LOGINAsaraiah KaineThey didn’t call it a ritual because it involved candles or chanting.They called it a ritual because once it started, there was no way to pretend it hadn’t changed you.Eryss chose the location herself. Not the mansion. Not anywhere tied to Malrik, the council, or my family. She took me to a private medical facility buried beneath an abandoned logistics hub outside the city—steel corridors, biometric locks, generators humming like a second heartbeat under the floor.Modern. Clean. No mysticism theatrics.“This isn’t about awakening,” she told me as we walked. “You’re already awake. This is about organization.”“Organization of what,” I asked. “The voices?”“The memories,” she corrected. “They’re stacking. If you don’t separate them, they’ll collapse into each other.”“And if they do?”She stopped walking. Looked at me carefully. “Then you won’t know where Zenaida ends and you begin. And Malrik will lose you either way.”That landed harder than any threat.Malrik wasn’t
Asaraiah KaineThey didn’t knock.They never do when they think they’re above doors.I was in the east wing, the old sitting room that overlooked the city from a height that made people feel small. I’d chosen it deliberately—glass walls, open space, nowhere for shadows to gather without being seen. Power doesn’t like being cornered. It likes distance.Malrik was three rooms away, on a call with Rotterdam. I could feel him even without looking. A low, steady presence at the edge of my awareness, like a hand hovering near my back without touching.The air shifted.Not dramatically. No thunder, no cinematic nonsense. Just a pressure change, like when an elevator drops too fast.I straightened.Six figures appeared where the windows met the floor.No smoke. No light show. Just… there.They looked human. That was the problem.Three men. Three women. All dressed like they belonged on private jets and corporate boards. Expensive suits. Calm eyes. The kind of people who ruin lives with signat
Asaraiah KaineMorning didn’t fix anything.It rarely did.The sun crept in through the tall windows like it always had, pale and polite, pretending nothing had happened in the dark. The sheets were still warm where Malrik had been, the faint scent of smoke and something sharper—ozone, iron—lingering in the air.I hadn’t slept again.Not really.Lying still while your mind replays the sound of a blade entering flesh doesn’t count as rest.I sat up slowly, grounding myself in the room. The mansion was awake. I could feel it now—the movement of people, the hum of security systems, the faint vibration of power flowing through walls that had seen too much blood to ever be innocent again.I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood.My reflection in the mirror paused me.I looked the same. Dark hair falling loose down my back. Bare face. Bare feet on cold marble. But my eyes—there was something different about the way they held light now. Like they were remembering how to burn.I dr
-Asaraiah Kaine-Sleep stopped pretending it was mine.It didn’t arrive gently or with the mercy of dreams. It tore through me the moment my eyes closed, dragging me somewhere that smelled of smoke and iron and old stone. I knew better than to fight it. Fighting only made it sharper.I opened my eyes into fire.Not the kind that flickers. The kind that eats.The world around me wasn’t the mansion. It wasn’t even this century. Walls of blackened stone rose around a courtyard soaked in blood. The sky burned the color of dying embers. Screams echoed—not panicked, but resigned. People who already knew there was no escape.I stood barefoot in the middle of it.My hands were red. Not metaphorically. Red to the wrists, blood drying in the grooves of my palms. I looked down and felt the weight before I saw it.A dagger.Old. Ornate. The hilt warm, almost alive, as if it recognized me.“No,” I whispered.The word came out wrong. Older. Sharper.I lifted my head.Malrik was on his knees in fron
-Asaraiah Kaine-The mansion did not sleep.It pretended to.That was the first thing I noticed when we got back from the burial grounds. The lights were dimmed to their night setting, the staff dismissed to their quarters, the gates sealed. On the surface, everything was routine. Perfectly controlled. Perfectly calm.Underneath, the air vibrated.Not metaphorically. Literally.I felt it in my teeth. In the soles of my feet as I crossed the marble floor. In the second heartbeat that had stopped pretending it didn’t exist.Malrik noticed it too. He didn’t comment. He never commented when the danger wasn’t visible yet. He only adjusted—security protocols shifted, guards repositioned, doors locked in sequences that didn’t repeat.The house was holding its breath.“You should rest,” he said when we reached the east wing.I took off my coat and handed it to Leina without looking away from him. “I will. When this is done.”His jaw flexed. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is yet.”“I know wh
Asaraiah KaineWe didn’t go at night.That alone told me everything.If Malrik had his way, we would have gone under cover of darkness with half the city locked down and snipers on every rooftop within a mile. But this wasn’t a raid. It wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t even revenge.This was a reckoning.So we went at dawn, when the world pretended to be clean.The Montova burial grounds sat on the edge of old land—olive trees gone feral, stone paths cracked with age, mausoleums leaning like tired men who had held power too long and forgotten why. The air smelled like wet earth and neglect. No guards. No cameras.Of course there weren’t.My family buried their sins where no one looked twice.The car stopped at the iron gates. I didn’t wait for Malrik to open my door.Gravel crunched under my boots as I stepped out, long coat brushing my calves, hair pulled back tight. No dress. No softness. Just black and steel and the quiet hum under my skin that had become my constant companion.Two hear







