Page 57 of Third

His mouth devoured hers, and she clung to him, fingers fisting in the fabric of his shirt. For one endless heartbeat, the world narrowed to this—heat, breath, connection.

Then, abruptly, he tore himself away, staggering back as though burned.

She gasped, reaching for him—then stopping herself just intime.

They stood there, panting, staring, the bond between them vibrating with the force of what they’d barely survived.

A sound shattered the charged silence.

Click.

Ahiss.

Anya spun, heart slamming into her throat.

From the shadows of the broken rocks ahead, creatures exploded intoview.

Hominids. Pale. Slick-skinned.Fast.

Tor’Vek shoved her behind him with a single, brutal motion and drew his sword. His solar gun blazed to life, but he tossed it aside almost immediately, favoring the blade—favoring close combat.

They swarmedhim.

He moved with lethal precision at first—acalculated machine of muscle and rage. But the precision didn’tlast.

The craving. The anger.

It unspooled inside him like a snappedwire.

He fought too hard. Too violently. When he felled one creature, he didn’t stop. He drove his fists into the corpse again and again, blood splattering the rocks, his breath coming in savage snarls.

“Tor’Vek!” Anya cried.

He didn’t hearher.

He waslost.

His fists didn’t know when tostop.

Another creature lunged. He turned with a roar—not the cry of a man, but of something ancient and furious—and tore intoit.

The first scouting wave had barely begun.

And already, Tor’Vek was unraveling.

Anya backed away, stumbling over loose rock, her breath jagged and thin. Blood sprayed in wide arcs, the air filled with the crunch of bone under fist, the screech of dying things, and Tor’Vek’s low, feral growl. He was a storm now—silent one second, roaring the next, fury bleeding through everymove.

She opened her wrist display, desperate for something—anything—that made sense. The countdown blinked back ather.

41:14:22

Her stomach dropped. “No… no, that can’t be right.”

It had been at 48:00:00 when they’d left. They hadn’t been walking that long. But the digits ticked down faster now. Toofast.

Her heart slammed into her ribs. Selyr had warned them this would happen—warned the countdown would accelerate the moment they gave in to the bond, to rage or craving or both. And Tor’Vek had just lost control of all three. Or maybe it wasn’t Selyr at all. Maybe the bracelets were reacting on their own, feeding off Tor’Vek’s emotional spike, interpreting the violence as a signal that they weren’t ready. That they were becoming unstable. That it was time to endthem.

“Tor’Vek!” she screamed again, but he didn’t respond. His sword had disappeared beneath a pile of bodies. He fought now with fists and blade edges ripped from the corpses themselves. His movements were no longer calculated. They were primal.

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