46. Chained

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CHAINED

There was such a loud noise in my head

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There was such a loud noise in my head. Such a painful, wicked noise that pulsed through my blood, that stretched through my nerves.

It screamed. It yelled. It crooned and cawed and called for me.

So many voices, so many sounds, so many words. They stormed in my ears, they echoed in my bones. Laced around my mind, caressing the edges of my thoughts, begging to be welcomed.

The world was so silent as I was tossed in a corner, so hazy the lights swam in my vision.

More screaming. More yelling. More power went into my blood trying to control me.

Leon and Rhiannon were here, too. Chained in the same corner, each at my side.

The voices grew louder. Louder louder louder. I hadn't heard the chair being dragged across the familiar front room, hadn't heard the thudding of his boots as he approached us.

I hadn't felt him appearing behind me in the Tower until too late. Hadn't sensed a drop of magic until he'd stepped out of the shadows.

Maybe I had been too engrossed in the monsters carved into the walls. Maybe I had been too lost down my own thoughts and plans.

I should've noticed him. I should've felt him prowling in the folds of the world waiting for me. I should've—

He'd been the one to deliver the box to my rooms this morning.

He'd been the one to hand me the shirt soaked in Blake's scent. Not just his scent…there had been something else.

The auras behind the Nightbleed doors shouldn't have been small and quiet. They should've been bright and loud. They had been dim even in the council room.

It wasn't because of some protective spell.

There had been something else with that shirt.

A drug. Something that had slipped into my system for seven hours. Something that had silently diluted my senses.

He'd put it in there. He'd waited for me, followed every move.

He sat on the chair, the edges of the ankle he placed over his knee hazy in my vision. Leon and Rhia were hazy, too. But it was fading. This loud haziness was fading, slowly.

I could feel the gentle tug through the mating bond. The gentle words brushed down another bridge—the one I'd kept built with Rhia since the first day we arrived.

Alive. They were both alive.

The haze and mist trickled away but I would have known that face even if I were going blind. Would have known that cologne, that edge of a smirk, that voice with or without the unbearable tension in Leon's muscles. In his bones.

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