Chapter 38. Broken Balance

There was no audience to greet her when she opened her eyes—only a fierce, unrelenting heat that seemed to rise from deep within her bones rather than fall from any sun or hearth above. It pressed against her skin like a silent alarm bell, making every inch of her flesh feel unexpectedly taut, as though her body had been stretched just past its comfort point.

When she drew her first ragged breath, the air tasted of copper and iron, metallic and bold, as if her own blood had taken to whispering secrets in her mouth. The lines of scar and brand that trailed across her chest and coiled around her arm no longer seared with pain but throbbed in time with her heartbeat—a second, echoing rhythm laid on top of the first, each pulse a reminder that something fundamental inside her had shifted while she slept.

She didn’t remember how she left the circle, didn’t recall the precise moment she stepped away from the chanting faces and the steady drum of initiation. All she knew was t