The bond changed everything.
It was as if someone had turned up the volume on reality — every sense sharpened to a razor's edge, every color deepened, every shadow brightened. Arvella felt Lucas through the bond the way she felt her own heartbeat: constant, essential, inseparable. And she felt something else — something that had been building inside her for four days, straining against chains and runes and walls of stone — rising to the surface like a tide.
Now, Astraea said. NOW.
The cuffs around her wrists and ankles cracked, fell to the ground. Then it happened.
The shift took her like a wave.
It was not gradual. It was not gentle. It was the culmination of eighteen years of waiting — eighteen years of being told she was less, being told she was broken, being told she would never h
