The Shattered Glass

The survival lessons were violently accelerated the following night.

Julian had retreated to his penthouse, a sprawling, shadowy apartment heavily warded with blood-magic at the very top of the city. He had ordered Elara to stay away, to hide in her apartment behind wards he had hastily drawn on her door. But the bond pulled at her. She felt his pain, a dull, throbbing ache of magical depletion from the fight in the vault. Driven by an instinct she no longer questioned, she bypassed his orders and took the private elevator to his residence.

She found him in his vast, minimalist living room, slumped in a leather armchair, looking ragged. Before he could scold her, the temperature in the room plummeted.

The heavy, oppressive wards protecting the penthouse shattered with a sound like a bomb detonating.

The floor-to-ceiling windows blew inward in a tempest of jagged glass and howling wind. Stepping through the shattered frames were four figures cloaked in shifting, shadowy armor. Kaelen’s faction had not waited. They knew Julian was weakened, and they knew his vulnerability was exposed.

Julian surged to his feet, throwing a wall of kinetic energy that knocked the first two attackers backward. But he was slow. The remaining two warlocks moved in sync, casting a snare of crackling, black spectral chains that whipped around Julian’s wrists and throat, forcing him to his knees.

Elara screamed, rushing forward, but a shockwave of dark magic threw her behind a heavy marble kitchen island.

"We take his head," one of the shadowy figures hissed.

Julian struggled, his eyes burning violet, but he wasn't pulling on the deep, destructive currents of his power. Through the bond, Elara felt his terrifying restraint. *If I unleash the curse,* his panicked thought bled into her mind, *the psychic backlash will fry your human brain. I cannot do it. I will not kill you to save myself.*

He was choosing to die rather than risk breaking her mind.

Crouched behind the marble, Elara looked at her trembling hands. All her life, she had tried to be invisible. She had suppressed her sight, suppressed her voice, suppressed her very existence to avoid the terrifying things lurking in the dark. But the man she was irrevocably bound to was going to be slaughtered because she was too fragile.

* No.* Elara closed her eyes. She didn't push the clairvoyance down; she pulled it up. She embraced the terrifying, vibrating energy that had always hummed beneath her skin. She grabbed the silver tether connecting her to Julian with both hands.

* Julian,* she pushed the thought down the conduit, her mental voice ringing with a newfound, steely authority. *Take it. Take my energy. I can hold it. I am not breaking today.*

Julian’s head snapped toward her hiding spot, his eyes wide with shock as a surge of pure, brilliant clairvoyant energy flooded through the tether from Elara's soul into his.

With a roar that shook the foundation of the building, Julian stopped holding back. The spectral chains binding him shattered like brittle ice. He didn't use blood magic; he used the pure, radiant energy Elara fed him. A shockwave of blinding, silver-violet light exploded outward. It swept through the penthouse, disintegrating the dark magic of the assassins and blasting them bodily back out through the shattered windows into the stormy night sky.