Broken Bonds
1093 Words
Atlas's POV — Present Time
Three weeks. Three weeks free, and I still hadn't found a way back to Draconis.
This realm was bright and loud and utterly foreign to me after five years in a cell. I had been searching for someone — anyone — who could help me navigate back to my kingdom, and I had come up empty every day. Most of what I encountered here were werewolves, and none of them were interested in helping someone who looked like the demon that had been wearing my face.
I had considered going to Jessica. I knew where she was. But Jessica would lead me to Ava, and Ava would lead me somewhere I wasn't ready to go — somewhere inside myself that I had been keeping very deliberately locked.
Ava, with her purple eyes and her power that was probably greater than mine, which I would not be admitting aloud to anyone. I had been thinking about her since the moment I saw her in that dungeon. Her beauty was in a different category from anyone I had encountered — even Sorena, who she resembled in a way that still unsettled me. And she had been burning in my mind ever since, which was not something I had invited or wanted.
At least we hadn't mated. Dragon sickness was not something I had the capacity for right now. And I wouldn't have mated with her regardless. She was a witch. I had a deep and thoroughly justified contempt for witches that no goddess-appointed bond was going to override. Once I found my way back to Draconis, I intended to bring the full weight of my kingdom down on that witch barrier and drive them out permanently.
I returned to the cave as the day ended, flying above the cloud line to avoid being spotted. I closed my eyes and fell into the same gym I always went to in my mind — the one place I had always been able to work off the excess of everything.
I felt a presence behind me and ignored it. And then a voice broke through. Ava. Watching me, with a range of things moving across her face that she thought she was hiding.
I had learned to dreamwalk as a child — I used to find myself in the dreams of family members without meaning to, until I learned to control it. Ava's presence was faint, which told me she was still new to it. Still learning what she could do.
Knowing she could reach me while I had been doing everything possible to avoid thinking about her was — inconvenient. And I took it out on her, which I recognized even as I did it.
"Get out of my dreams, Ava," I said.
She was pushed back and hit the ground. I reached for her — and she was gone. Woken up. I woke up immediately after.
Part of me wanted to reach back out. The part of me that had been raised to understand what a mate bond meant — what it cost to deny it. The rest of me had five years of rage and a kingdom to reclaim.
Adam was sitting on my throne right now. My own brother had handed me to a demon, gotten our father killed, and taken everything. I was taking Draconis back, and nothing was going to delay that.
Harmon's POV
Two weeks I had been searching for Pythia. I had combed through realms, followed every lead, sent word to Netilan. Nothing.
I was moving through the trees when I felt the snap.
Before that moment, I had still been feeling Brandon's fear through the thread that connected our wolves — faint, but present. Enough to tell me he was alive. My wolf couldn't speak to his wolf, but she could still feel him, and that had been enough to keep me moving.
The snap was nothing like I had expected. I had heard the description from others who had lost their mates. I thought I understood what they meant. I hadn't.
It was like someone had reached into my chest and removed something that had always been there, and the space it left behind was not empty — it was worse than empty. It was an absence with weight.
I fell out of the tree. My leg broke on impact. My wolf healed it before I hit the ground fully. My heart was something she could not touch.
Somehow I made it back to the castle. Ava was the first person I found. I didn't have words. I didn't need them.
I grieved for a week in my room and let no one in after the first two days. I cursed the goddess more times than I could count and begged her every morning to show me something — a direction, a name, anything. She gave me nothing.
Then grief turned. It turned to anger and the anger turned into something clean and sharp and focused. Hunting. Finding. Even if what I found was only a body — I was going to give that to Harmon if it was the last thing I did.
I wrote the letters. I let them believe I was going back to the Amazons. I should have known better than to try to fool Samael and Jasmine.
They cornered me at the door. Jasmine pressed a bag of weapons into my hands and held me without asking questions. Then she stepped back.
"I could come with you," she said.
I looked at Samael over her shoulder. They had just survived something that had tried to destroy everything. They deserved the time they hadn't had yet. Brandon and I had been robbed of ours.
"You're needed here," I told her. "And I need you watching for anything that comes back around."
Samael held me too, and gave me a second bag and a gold ring with a white crystal set in it.
"If you are in danger — press the crystal. It will turn red, visible only to you, and will show us where you are," he said.
I put the ring on and looked at both of them one last time. Then I walked to the border and stopped.
The trees behind me led back up to the castle. Looking at it now, all I could feel was what was missing.
"I, Harmon, renounce all ties to this kingdom," I said aloud.
The bond broke clean. I turned and left, with nothing ahead of me but the mission.
- Writer
