Isobel's POV
They separated us at the end of the second chamber.
No warning,no explanation. One moment Nora was beside me, her shoulder a quiet, steady presence against mine, and the next a guard stepped between us with the kind of finality that didn't invite argument.
"Nora" I started.
"Don't," she said quickly, her violet eyes sharp, urgent, cutting to me one last time. "Whatever room they put you in don't fight it. Don't ask questions. And whatever they do to you" she dropped her voice to almost nothing, "don't make a sound."
Then she was gone, steered left with a group of others, and I was steered right, and the stone corridor swallowed the distance between us like it had never existed.
I was alone.
The corridor was narrow and cold, lit by the same drifting gold orbs as the second chamber but fewer of them here, spaced far enough apart that the shadows between them felt intentional. Two guards flanked me one ahead, one behind neither speaking, neither looking at me. Just walking. Just delivering.
I belong to Nyxara. I belong to Nyxara.
The words were starting to feel hollow.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked.
Nothing.
"I said, where"
"Quiet," the guard behind me said. One word. Final.
I swallowed and kept walking.
The room they brought me to was small compared to the chambers before it, but everything inside it was deliberate. A low stone table at the centre. A basin of dark liquid set beside it, steaming faintly. Shelves along the walls lined with instruments I had no names for curved, precise, some gleaming and some dull with age. A single orb of light hung directly overhead, and it didn't drift. It stayed. Watching.
A woman stood waiting.
She was not a guard, not an agent. She was small and sharp-featured, with pale silver hair pulled back severely and markings running from her jaw down the side of her neck dark, intricate, like ink pressed into the skin from beneath rather than on top. She looked at me the way people look at work they are about to begin.
"Sit," she said, nodding toward the stone table.
"What is this place?" I asked. "What are you going to do to me?"
"Sit," she said again, with the patience of someone who had repeated themselves many times before and had stopped being bothered by it.
I sat. Mostly because my legs were tired and partly because arguing with a woman surrounded by unidentifiable sharp instruments seemed deeply unwise.
She moved around me slowly, examining. Her fingers were cold when they tilted my chin up, turned my head left, then right. She pressed two fingers briefly to the inside of my wrist, held them there, watched something I couldn't see.
"You're Earth-born," she said.
"I belong to Nyxara," I said automatically.
Her mouth curved. Not warmly. "You can drop that in here. It's for the traders and the floor agents. I already know what you are."
I blinked. "Then why am I here?"
She moved to the basin and dipped a cloth into the dark liquid, wringing it slowly. "You've been flagged."
My stomach dropped. "Flagged for what?"
"Slave Bonding," she said simply, and turned back toward me.
The words hit me like cold water. "What ?what does that mean?"
"It means someone of rank has chosen you," she said, the same way she might comment on the weather,flat, Certain."Before a formal claim is sealed, the slave must be bonded, It binds you to your claimant on a level deeper than chains, deeper than walls." She paused. "It cannot be undone by running. It cannot be undone by distance. Once the bonding is complete, your claimant will always be able to find you. And you..." she tilted her head slightly, "will always feel them."
The blood drained from my face. "Feel them how?"
"Their presence,their emotions,their arousal too, faintly, their proximity." She said it without drama, without cruelty. Just fact. "Some slaves describe it as a second heartbeat that is not their own."
"That is not" I stopped. Breathed. "That is not something I agreed to."
"Slaves do not agree," she said quietly. "They survive."
I stared at her. Something hot and furious rose in my throat and I forced it back down because I remembered Nora's voice don't fight it, don't ask questions, don't make a sound and I needed to be smart right now more than I needed to be angry.
"Who chose me?" I asked, keeping my voice carefully even.
She didn't answer. She pressed the warm cloth to the inside of my left wrist and I felt it immediately not pain but pressure, deep and resonant, like a sound pitched too low to hear but not too low to feel. Like something ancient and enormous turning its attention toward me.
"Who chose me?" I asked again, louder this time.
"That is not information I am authorised to give you."
"Then I'm not authorised to sit here," I said, and moved to stand.
Her hand came down on my shoulder not rough, not aggressive, but with a certainty that stopped me completely. "Girl," she said, and her voice had shifted now, softer, almost careful, like she was choosing her next words with intention. "I have done this work for a very long time. I have seen Earth-born come through this chamber frightened and I have seen them come through it foolish, and I will tell you the frightened ones survive longer."
She let that sit for a moment.
"Whoever chose you has enough rank to pull you from the general floor entirely. Do you understand what that means? It means you will not be passed between traders. You will not be auctioned in the lower markets. You will not disappear into the kind of service that leaves nothing of a person behind." Her grip on my shoulder eased slightly. "This bonding is not a punishment. For someone like you, in a place like this it may be the only thing that keeps you whole."
I looked at her for a long time.
Then I sat back down.
"Good," she said softly, and returned to her work.
The bonding took time. She worked in near silence, and I let her, because my mind was already screaming loud enough for both of us. The pressure built in slow, deep waves not pain, but impossible to ignore, like something being threaded through me at a level that had nothing to do with skin. I kept my breathing steady. I kept my face still.
Don't make a sound.
I didn't make a sound.
When it was over, she stepped back and looked at her work with quiet professionalism. I looked down at my wrist.
The bonding seal was dark against my skin a pattern of lines and shapes that meant nothing to me but clearly meant everything here. And then it happened. A pulse. Slow and steady and completely separate from my own heartbeat.
One beat. Two beats. Three.
"What does it mean?" I whispered, staring at it. "The pattern what does it mean?"
She was quiet for a moment. She picked up her cloth, moved to the basin, set it down carefully.
"It carries the essence of your claimant," she said finally. "Their bloodline. Their rank. Their name, written in the old tongue."
I looked up at her. "Whose name?"
She turned to face me, and for the first time since I had walked into this room, something moved behind her eyes. Not pity exactly. Something closer to acknowledgement.
"You already know," she said quietly.
And the terrible thing was — she was right.
Because the pulse beneath my skin was not frantic, not violent. It was controlled. Steady. Patient.
Exactly like him.