LOGINFAOTwenty-one days.I knew because Seraphina told me. She liked to mark the milestones. Liked to remind me exactly how long I'd been hers.The third week had been different from the others.The first week, she'd used isolation and starvation. Classical conditioning — her presence meant food, water, human contact. By the end of it, my body lifted toward the door every time it opened, desperate for stimulus.The second week, she'd introduced the table. The edging. Teaching my body to respond to her touch, to crave it even as my mind recoiled. By the end of that week, I got hard when I heard her heels on the stairs.This week, she'd added pain.It started on day fifteen.She arrived with a new case — larger than before, filled with things I didn't want to identify. Crops and floggers and clamps. Candles and cuffs and implements whose purposes I could only guess at."You've been so good," she'd said, circling the table where I lay strapped down. "So responsive. But I think you're ready f
The bond flared without warning.Pain — sharp and sudden, slicing through me like a knife. I gasped, dropping the gun, my hand flying to my chest where the bond lived.Fao—More pain. Different this time. Not just physical. Shame so thick it choked me. Desperation. And beneath it all, a broken whisper:I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't—Fao! I pushed everything I had through the bond. I'm here. I'm still here. What's happening? What is she—The connection cut off. Smothered by distance or drugs or both.I stood there shaking, one hand braced against the wall, trying to catch my breath. Whatever had just happened to him — whatever Seraphina had just done — it was bad. Worse than before.He was running out of time.I'm coming, I sent into the void, even knowing he probably couldn't hear me. Hold on. I have a plan. Just hold on a little longer.Nothing came back.I picked up the gun with trembling hands. Reloaded. Fired.Center mass. Heart. Head.Again. Again. Again.I was going to find him.
ELOWENTwenty-one days.Three weeks of dead ends. Three weeks of eliminated properties and cold trails and intelligence that led nowhere. Three weeks of watching pins move from yellow to blue on the war room map while the one pin that mattered — the red one, the one marking where Fao actually was — remained stubbornly absent.I stared at the map until my eyes burned. Wyoming. Idaho. Nevada. We'd narrowed it down, but "narrowed" still meant hundreds of square miles of wilderness, dozens of potential hiding spots, and not enough scouts to cover them all."The Idaho property is looking less likely," Garrett said, sliding a report across the table. "No activity in the past week. Power's been off since October."Another blue pin. Another dead end."That leaves Wyoming and Nevada.""Both heavily fortified. Both with enough security to spot our scouts before they get close enough to confirm anything." Garrett's jaw tightened. "We're running out of options, Luna."I knew. God, I knew.The doo
FAOFourteen days.Or maybe fifteen. The line between them had blurred, smeared by pain and exhaustion and the endless cycle of Seraphina's visits.I lay on the cold stone floor where the guards had dumped me after last night's session. They didn't always strap me to the table anymore — sometimes they left me here, curled in on myself, too weak to move even if I wanted to.The collar was still around my neck. She never took it off now.I was drifting somewhere between sleep and consciousness when the voices started.Arguing. Outside the door. Muffled by stone and wood, but loud enough to penetrate the fog.I forced my eyes open. Forced myself to focus."—can't keep coddling him forever." A woman's voice. Older. Sharper. Cracked around the edges like old ice. "Let me have him. I'll make him compliant."My blood went cold. I knew that voice. Vivienne. Seraphina's mother. The mad bitch who wanted to flay me and breed me like livestock."He's MINE." Seraphina's voice, hard as steel. "I'll
That night, Rowan found me in the gardens.Not the war room — I couldn't stand to look at those maps anymore, all those pins that led nowhere. Instead I sat on the bench by the pond, the same bench where Nina had talked to me about the bond a week ago.It felt like a lifetime."Thought I'd find you here." Rowan settled beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "The war room was empty. Figured you finally cracked and started talking to the fish.""Not yet. Give it another week.""That's not funny.""No." I stared at the water, at the reflection of stars on its surface. "It's not."We sat in silence for a while. The night was cold, but I barely felt it. Barely felt anything except the dull ache in my chest where the bond lived."He's getting worse," I finally said. "I can feel it. The first week, he was angry. Fighting. Reaching for me constantly." I wrapped my arms around myself. "Now it's just... pain. And shame. And this horrible resignation, like he's accepted that this is
ELOWENFourteen days.Two weeks since the ambush. Two weeks since I'd driven away with Declan bleeding in the back seat, not knowing Fao had been taken until we reached Silverpine. Two weeks of searching, planning, waiting.Two weeks of feeling him suffer through the bond and being unable to do a damn thing about it.I stood at the head of the war room table, maps spread before me, pins marking every Varen property we'd identified. Red for confirmed. Yellow for suspected. Blue for eliminated.Too much yellow. Not enough red. And every blue pin — every dead end — felt like a personal failure."The Montana compound is empty," Garrett reported, sliding a folder across the table. "Surveillance team confirmed it's been abandoned for at least six months. No power, no water, no activity."I pulled the pin from the Montana location and dropped it in the discard pile. Another dead end."That leaves what? Four possibilities?""Three." Lucia, the Marchetti liaison, shook her head. "We eliminated
ELOWENThe paw print was the size of my hand.I crouched at the bottom of the porch steps, phone out, taking picture after picture like documentation would somehow make this less terrifying. The morning light was gray and flat, washing out the details, so I grabbed a measuring tape from the junk dr
ROGUEShe closed the curtains.He stared at the cabin, at the windows that had always been open to him, now blocked by fabric. Dark shapes against the golden light inside, hiding her from view.Why?The question circled in his mind, chasing its own tail. She'd never done this before. Every night si
ELOWENI hadn't slept properly in three days.Every sound woke me — the creak of the cabin settling, the wind brushing branches against the roof, the distant hoot of an owl. Sounds I'd lived with for two years, sounds that used to mean home and safe and peace. Now they meant something else. Now the
ROGUEHunger drove him through the trees.Not the dull ache of missed meals — he knew that feeling, had lived with it more times than he could count. This was sharper. Cleaner. The kind of hunger that narrowed the world to a single point: prey.The deer had been careless. Old, maybe, or sick — some







