The merchant would die in four minutes.
Arin Kavros—though that wasn't the name he'd given the innkeeper, or the one on the forged travel papers in his coat—counted heartbeats from his perch three rooftops away. The target moved through the lamplit street below, flanked by two guards who scanned the crowd but never thought to look up.
Amateurs.
The autumn wind carried the smell of roasting chestnuts and coal smoke. Arin's fingers rested light on the throwing knife at his hip, but he wouldn't need it. Not for this. The poison was already in the merchant's wine from two hours ago, slow-acting, untraceable. By the time the man collapsed in his townhouse, Arin would be four districts away with a new name and a heavier purse.
He'd done this sixty-three times.
He hated that he'd counted.
The merchant turned down Silk Street. Three minutes now. Arin moved across the rooftop, silent as exhaled breath, his magic pulling shadows close—not true invisibility, but enough. Enough to be a rumor. A ghost. Nothing that left a name.
Two minutes.
He dropped to a lower roof, boots finding purchase on slate still warm from the day's sun. The merchant's guards were talking, relaxed. One laughed. They thought their employer safe because he'd paid the Covenant Office for protection wards on his house.
They didn't know Arin had been inside three days ago, wearing a servant's face, replacing the ward-stones with flawed replicas.
One minute.
Arin's chest tightened.
He froze, fingers splayed against the roof's edge. The sensation came from nowhere—a warmth that bloomed beneath his sternum, spreading like spilled wine through fabric. Not pain. Not poison. Something else.
Presence.
His pulse stuttered. For half a heartbeat, he felt—
—a desperate, aching loneliness wrapped in silk and duty—
—a cold, curious hunger that tasted of old parchment and older death—
Arin's breath caught. His vision blurred at the edges.
Below, the merchant stumbled. Right on schedule.
But Arin couldn't move. The warmth in his chest pulled, insistent, *wrong*. He pressed his palm flat against his ribs, feeling for broken bones, internal bleeding, anything that made sense.
Nothing.
The merchant collapsed. The guards shouted. Arin should have been gone already, three streets over, but his legs wouldn't obey. The warmth pulsed again, and for a moment—just a moment—he could have sworn he felt two other heartbeats layered beneath his own.
Impossible.
A whistle cut through the night. Covenant patrol, responding faster than they should have.
Arin moved.
He ran across the rooftops, shadow-magic flaring instinctively, but the warmth in his chest disrupted his focus. His foot slipped on loose tile. He caught himself, barely, and dropped into an alley that reeked of piss and rotting vegetables.
His hands were shaking.
Arin Kavros did not shake.
He pressed deeper into the shadows, listening to the patrol boots hammer past, and tried to breathe through the sensation of being watched from the inside out.
The safehouse was two miles south, but Arin made it four.
He doubled back three times, changed his coat in a public bathhouse, walked through a market crowd, and only when he was certain no one had followed did he slip into the abandoned tannery on the city's eastern edge.
The smell of old leather and lye still clung to the walls. Arin had claimed this place six months ago—one of a dozen bolt-holes scattered across Valcrest. No one knew about it. No one could.
He barred the door. Drew the shutters. Lit a single candle.
Then he let himself feel it.
The warmth was still there, a coal ember lodged behind his ribs. But it wasn't just warmth anymore. It was *weight*. Presence. The sense of standing in a room with two other people he couldn't see.
Arin's jaw clenched. He stripped off his coat and shirt, checking for marks, puncture wounds, anything. His skin was unmarked except for the usual scars—knife work, burn from a badly-mixed poison, the puckered line across his ribs from a job gone wrong in Ashenwild.
Nothing new.
But the presence pressed closer.
He felt it like a hand on his shoulder. Like breath on the back of his neck.
No.
Arin spun, blade in hand, slashing at empty air.
The candle flame guttered. Shadows danced. He was alone.
But he wasn't.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears—and beneath it, faint but undeniable, two other rhythms. One steady, controlled, heavy as a crown. One slower, deeper, cold as a crypt.
"No," he said aloud, voice rough. "No, no, no—"
The warmth surged.
Arin gasped, doubling over as sensation flooded him—not pain, but *feeling*. Emotions that weren't his crashed through his carefully maintained walls:
Longing. Desperate and royal and wrapped in silk.
Curiosity. Sharp and dark and hungry for answers.
And beneath both, an ache so profound it stole his breath.
Loneliness.
Not his loneliness. Theirs.
"Get out," Arin snarled, pressing his palms against his temples as if he could physically push the sensations away. "Get out, get out—"
But they didn't leave. They settled, like sediment in water, becoming part of the landscape of his body.
He could feel them. Two souls. Two people.
Somewhere in the world, they were feeling him too.
Arin's stomach turned. He lurched to the corner and vomited, bile burning his throat. When he was empty, he stayed on his knees, forehead pressed against the cold stone wall.
This was a curse. Had to be. Someone had tagged him with tracking magic, or a soul-leech spell, or—
No.
He knew what this was.
He'd heard the stories in the underworld. Whispered over cards and cheap wine. The old contracts that paid triple for hunting down bonded pairs who'd tried to run. The purges, decades ago, when the Covenant Office had burned entire families suspected of harboring multi-soul bonds.
This was a bond.
And it was more than one.
"Fuck," Arin whispered. Then, louder: "Fuck."
He tested it methodically.
Arin had survived this long by trusting nothing and verifying everything. If this was a bond—and every instinct screamed that it was—he needed to understand it.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, and closed his eyes.
Breathe. Focus. Isolate.
His own heartbeat first: familiar, steady, the rhythm he'd learned to slow during jobs, to quiet when hiding.
Then—there. Beneath it.
A second pulse. Stronger than his, measured, like a drumbeat in a throne room. It carried weight. Authority. And underneath that authority, a tremor of fear.
Theprince.
Arin didn't know how he knew, but he did. This presence tasted of gold and duty and a loneliness so vast it could swallow kingdoms.
And the third—
Arin's breath hitched.
The third heartbeat was slow. Cold. It moved through the world like a hand trailing through water, parting the veil between life and death. This presence didn't fear the dark. It *was* the dark, intimate and infinite.
Thenecromancer.
"Of course," Arin muttered, opening his eyes. "Of fucking course."
A prince. A necromancer. And an assassin.
The Covenant Office would execute all three on principle.
He pulled his knife from his belt and pressed the tip against his left palm. The blade bit skin. Blood welled, dark in the candlelight.
The pain was sharp and immediate.
And then—
—an echo. Faint but real. A phantom sting in two other palms, miles away.
One presence flinched. The other went very, very still.
They'd felt it.
They knew he was testing.
Arin's hand trembled. He watched his blood drip onto the stone floor and felt the weight of two other souls pressing against his awareness, curious and cautious and there.
"I didn't ask for this," he said to the empty room.
The presences didn't answer. But they didn't leave either.
He wrapped his hand in a strip of cloth and tried to think.
Multi-soul bonds were illegal. Punishable by death or severing—a magical amputation that left the soul crippled, half-alive. The Covenant Office had enforcers specifically trained to hunt them down.
If anyone discovered this, all three of them were dead.
But the bond was already formed. Already active. He could feel it settling into his bones like scar tissue, permanent and undeniable.
Arin had spent his entire life alone. It was safer that way. Attachments got you killed. Trust got you betrayed. He'd learned that lesson young, in blood and fire, and he'd never forgotten.
But now—
Now he could feel a prince's desperate restraint and a necromancer's cold fascination, and beneath both, the same aching loneliness that had haunted him for years.
He wasn't alone anymore.
And that terrified him more than any blade.
The burning started at midnight.
Arin had been staring at the candle flame, trying to plan his next move, when heat seared across his left ribs.
He hissed, clawing at his shirt. The fabric came away and he looked down.
Light.
Golden and silver and shadow-dark, all at once, bleeding through his skin like ink through paper. The heat intensified, and Arin bit down on his belt to keep from screaming as the mark wroteitself into his flesh.
A sigil.
Fractured into three pieces, incomplete, each section glowing with different light. One piece burned gold—royal magic, sun-bright. One shimmered silver-white—necromantic power, cold as bone. And one bled shadow—his own magic, the darkness he'd wrapped around himself for years.
The three pieces didn't touch. They hovered, separated by hairline fractures, but even incomplete, the sigil *pulled*. It wanted to be whole.
The burning faded.
Arin's breath came in ragged gasps. He touched the mark with shaking fingers. The skin was raised, warm, undeniable.
He knew this sigil.
He'd seen it once, years ago, carved into the execution block in Valcrest's central square. A warning. A reminder of what happened to those who defied the One-Soul Law.
The Covenant Mark of Three.
"No," Arin whispered. "No, no, no—"
But even as he said it, something in his chest loosened.
The loneliness that had been his constant companion for fifteen years—the weight that made every success hollow, every survival empty—it eased. Just slightly. Just enough to notice.
He could feel them.
The prince, somewhere in a palace, staring at his own mark with dawning horror and desperate hope.
The necromancer, in a tower or library, tracing the sigil with clinical fascination and barely-hidden longing.
And they could feel him.
For the first time in his life, Arin Kavros was not alone.
Rage and terror and relief crashed through him in equal measure. He wanted to claw the mark off his skin. He wanted to run until his legs gave out. He wanted to find them, these two strangers who'd invaded his carefully controlled existence, and demand answers.
But beneath all of that—
Beneath the fear and fury—
He felt seen.
And he didn't know if that was a gift or a curse.
The presence arrived an hour before dawn.
Arin felt it like a ripple in still water—magic, moving through the city, searching. Not Covenant enforcers. Something else. Something older.
His instincts screamed run.
But the bond pulled in two directions, and for the first time in his life, Arin didn't know where to go.
He pressed his hand against the mark on his ribs. It pulsed, warm, alive.
And then—
He felt them.
Not just their heartbeats or their emotions, but them. Their presence, sharp and immediate, as if they'd stepped into the room.
The prince's voice, not words but intent: Where are you? I need—
The necromancer's response, cold and certain: I'm coming.
Arin's jaw clenched. "I didn't ask for you," he said aloud, knowing somehow they would hear. "I don't want this."
But even as he said it, his hand stayed pressed against the mark.
He could sever it. Maybe. There were blood-mages in Ashenwild who specialized in breaking bonds. It would hurt—might kill him—but it was possible.
He could run. Change his name again, disappear into the southern territories, bury himself so deep even magic couldn't find him.
He could do what he'd always done: survive alone.
But the mark pulsed again, and he felt their response:
The prince's desperate restraint cracking, just slightly.
The necromancer's curiosity sharpening into something almost like hope.
And beneath both—
The same loneliness he'd carried for years.
Arin closed his eyes.
He'd spent his entire life running. From his past, from attachments, from anything that could be used against him. He'd made himself into a ghost, a shadow, nothing that could be caught or held.
But the bond had found him anyway.
And for the first time, he didn't know if he wanted to escape.
The presence in the city drew closer. Arin felt it like pressure against his skull—someone tracking the magical surge from the bond's awakening.
He had minutes. Maybe less.
He grabbed his coat, his knives, the forged papers that would get him past the city gates.
But he didn't head for the door.
Instead, he stood in the center of the abandoned tannery, hand pressed against the fractured sigil on his ribs, and reached back through the bond.
I don't want this, he sent, not words but feeling. *But I'm not running.*
The prince's presence flared—shock and relief and desperate gratitude.
The necromancer's response was cooler, more measured, but underneath: Finally.
Arin's mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"The only way out is through," he muttered. "And through means finding you."
He didn't know their names. Didn't know their faces.
But he knew where they were.
The bond pulled north—toward the palace, toward power, toward everything he'd spent his life avoiding.
And south—toward the mage district, toward death magic, toward answers.
Arin Kavros had survived by trusting no one.
But the mark on his ribs burned warm, and for the first time in fifteen years, he wasn't alone.
He pulled his hood up, checked his blades, and stepped into the pre-dawn darkness.
The hunt had begun.
But this time, he wasn't sure if he was the hunter or the prey.