Chapter 13
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Sonny is already moving before the alarm finishes its second shriek.
One moment we are half-joking by the water, talking about love and bonds and whether any of this mess has rules worth trusting, and the next the whole settlement changes shape around us.
The sound slices through Dathanor like a blade through skin, high and urgent and wrong in a way I feel in my teeth.
Voices rise in the distance. Boots strike stone.
Metal answers metal as weapons are grabbed, checked, passed from hand to hand.
The quiet edge of the town vanishes under a rush of purpose so swift, it makes my pulse leap.
“Move,” Sonny snaps, no humour left anywhere in him.
I don’t need telling twice.
Together we run for the main settlement path, loose stones skidding under our boots as we cut around a low rise and head for the central tunnels.
Behind us, the small pond lies smooth and uncaring, catching strange light from the sky.
Ahead, Dathanor opens in layers of motion—Riftborn spilling out from side passages, Glowranth allies hauling crates towards barricade points, the old habits of a hunted people snapping into place with brutal efficiency.
Nobody screams. Nobody freezes. That, more than the alarm itself, drives home just how often they’ve prepared for this.
Heat churns low in my chest, but it’s not fear alone.
Through the bond, Varek burns like a fixed point in the middle of chaos.
I can’t hear his words, can’t see what he is doing yet, but I can feel the shape of him in the settlement ahead—locked focus, leashed violence, command without hesitation.
The awareness steadies me even as it unsettles me.
A few weeks ago, I would have sworn black and blue I wanted no one in my head, no thread tugging me towards anyone else.
Now I lean into it without thinking, following that pull through the crush of bodies and the flaring noise.
By the time we reach the wider central passage, the place is already armed.
A sentry I vaguely recognise from the outer tunnel watch is shouting to a knot of Veilvox near the eastward branching.
Someone else is handing out blades from a long case set open on a table.
At the far end of the passage, under one of the broader arches where the glow-veins in the stone pulse brightest, Varek stands with Kael and Shanae, and the sight of him hits me hard enough to almost throw my stride.
He looks enormous.
That isn’t exactly new, but the shift in him is.
Nothing in his posture is wasted. His shoulders are set, his horns catching the blue-green light as he turns his head fractionally to take in three different reports at once, and for all the violence coiled in him, he’s stillness at the centre of the storm.
Even from here, even before he looks my way, I know everyone in this corridor is orienting themselves off him. It’s not deference. It’s gravity.
Then his gaze finds me, and the bond jolts.
Relief punches through first, hot and immediate, followed by the fast, hard edge of concern.
He rakes his eyes over me in one swift pass, confirming what he needs to confirm, and then the expression is gone again, filed back under command.
Across from him, Kael is issuing orders to two fighters with the clipped authority of someone used to being obeyed even when he would rather be elsewhere.
Shanae, all business, is loading a short blade into a belt sheath while listening to a messenger rattle off positions.
“East tunnel breach?” Sonny calls as we reach them.
“Single approach,” Shanae answers without looking at him. “No visual on additional forces.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t any,” Kael says.
“No,” Varek replies, his voice carrying without effort. “It does not.”
Close now, I can feel the charge in the air, how everyone’s braced for one of two possibilities. Either someone has come in who was not meant to, which is bad enough, or the Crown has found Dathanor at last, which is the kind of bad that rewrites futures.
“Where’s Jamie?” Sonny asks.
“Secured,” Shanae says. “Jack and Caly are with him.”
Good.
The word appears in my head and goes nowhere useful because there’s no time for relief, only for the next thing.
From the eastward tunnel comes the thunder of running feet, ragged and uneven, too heavy for a scout, too desperate for a measured retreat.
Heads turn as one. Weapons are lifted. The whole passage seems to narrow.
Out of the tunnel mouth staggers a figure I do not recognise at first.
Too much blood.
Too much dirt.
Too much of him hidden under the wreckage of what used to be expensive fabric and royal arrogance.
Then he hits the brighter spill of bioluminescent light, and the room seems to drop out from under itself.
“Aelith,” Kael says, and for the first time since I’ve known him, the name sounds like a blow.
The prince stumbles another step, one hand braced against the wall.
Blood slicks his side, dark against deep blue skin.
The glow of his sigil is dimmer than I’ve ever seen it, stuttering weakly under torn cloth.
One eye is swelling. His breathing comes ragged and wet, and for a ridiculous half-second, all I can think is that he looks less like a prince and more like something hauled half-dead from a dungeon.
He's alone. That realisation strikes harder than the sight of his injuries.
No Dawson trailing close and stubborn with his bright grin. No escort. No guards. Just Aelith, wrecked and furious and somehow still upright out of pure spite.
Then his knees give.
Kael reaches him first.
It’s not even a question. One moment he’s beside Varek; the next he has crossed the space in three hard strides and caught Aelith before he can smash face-first into the stone.
The move is so instinctive, so immediate, that nobody has time to comment on it.
Aelith sags against him for a second, teeth bared, then shoves Kael weakly as though he would rather bleed out than be helped by anyone.
“Do not,” Kael says, low and lethal, “test me.”
Aelith laughs. The sound is ugly and split down the middle by pain. “You always did have a flair for timing.”
“Who followed you?” Varek asks.
Straight to it… that’s my guy. There’s no wasted softness or visible crack in command.
Aelith lifts his head. The eye that is not half swollen finds Varek through a blur of blood and exhaustion. “No one.”
The answer came too fast.
Nobody in the corridor believes him. I can feel that disbelief move through the room like a change in weather. Shanae doesn’t even bother hiding hers. Sonny mutters something profane under his breath. Kael’s jaw locks so hard, I can see the tension from where I stand.
“Inside,” Varek says.
There’s no argument about that one. Aelith’s in no shape to make one, and if he somehow finds the strength, Kael takes the choice from him by hauling his arm over one shoulder and half dragging, half carrying him towards the medical rooms. The rest of us move with them in a knot of weapons and suspicion, the corridor parting ahead as others clear the way.
As we walk, I keep looking for Dawson like the act of looking hard enough might conjure him into existence.
Nothing.
Only Aelith’s blood dripping onto the stone in a dark, broken trail.
By the time we reach the medical chamber, the place is already in motion.
Iris turns from a worktable, takes one look at the prince, and starts issuing orders clipped enough to skin paint.
Aeroth appears from somewhere behind a hanging screen with an armful of bandages and the expression of a male who had plans for a quiet afternoon and has just watched them die.
“On the table,” Iris says.
“That is not happening,” Aelith growls.
Kael dumps him onto it anyway.
The prince hisses through his teeth, claws scraping against the edge of the metal frame, and for a moment, I get a flash of what he must have been like before any of this, before Dawson, before the Crown started splintering under the weight of its own lies—beautiful, vicious, impossible.
Now he just looks hunted.
Iris cuts through the side of his tunic with efficient brutality. “Hold still unless you’d like to die making this more annoying than it already is.”
He bares his teeth at her. She bares her own right back and keeps working.
Around us, bodies pack into the room and spill into the hallway beyond.
Varek stands near the end of the table, arms folded, gaze fixed on Aelith with a stillness that reads as dangerous even to me.
Sonny edges up beside Kael, not touching him but close enough that it counts.
Shanae positions herself near the door, keeping one eye on the corridor. Nobody relaxes.
Because Aelith is here.
Alone.
And nothing about that bodes well.
Under Iris’s hands, the prince’s injuries come clear in ugly layers.
A deep cut along his ribs, not immediately fatal but close enough to matter.
Bruising around his throat. Burns across one forearm, the flesh there angry and blistered in a pattern that does not look accidental.
His whole body is one long declaration that whatever happened in that palace, it did not happen cleanly.
Still, he lives, which means he made it here for a reason.
The knowledge moves through the room before anyone says it aloud.
Varek is the one who finally does. “Where is Dawson?”
The question forms like a dropped blade, and Aelith goes utterly still.
Under the blood and dirt and fury, under the pain and the exhaustion and the stripped-bare edges of him, something changes.
It’s not fear exactly. Well, not only fear.
It’s the look of a male who’s been holding himself together around one single point and knows the moment he names it, everything else may come apart.
My own stomach drops.