Chapter 15 The Chains We Carry
“Not this one,” I whispered. “I know this one.”
Above, a shadow moved in the fire. Wings. A long neck. A head crowned with horns.
My stomach dropped. “No.”
“This was the day they chained me,” Drake’s voice said, low and ragged.
The perspective shifted. I was no longer a child in the street; I was watching from somewhere higher. From above the houses. From where the air was thinner and the heat rose in shimmering waves.
I felt metal biting into my limbs. Runes burned into bone. A muzzle cutting into the flesh at the corners of my mouth.
A voice snarled in my ear—Breathe when we tell you, beast—and another voice, oily and smooth, recited something in a language older than the Syndicate.
My chest heaved, but it wasn’t my choice. Fire pulled at my lungs like a tide. When I tried to hold it back, the runes flared red-hot. Pain screamed along every nerve, and the flame tore out of me, channeled down, aimed.
The village below lit up.
Somewhere in that inferno, a small figure ran toward a collapsing house. A flash of a red scarf in front of her. She grabbed for the boy wearing it. The roof gave way.
The fire hit them late, like it had almost been diverted. Enough to scar. Enough to carve a memory into both of us.
“I saw you,” Drake said, voice hoarse as if he was reliving the scorch. The chains bit deeper into our shared vision. “You pushed back. No one else did.”
I choked on smoke that wasn’t really there. “Get me out of this.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
The chains around our limbs flared again, burning through scales and skin and nerves. The sigil—the same spiral mark I’d seen on the shade-touched—flashed in the air, scorching itself into reality and memory at once.
The pain spiked so sharply the bond shrieked.
The world tore.
I snapped awake with a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
The cave ceiling loomed overhead, dim and uneven. For a moment, the rock seemed to pulse like the obsidian walls in his mind. My heart hammered against my ribs in a double-beat so fast it hurt.
My hand flew to my chest.
“Breathe.”
Drake’s voice. Closer than I expected.
I turned my head. He crouched in front of me, one hand braced on the floor, the other hovering near my shoulder like he wanted to touch me and wasn’t sure if he was allowed.
His face was pale beneath the gold, eyes bright and slit-narrow. Sweat beaded at his temple. The mark on his wrist glowed like someone had poured sunlight into it.
“You saw it,” he said softly. “Didn’t you?”
“Which part?” I rasped. My throat felt raw, like I’d actually breathed in fire.
“All of it.”
I swallowed hard. “I saw enough.”
He sank back on his heels, dragging a hand through his hair. It trembled. Just a little, but enough.
“The bond is syncing deeper than I thought,” he said. “It’s not just sharing surface impressions anymore. It’s braiding roots.”
“That’s… not an image I enjoy,” I said weakly.
“Souls aren’t tidy.”
“You keep saying that like it’s supposed to be comforting.”
He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s supposed to be honest.”
My head swam. My skin felt too tight. The cave seemed smaller than it had when I’d fallen asleep.
“You were chained,” I said, because apparently my mouth didn’t care that my brain was still listing. “Over my village.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No deflection.
“They made you breathe when you didn’t want to.”
“Yes.”
“They drove the fire through you.”
“Yes.”
I forced myself to meet his eyes. “You still killed them.”
His expression didn’t flinch. “I was the instrument,” he said. “They were the hand.”
“You think that makes a difference?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Do you?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The answer should have been easy. Should have been no. Fire is fire. Burned is burned.
But the memory of chains biting into limbs, of runes seared into bone, of a muzzle forced onto a mouth that didn’t choose its targets—those sat like stones in my stomach.
And I remembered my own hands signing forms I didn’t understand because a Syndicate officer said good girl and slid food across the table.
“It doesn’t bring them back,” I whispered.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
Silence settled between us. Not empty—heavy. Full of things unsaid.
He broke it first. “You pulled your own memories into the bond as well.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Intention stopped mattering when you tied your heart to mine,” he said gently. “That’s what this kind of magic does—it takes what you try to hide and drags it into the fire.”
I grimaced. “That sounds terrible.”
“It is,” he said. “And sometimes… useful.”
A muscle jumped in my jaw. “You think knowing what they did to me gives you leverage?”
He blinked slowly. “No. It gives me context.”
“For what?”
“For why you still cling to their story even after it’s burned you twice.”
I bristled. “They trained me. Fed me. Gave me weapons, discipline, structure—”
“They gave you orders,” he corrected. “And told you the fire was only ever pointed outward.”
“That’s what war is,” I snapped. “You point the fire at the enemy so it doesn’t eat you.”
His gaze softened, the way it did when he was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. “And what happens when you realize the people holding the torch don’t care if you’re between them and the flames?”
My throat tightened.
Images flashed behind my eyes: shade-touched Syndicate soldiers stumbling toward us; the drained corpses in the outpost; the cracked recall charm in my pack, tossed aside as defective.
“This isn’t the time,” I muttered.
“It’s exactly the time,” he said. “You can’t navigate a battlefield if you refuse to look at the map.”
“Is everything a metaphor with you?”
“Only the important parts.”
I scrubbed a hand over my face and let my head thunk back against the rock. The stone was blessedly cool. For a moment I just listened—to my own breathing, ragged but leveling, and to his, deeper and slower.
“…How long does this last?” I asked finally.
“The dreams?” he asked.
“The… bleeding. You seeing my memories. Me seeing yours.”
“As long as the bond stays,” he said. “It might dull. It might sharpen. But it won’t go away on its own.”
I closed my eyes. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“I could lie, if you prefer.”
“You’re terrible at lying,” I said. “The bond tattles.”
“Then I suppose you’re stuck with the truth.”
We sat in silence a while longer. My heartbeat slowly eased out of its double-time panic, settling into something I could function with. The mark on my wrist dimmed from a burn to a low, steady heat.
“Can you sleep again?” he asked eventually.
“Do I want to?”
He tilted his head. “You won’t always see the worst. Sometimes it pulls smaller things. Quieter ones.”
“Like what?”
He hesitated. “Once, after a long hunt, I dreamt of my clutchmates curled in a pile, snoring so loudly the mountain shook. It wasn’t a memory I thought I still had.”
Something about the way he said clutchmates made my chest hurt.
“And you saw that… with someone else?”
“No,” he said. “That was before chain-magic. When my dreams were mine alone.”
There was an ache under those words that had nothing to do with the bond.
“Do you miss it?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“What?”
“Being alone in your own head.”
He considered that for a long moment, gaze distant.
“Sometimes,” he said. “But then again, that got me chained over your village. Alone with the fire they forced through me. I think I’ve had enough solitude for a few lifetimes.”
I snorted softly. “So you’re saying I’m an upgrade.”
“I’m saying,” he replied, “that if I have to share my mind with someone, I’d rather it be the girl who tried to drag a boy out of a burning house than the man who lit the match.”
I swallowed around the sudden lump in my throat. “…He didn’t make it.”
“I know,” Drake said. “I felt him go.”
The bond thrummed once, deep and low, like it recognized grief and wanted to wrap around it.
I drew my knees up slowly, careful of the one he’d treated. “If we keep sharing like this,” I said, “there won’t be much left that’s only mine.”
He looked at me, eyes serious. “The bond doesn’t erase you, Christine. It just makes it harder to pretend you’re not what you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“Someone who’s been burning from the inside for a long time,” he said softly. “Long before you ever met me.”
That stung because it was true.
“Go to sleep,” I muttered, because I couldn’t hold the weight of that look any longer. “You’re getting annoyingly perceptive.”
He gave a quiet huff of a laugh and leaned his head back against the rock. “As my lady Knight commands.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Christine, then.”
“That’s worse.”
“Get some rest,” he said, ignoring me. “We move at dawn. The shade will spread with the light.”
“That seems backwards,” I grumbled.
“Light casts shadows,” he replied. “And monsters love something to hide behind.”
I let my eyes fall shut again. This time, when the bond tugged, it was softer. Not a plunge—more like a tide, drawing me under and letting me up in slow, rocking waves.
I dreamed again, but differently.
Brief flashes: my hand as a child, reaching for a spark floating above a candle; his claws, careful as he moved a boulder away from a bird’s broken nest; my first spell-circle carved shaky and precise; his first flight alone, the world dropping away as the wind screamed past.
None of it hurt. It just… was.
Two lives flickering back and forth like lanterns seen from a distance.
Ash and embers.
Chains and wings.
And somewhere between all of it, a growing, dangerous truth:
The more of him I saw, the less clearly I could paint him as only the monster in my stories.