. The guests, my brothers, my mother, are gone. There’s only the two of us in a place that shouldn’t exist, vast and dark and old, and I know with bone certainty that we are somewhere beneath the world.
A throne sits at the heart of it.
Not a chair. A thing carved from black stone and older intent, wrapped in roots of silver light, and it’s awake. I can feel it the way I felt the pressure under the resort all night, except now I’m standing in front of it, and it knows my name. It knows my blood. Seven hundred years of it.
And Brynn stands beside it.
Not in front. Beside. One hand resting on the stone like it belongs to her, like she belongs to it, and the silver light is crawling up her arm and into her eyes and she is so beautiful and so wrong in this place that my wolf surges up howling.
“Brynn.” My voice doesn’t carry. There’s no air here. “Brynn, look at me.”
She doesn’t. She’s tilted her head like she’s listening to something I can’t hear.
“There are voices,” she whispers. “Leo. There are voices in the stone. They’re saying my name.”
“Don’t listen to them.”
“They’re saying yours too.”
The roots of light pulse brighter. The throne breathes. And somewhere in that vast dark, something begins to turn its attention toward us, something that makes the shadow-creature from the greenhouse feel like a stray dog, and I do the only thing my body knows how to do.
I pull her to me.
I wrap myself around her and I put my back to the throne and I hold her against my chest like I can be a wall, like seven hundred years of predator can stand between her and whatever is waking, and for one impossible second she fits there. She fits like she was cut to.
“I’ve got you,” I tell her. I don’t know if it’s true. I say it anyway. “I’ve got you. Don’t let go.”
Her fingers fist in my shirt.
The voices rise to a roar.
The circle releases us.
I come back to the ceremony hall on my knees, Brynn still clutched against me, both of us gasping like we’ve been pulled out of deep water.
The symbols beneath us are scorched black.
The guests are shouting. My brothers are halfway into the circle, Tristan’s hand on my shoulder, Dominic dragging a stumbling Brynn back from me, and I have to fight my wolf to let her go.
“What happened?” Tristan is saying. “Leo. What the hell happened? You both just dropped, you were gone and your eyes went silver as hers.”
“I don’t know.” It comes out hoarse. I don’t know. That’s the truth, and it sits in me like a stone. “I don’t know what that was.”
Across the hall, Evelina has gone very still. Not amused. Not performing. Her hand is at her throat, and for the first time in my life I see my mother look afraid.
And the Oracle.
The Oracle has backed against her black column, both hands raised, white eyes wide and streaming, staring at Brynn like Brynn is a fire that’s about to spread. Her mouth moves. No sound. Then sound.
“No,” she breathes. “No, no, it cannot be her, it was sealed, it was sealed.”
“What was sealed?” I’m on my feet. The hall has gone silent around the old woman’s terror. “Oracle. What did you see?”
She turns those blind, weeping eyes on me. Then on Brynn. And when she speaks, it isn’t a guess, and it isn’t a reading.
It’s a verdict.
“She hears the Covenant.”