The first thing I felt was not the war.
Not the sound of steel.
Not the shifting tension in the air.
It was him.
A sharp, tearing pain split through my chest without warning, sudden and violent enough to drag the breath straight out of my lungs as my body locked where I stood, my fingers curling instinctively against my ribs as if I could physically hold myself together.
The bond.
Darius.
My vision flickered, not from weakness but from the force of it, from the way the connection pulled at me like something desperate, something slipping.
Something losing.
My breath came unevenly, my pulse spiking as the world around me blurred—not disappearing, but fading into something distant, secondary, unimportant compared to what was happening inside me.
Because this—
This wasn’t just pain
