Epilogue
Arwen
The world doesn’t come back all at once. It rebuilds itself in violent fragments—noise, breath, gravity—like a book slammed shut and then pried open again. My eyes stay closed, but I feel everything shifting, sliding, reassembling around me. The floor is solid under my spine. Cold. Unforgiving.
Not sand.
Not heat.
Not the Wastes I expected.
As I try to open my eyes, I feel a familiar weight. A hand is on my shoulder.
Atticus.
My heart stutters. I force my eyes open, vision swimming, and drag myself toward him. In the mess of my new bond, powers awakening and exile, I didn't notice he had stayed with me.
His body is laying prone beside me, limbs heavy. Pale, slack, too still. My pulse hammers in my ears as I fumble a hand under his nose.
Warm breath ghosts across my fingertips.
Alive.
Breath catches in my throat, relief washing through me so hard my shoulders tremble. I press a shaking hand to his cheek, whisper his name like it might anchor us both.
Then the rest of the room sharpens.
Bars.
Steel bars, thick..
A small square chamber made of carved stone. A bolted bunk bed with thin mattresses. A tiny adjoining bathroom with stainless-steel fixtures, too clean and polished to belong in exile.
This is not the Wastes. This is a cell.
My stomach drops, cold and fast. Why? Who would—
A sharp ache snaps through me like a blade driven straight into my sternum.
The bond. Maddox.
The proximity bond, newly sealed with mixed blood and everything we didn’t say, slams into me with unbearable force. It curls in my chest like a burning wire dragged tight between us. Distance hits like pain. Too far.
My other bonds tug faintly—Maylo, Alexi, Gabriel—a distant chorus I can’t reach, frayed by whatever magic yanked me here. But Maddox’s absence is a hollow so brutal I almost fold.
It feels like someone carved out a piece of my ribs and left the edges raw.
Maylo knew something. He had to. The smile he wore. The timing. The way he—
A pulse of heat rolls through my spine, derailing every thought.
My sin power.
It lives under my skin like a second heartbeat—hot, restless, hungry. Untamed, untested, rising with each breath I take. Magic I didn’t earn through a vial or a ritual or someone else’s invention. Mine. A truth roaring awake in my bones.
The air around me trembles.
Footsteps have my attention snapping out the bars.
A lock unseals with a heavy clunk. Metal slides. The outer door groans open, and the echo slithers through the cell like a warning.
Councilor Blaise steps inside.
He carries his smugness like armor, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted just enough to make me want to break it. His eyes drag over the cell—over me—like he’s inspecting merchandise.
“Well,” he says, tone dripping with satisfaction, “I’m surprised you’re awake already.”
His gaze flicks to Atticus’s unconscious body with clinical disinterest.
“I instructed the transporter to hit you with enough power to knock you out for hours. Looks like it did the job on Willshire’s boy.”
He tuts, pretending sympathy he doesn’t feel.
Then his smile twists.
“To think,” he continues, stepping closer, “that I’ve captured not only the most powerful individual our nation has seen in centuries…” His eyes glitter. “…but Councilor Willshire’s prized heir as well.”
My pulse goes icy.
He savors the moment, drawing it out like a fine wine.
“I truly don’t believe this could have gone better.”
Something in me cracks.
Not my fear. Not my hope.
My restraint.
The power in my veins surges upward—hot, wild, gathering like a storm ready to claw its way free.
Blaise’s smile falters.
***
Maddox
The world doesn’t explode when they take her.
It breaks.
Quietly. Cleanly. Like a bone snapped under skin.
One second she’s there—blood on her hand, glass scattering, power flickering under her skin like a fuse just waiting for a match.
The next—
Light.
A sound like the air being sucked out of the room.
Her outline dissolving into nothing.
And then the bond hits me.
Not the forming of it—we’d crossed that line the moment our blood mixed and the universe decided it liked the idea of tying me to her.
No.
This is the after.
This is what it feels like when a proximity bond is yanked across a void.
A white-hot wire wraps around my ribs and jerks hard enough to rip the breath out of my lungs. My knees almost give, and I catch myself on the wall like it’s the only thing in the room that isn’t collapsing.
Her presence—new, bright, raw—flashes once.
Then disappears into nothing.
Someone screams her name. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s Atticus. Maybe it’s the version of myself I was ten seconds ago, the one who thought the worst thing that could happen tonight was Blaise’s exile order.
My father grabs my jacket, screaming into my face. Councilor Willshire shouts something. Maylo’s laughing like he knows a secret he shouldn’t. The guards are yelling over each other, and Councilor Blaise is bellowing orders no one hears.
None of it matters.
All I can feel is the void where she should be.
A proximity bond isn’t supposed to behave like this. Space should dull it, not twist it. Distance should pull, not suffocate. It feels like trying to breathe around a fist clamped over my sternum.
A proximity bond. I have a bond.
I should have known. The pull to her presence was too strong.
Someone drags my father off of me. Someone else claps, trying to achieve order. Councilor Blaise is gone with the transporter before I get my bearings—like the coward he’s always been.
None of it matters.
I shove forward into the center of the platform, ignoring the hands grabbing at me, ignoring the shouting.
The space still carries the aftertaste of Arwen’s magic—burning and new and volcanic, like a power that doesn’t know the meaning of restraint.
She didn’t just get taken.
She triggered.
She manifested.
Without the damn potion. How?
A bitter laugh scrapes out of me. It’s not amusement. It’s disbelief sharpened into something dangerous.
Of course she didn’t need it. Of course she never did.
Of course she found her power the moment the world tried to take her away from me.
The bond pulses again—hard enough to steal my breath—then drops into silence.
I think someone has her. I can feel the surprise.
Someone moved her somewhere the bond can’t reach or won't let me. That’s not distance. That’s obstruction. Intention. Where in the wastes could she be?
As much as I despise Atticus, I'm thankful she's not completely alone.
I stand, finally steady, vision tunneling into something cold and razor-edged. The kind of focus my father tried to beat into me for years, the kind I only ever found when someone threatened what was mine.
Maylo leans against a pillar, that eerie little smile from earlier wiped right off his face as he sees mine. Good. He should be scared.
Because this bond—this thing the universe hammered between Arwen and me—tightens again, a low, violent surge under my ribs.
She’s alive.
She’s angry.
She’s calling to me without even knowing it.
And whoever took her? Whoever thinks they can cage her, move her, hide her, use her?
They just declared a war they can’t win.
“I’m going to find her,” I say.
“What do you mean find her? They’re in the wastes. Going there would be a death sentence.” Councilor Willshire scoffs.
I look at my father as my attention starts to dial in. His stopped shouting but his eyes are already calculating. “We all saw the blood mix, we saw you react… Maddox, we must speak about this. Privately. Now.”
I notice the whispers of her unmatched power levels happening all around me.
“Two bonds… two powerful bonds.” They say in hushed breaths.
I know immediately that I won’t be the only one searching for her. Arwen has just become one of the most powerful chess pieces in the continent.
Because the chamber hasn’t realized it yet—but the moment that bond snapped tight across the void, the moment her power woke up in the dark—
The most dangerous version of Maddox West woke up with it.
And I’m not stopping.
Not until Arwen Davies is back in my arms.