Two days.
Forty-eight hours. A lifetime measured in heartbeats and the cold, unceasing weight of obsidian against her skin.
The guards who came for her weren't the usual brutes. These men moved with a silent, lethal grace that spoke of Caldan. They didn't drag her. They flanked her, their eyes forward, their hands resting on the pommels of their swords. A gesture of respect, or a warning that she was now a different kind of prisoner.
His prisoner.
The memory of him was a brand, hotter than the serpent mark on his own palm. The desperate heat of his mouth, the rough scrape of his jaw against her cheek, the low growl of his promise. I will come for you myself.
He had. But not in the way she'd imagined.
Not with a quiet key in the dead of night, but with an armed escort in the damning light of day, leading her not to freedom, but to the heart of the serpent's den.
