THE BLASTED CONTRACT COIN BOOK 1

CHAPTER 27 WEIGHTOF A SHADOW

POV Lucian

I had stayed behind in the cellar to ensure the twins, or even Mercy herself, didn't prematurely terminate the rat. Tensions in the damp room were charting far too high, rising even further as Caspian and Sterling targeted him with lethal promises.

We had a formidable family, and I loved them with a fierce, quiet intensity. But we were also an assembly of weapons, and weapons are inherently dangerous if let loose.

We had yet to test the true parameters of the tether, though. It was a statistical probability that whatever trauma befell the prisoner would mirror onto our sister, but we hadn't witnessed definitive proof of the mechanic.

"Check the coin, Mercy," I commanded, growing weary of the grifter's theatrical banter.

She reached into her dark tunic and withdrew the gold piece. The Lady with the Open Eyes stared back at us under the flickering torchlight. The metal remained cold; the etched pupils were wide and unyielding. On the reverse side, the scales remained heavily tipped. No shift. No rebalancing. The "intentional act of care" had been an absolute waste of Poppy's alchemical craft, and an even greater waste of our time.

Something inside my skull snapped.

I am the shadow of this family—the one who resides in the silence, the cold, and the forgotten spaces—but even silence has a breaking point. I moved faster than the human eye could process, a fluid blur of ink and sudden malice, my shadows propelling me and helping me act upon my malicious intents.

I slammed Cillian against the weeping stone wall, my hand locking like an iron vice around his throat. My shadows were whipping around me like flames feeding on oxygen. I wanted to feel the physical struggle of his life failing beneath my bare palm.

"You lying, bottom-feeding rat," I hissed, lifting him until his worn boots barely brushed the floorboards. "You are playing us."

In that moment, I was no different than any of my siblings. We all possessed a killer baseline. Consider it a dominant family trait.

Cillian thrashed, struggling to draw enough oxygen to form a syllable, his face rapidly darkening to a dangerous purple.

"You think... a tart... is going to pay off... a Soul-Contract?"

I squeezed tighter, intentionally cutting off the airway. I wanted to see his eyes roll back into his head. I wanted to register the precise millisecond his pulse faltered, and the smug, reckless light in his eyes finally went out.

Cillian's hands clawed weakly at my wrists. Then, his entire frame went completely limp.

But he wasn't the only one.

Behind me, a sickening, heavy thud echoed through the cell—the unmistakable sound of a human body hitting stone with absolutely no defensive effort to break the fall. I spun around, my fingers still maintaining their grip on Cillian's unconscious form.

Mercy was down.

Her gray eyes were rolled back, her jaw slack, her chest completely still. Her breathing had stopped in perfect, terrifying synchronization with the man dying in my fist.

"Lucian, let go!" Gideon roared, his voice a literal tidal wave of pure panic.

The twins were already dropping to their knees beside her. Sterling was frantically weaving a raw sensory input directly into her chest to violently stimulate her central nervous system, while Caspian glared up at me with a look that commanded me to drop the asset or face execution.

I let go. Cillian slumped onto the damp straw like a discarded sack of grain.

Gideon wrenched me backward away from the prisoner, his own Heart Weave flaring with blinding intensity as he forced Cillian's chest to compress, driving life back into the man's lungs. Cillian instantly shattered the silence, gasping, coughing, and retching as air was violently shoved back into his system.

A fraction of a second later, Mercy let out a sharp, ragged gasp of her own, her pale hand flying up to clutch at her throat, targeting the exact physical quadrant where my fingers had just crushed Cillian's windpipe.

"f**k!" I roared.

My shadows exploded outward in a violent, uncontrolled wave of ink-black darkness. The torrent swallowed the cellar for a single heartbeat, instantly extinguishing every torch and plunging the entire room into a cold, suffocating void. It was a childish tantrum of my weave, a desperate release of the crushing pressure building in my skull that threatened to crack my own ribs from the inside out.

I forced myself back into alignment, pulling the stray shadows back into the folds of my cloak like a shameful secret. I dropped to one knee in front of Mercy, my heart hammering violently against my ribs.

"I am sorry, Little Bird," I whispered, reaching my hand toward her but freezing an inch from her skin, suddenly terrified to touch her. "Are you functional? Talk to me."

Mercy blinked, her gray eyes slowly refocusing on the ceiling. She rubbed the reddening skin of her neck, her voice coming out in a thin, bruised rasp.

"I am... operational. I am satisfied that we have successfully confirmed the parameters of the 'death-link' mechanic. It was highly efficient to test the variables as you did. Now we have verifiable data to work with."

She sounded so clinical, so much like a perfectly calibrated piece of machinery, that I almost missed the distinct, rhythmic tremor in her fingers.

The next thing I registered was the world exploding into a wall of white-hot pain.

Gideon's fist caught me square in the jaw. It was a mountain of a punch, fueled entirely by the raw terror he had experienced watching our sister collapse yet again. The force sent me flying sideways; I crashed hard against the iron bars of the cell and slid down to the stone floor. For a terrifying second, my vision went completely dark.