Page 53 of Mane Squeeze
The prince tilted his head, expression unreadable. “Yes. But rage won’t save you now. Not from this.”
He raised his hands, and the runes along the perimeter sparked. Sigils of bone and ash flared to life, forming a lattice in the air that hummed with layered incantations.
“You and Lillith,” he said, weaving with sharp flicks of his fingers, “share a bond that should not exist. A bond that was not mine to forge… but is now mine to unravel.”
“Touch her,” Dominic growled, his chest heaving against the paralysis, “and I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.”
“Oh, I’m not touching her.” Thaloryn’s voice dropped to a hush. “I’m freeing her.”
Then the pain hit. Not heat. Not cold. Somethingdeeper.
It wasn’t his body, it was his soul.
Something inside him, deep, raw, essential, was pulled taut andripped.The bond. The tether. It howled as it snapped, a soundless scream that reverberated through every bone in his body.
Dominic collapsed. His palms hit the dirt. He gasped, not from air loss, but from the suddenabsence.It was gone.
Her warmth. The constant tether between them. The magnetic hum beneath his skin. It had vanished like smoke.
He gagged on the void it left behind.
Thaloryn crouched beside him, too close, fingers still glowing from the spellwork.
“Now,” the fae prince whispered, brushing ash from Dominic’s jaw, “you can walk away. Return to your pride. To your solitary, hollow life. Once I free you from this place that is.”
Dominic forced himself upright, trembling with rage. “You think cutting me loose wins you something?”
“Oh, it wins everything.” Thaloryn stood. “She’ll feel the loss. But she’ll interpret it asfreedom. And you? You’ll feel nothing but the hole.”
Dominic surged forward—and was slammed down by another binding rune that lit up beneath him. It singed his wrists, his calves, his shoulders, pinning him like an insect in a fae hunter’s trap.
“She’ll doubt what she felt,” Thaloryn continued, voice distant now, almost wistful. “She’ll convince herself it was the magic. That none of it was real. That’s what you mortals do when you’re scared of truth. You call it enchantment. And worse? She will think that you chose to leave because the bond was broken, reinforcing to her that this was all just…magic.”
“You broke the bond,” Dominic rasped, “but you didn’t break me.”
Thaloryn’s smile faded. “No,” he said. “But I don’t have to.”
With a flourish, the prince flicked his wrist.
The runes sealed. The air compressed.
The fae vanished in a shimmer of moonlit smoke.
Dominic screamed into the silence, muscles burning against the restraints. His lion clawed at his insides, roaring in fury, but the wards didn’t budge.
He slumped back against the moss, breath ragged, heart hollow.
Not broken. But unmoored.
For the first time since the bond tethered them, he couldn’t feel her. And that was worse than any cage.
Back atPines and Needles,the bond had vanished like it had never been.
And Lillith?
Lillith would wake and feelnothing.
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