The Bloodline Prison did not exist to keep people in.
It existed to keep something else out.
⸻
The first sign is not an attack.
It is a silence where sound should live.
At dawn, every bird along Blood Moon’s western ridge goes quiet at once. Not fleeing. Not startled.
Just… absent.
Zane feels it before the alarms sound.
He is standing with me at the balcony when the bond tightens like a wire pulled suddenly too far.
“This isn’t Covenant,” he murmurs.
Jason’s voice crackles through the corridor wards seconds later.
“All outer sensors just lost one entire spectrum of detection,” he snaps. “Not damaged. Erased.”
My stomach tightens.
The heir shifts with sharp interest.
Not fear.
Recognition.
⸻
Deep beneath the ruins of the shattered Bloodline Prison, something stirs for the f
