1—Silence

1 Neon & Silence

The city was loud enough to drown out most things.

Not the silence inside him.

Tharien moved through the press of bodies like a shadow slipping between beats of light. Neon bled across wet pavement. Bass from the club across the street thumped through brick and bone. Sirens wailed somewhere too close to be comfort. The night was alive with heat and noise and hunger.

None of it touched him.

His awareness stayed sharpened, predatory in the way that came from too many years of learning how to survive without flinching. He catalogued exits, reflections in dark windows, the subtle shifts in a crowd when danger passed too near. His hands remained loose at his sides, ready. His breath stayed measured, controlled.

And beneath all of it, the bond pulled.

It wasn’t a voice. It wasn’t a command. It was a pressure behind his sternum, a warm, aching gravity that tugged him toward a single point in the city. Toward her.

Tharien ignored it.

He’d learned to live with the pull. Learned to set his jaw against it, to let it throb and stretch without giving in. The bond tightened when he resisted, a low hum of awareness threading through his nerves. He told himself it was just another instinct to master, another weakness to discipline out of himself.

Staying close put her in danger.

Distance kept things contained.

The logic was familiar. Comfortable in its cruelty.

He crossed the street without breaking stride, letting the river of people carry him forward. Laughter spilled from an open bar door. The air smelled like rain and alcohol and electricity. For a moment, the warmth in his chest flared brighter, sharper—an echo of her breath against his throat, her palms steadying him in the dark.

His steps slowed.

Just for a heartbeat, the instinct to turn back rose up in him, sudden and insistent. He pictured the lamplight in her apartment, the quiet circle of safety they made when the world felt too sharp. The thought of that stillness was almost enough to make him pivot on his heel.

Almost.

Tharien forced his gaze forward. He didn’t look back. The pressure behind his sternum tightened, then settled into a dull ache.

Control, he told himself.

Control is survival.

The crowd shifted around him, a subtle ripple that put the hairs on the back of his neck on end. He caught a glimpse of her in a darkened shop window—not her reflection, but someone else’s. A woman standing too still amid the restless flow of bodies. Her eyes were fixed on him with an attention that felt invasive, precise.

Tharien’s focus sharpened. He let the crowd carry him another few steps, then angled his path slightly, watching the reflection from the corner of his eye.

She matched his movement.

Not close. Not obvious. Just present in the way predators were present when they’d marked something worth tracking.

The bond reacted.

A sudden, sharp pressure bloomed behind his sternum, as if the invisible thread between him and Nori had gone taut. His breath hitched. He didn’t slow, didn’t give the watcher the satisfaction of knowing she’d been noticed. He turned down a side street, neon falling away into dimmer light.

When he glanced back, the woman was gone.

The wrongness lingered.

Tharien exhaled slowly, letting the city noise fill the space where unease wanted to take root. He’d heard the stories—people who watched bonds, who followed the glow of connection like hounds on a scent. Watchers, they were called in half-voices. As if naming them too clearly might draw them closer.

He’d never believed in them. Not really.

But the bond’s tight, uncomfortable throb didn’t ease. If anything, it pulsed harder, a quiet warning threaded through his ribs.

Visibility gets you killed.

The thought slid into place alongside the rest of his rules. Bonds made you visible. Visibility drew attention. Attention turned into hands on your throat sooner or later.

He kept moving.

The alley opened onto a wider street, quieter but no less alive. A group of men laughed too loudly outside a closed storefront. A woman argued into her phone, her voice sharp with something like fear. The city pressed in from every side, predatory in its own indifferent way.

Tharien’s gaze snagged on a familiar symbol stenciled low on a brick wall—a circle scored through with a single clean line. Most people would have read it as nothing more than graffiti. He knew better.

Severance.

The word formed in his head without sound. He’d never seen the ritual himself, but he’d heard what it left behind. People who walked away from something essential and called it mercy. Bonds cut “for the greater good.” Containment, they called it. As if you could cauterize a living thing without killing part of it.

The ache in his chest deepened.

A presence shifted at his shoulder. Gibor’s voice came out of the dark, low and controlled. “You shouldn’t linger here.”

Tharien didn’t jump. He’d known his mentor was nearby before the man spoke—the subtle change in air pressure, the familiar weight of authority that came with him. “I wasn’t planning to.”

Gibor’s gaze followed the line of Tharien’s sight to the symbol on the wall. His mouth thinned. “Places like this draw trouble. Attachments make you careless.”

Tharien’s jaw tightened. “I’m not careless.”

“No,” Gibor agreed. “You’re sentimental. That’s worse.”

The bond flared at the word, heat blooming behind Tharien’s sternum like a warning flare. He kept his expression neutral. “Sentiment doesn’t get people killed.”

Gibor studied him for a long moment, eyes sharp with an old, weary kind of knowing. “It gets them seen,” he said. “And seen is the first step toward being cut down.”

The words settled into Tharien’s chest with uncomfortable weight. He glanced once more at the symbol on the wall, at the thin line scored through the circle.

Containment.

Mercy.

The bond tugged again, more insistently this time. Tharien felt the direction of it with aching clarity. Home. Nori. The quiet space he’d left behind.

If I go back, I put her in the crosshairs.

The lie was easier to hold onto out here, in the noise and danger of the city. Easier to believe that distance was protection, that absence was restraint. He turned away from the wall, away from the symbol, away from the pull in his chest.

“I won’t stay long,” he said to Gibor.

Gibor nodded once. “Don’t stay at all,” he replied. “That’s how you keep the things you care about from becoming leverage.”

Tharien didn’t answer. He stepped back into the flow of the city, letting the night swallow him whole.

Behind his sternum, the bond tightened in quiet protest, a thin, aching line of awareness stretching as he put more distance between himself and the one place that made the world feel less sharp.

Somewhere in the dark, something listened.