Page 24 of The Reckoning of Starlight

Lykor hated the delay already.

They’d need strategy. Division of ranks. Knives striking the city’s pressure points.

“Three nights,” he said. “We plan and strike in three nights.”

Koln nodded.

“We take Elashor or the records that lead to our people,” Lykor said. “We leave wreckage. We get out.”

He scanned the ranks, then turned, frost blooming beneath his boots with every step.

Let Kyansari say the wraith brought war.

Let the elves remember who made them monsters.

CHAPTER 5

JASSYN

You will never raise a hand against yourself or others.

You will serve.

You will stay devoted.

Elashor’s commands looped without sound as Jassyn stared at the ceiling of Farine’s chambers. Dawn still hung hours beyond the high windows, and sleep had never bothered to claim him.

One night had passed since the Vallende estate had devoured him again. Their manor overlooked Kyansari, the capital’s glass spires visible from every southern window. Even here, the kingdom kept him in its sightline.

He lay on his back, wings trapped, the membranes cramped and numb where they drowned in the silk-covered mattress. Farine had insisted he remain partially shifted with his scales arranged as the Vallende trillium on his forehead. A display piece, kept ready and admired.

He held still, listening. The estate’s sounds were safer than the ones inside his skull.

The mansion breathed around him—fountains murmuring in the gardens, the faint chime of crystal stirred by a breeze somewhere below. Beneath it all, silence gathered weight.

The coercion hooked through his mind, barbs waiting under every thought. A leash, slack for now. Farine hadn’t yanked on it since the moons rose. Four hours, perhaps five. The longest interval yet. He cataloged the number and knew it meant nothing.

Jassyn eased himself upright, and the pillows whispered under him with a traitorous sigh. The movement drew a murmur from Farine. She rolled beside him in the dark, golden hair spread across the sheets, her perfume still cloying enough to choke.

Jassyn clenched his jaw and breathed through the seal of his teeth, thinning the air until her scent couldn’t follow.

An urge raced unbidden—to lock his hands around her throat, crush cartilage with his thumbs.

Elashor’s coercion sheared it away before his fingers could twitch. Jassyn reached for the impulse again and found only absence—the knowledge that violence had risen, its shape already erased.

His body hadn’t moved. Hadn’t even tensed.

I need to get out.

The thought rose stripped of panic, all calculation and necessity. Elashor had severed the bond with Vesryn and obliterated any trail that might lead the prince here. No one would even know where to look.

Farine reached for him, her fingers sliding across the sheets. Jassyn’s mind moved before hesitation could intervene. He kept both hands flat to the mattress, obeying the letter of Elashor’s commands while his awareness slipped through the space in the coercion. He cast a thread of telepathy outward into the crevices of Farine’s dreaming mind.

“Sleep.”

He twisted the magic gently, a key easing a lock. Her breathing deepened, fingers going slack against the bed.

Jassyn’s pulse hammered against his ears as he counted the seconds.