He would drag her back by the neck, strip away every single ounce of her freedom, and make her pay for every step she had taken tonight.

"Run," she whispered to herself, her voice swallowed by the roaring wind. "Just run."

She turned away from the golden lights of the palace and plunged into the thick, freezing fog, her cloth shoes slipping against the sharp stones of the downward path.

She had no map, no system, and no strength, but she had the open sky ahead of her, and for the first time in weeks, she was the one choosing where her feet would take her.

........

The mountain path was a cruel, jagged thing that seemed to have no end.

Lin Wan stumbled forward through the dense white fog, her hands extended blindly in front of her to catch herself against the rough rock walls.

The thick wool servant’s cloak she wore was heavy, soaked through with the freezing moisture of the high-altitude clouds.

Every gust of wind that whipped across the open cliffs felt like small knives cutting through her thin fabric, chilling her to the bone.

She could not see where her feet were landing. The soft cloth shoes Jarek had left for her were completely ruined, the thin soles torn open by the sharp edges of the mountain stones.

With every step she took, a sharp pain shot up through her heels, but she refused to slow down. The image of the empty bedroom chamber back at the palace was burned into her mind, a ticking clock that kept her legs moving despite the physical agony.

"Weiwei," she called out again, her voice a small, desperate plea inside the hollow emptiness of her own mind. "Please wake up. Just give me a compass line. Just tell me if I am moving down the mountain or walking toward a cliff."

Silence.

There was no familiar, comforting chime. There were no glowing green text boxes floating across her vision, and no soft, digital voice to tell her everything would be fine.

The system was completely dead, locked away behind the iron wall of spatial interference caused by the palace boundary and the heavy royal mark on her neck. She had no access to her dimensional storage space.

She could not pull out a warm jacket, a healing pill for her bleeding feet, or even a simple waterskin to soothe her parched throat.

She was completely ordinary. She was just a human female, completely lost in a harsh, alien world of monsters, with nothing but her own fragile bones to rely on.

Her breathing was shallow and ragged, the thin mountain air failing to give her lungs enough oxygen. As she pushed past a massive, dark boulder, a sudden, violent wave of nausea hit her lower belly. It was twice as intense as the morning sickness she had felt in her bedroom.

Her knees gave out completely, and she collapsed into the wet dirt at the edge of the path, her hands digging into the cold mud as she dry-heaved into the shadows.

She had nothing in her stomach to throw up except the simple herbal broth Jarek had given her, but her body continued to convulse, her stomach muscles tightening into painful, agonizing knots.

"Not now," she wept, pressing her forehead against the damp earth, tears mixing with the soot on her cheeks. "Please, not now. I have to keep moving."

She clutched her lower belly with one trembling hand, a strange, instinctual protectiveness washing over her that she did not fully understand. She felt incredibly protective of her body right now, as if her core was trying to shield something deeply fragile inside her from the biting cold.

She wrapped the gray cloak tighter around her small frame, forcing herself back onto her bleeding feet.

Suddenly, the wind completely died down.

The roaring sound of the mountain air vanished, replaced by an eerie, heavy silence that made the hairs on the back of Lin Wan’s neck stand up. The fog around her seemed to freeze, thickening until it felt like a heavy shroud wrapping around her body.

Then, she heard it.

It was a distant, heavy sound, cutting through the quiet night from the path behind her. It wasn’t the sound of loose gravel slipping down a slope. It was the distinct, rhythmic impact of a heavy, solid boot hitting the mountain stone.

Lin Wan’s heart stopped beating for a full second, her entire body freezing in place. She held her breath, her ears straining so hard they began to ring.

*Thud.*

*Thud.*

The footsteps were steady, unhurried, and terrifyingly deliberate. They carried a heavy weight that seemed to vibrate through the very earth beneath her feet.

With every impact, a familiar, terrifying pressure began to seep through the white fog, a dark, heavy heat that made the black manticore mark on her collarbone throb with a sharp, burning pain.

’it was him.’

Cassian had returned to the palace. He had found the empty bed. He had smelled her absence, and now he was hunting her down

in the dark.

"No, no, no," Lin Wan panicked, her voice rising into a frantic whisper.

Pure, unadulterated terror took over her mind, wiping away the exhaustion in her limbs and the pain in her feet. She turned around and began to run blindly through the fog, her cloth shoes slipping against the wet mud, her hands scraping against the jagged rocks as she threw herself forward into the white abyss.

She didn’t look where she was going. She didn’t care about the paths anymore. All she knew was that she had to put as much distance between herself and those heavy, marching footsteps as possible. She could feel his shadow expanding behind her, a giant predator stretching its claws through the clouds to drag her back to the golden cage.

She ran until her lungs felt like they were filled with liquid fire, her vision blurring with tears and sweat. The path beneath her feet began to slope sharply upward, narrowing until it became nothing more than a thin ledge of rock sticking out from the side of a massive mountain wall.

She pushed through a final, thick cluster of cloud-fog, expecting to find a downward slope that would lead her to the safety of the lower rings.

Instead, her foot hit nothing but empty air.

*Gasp!*

Lin Wan threw her body backward, her arms flailing wildly as she slid along the wet stone, her hands desperately gripping the edge of the rock to stop her forward momentum.

Small pebbles and loose dirt broke away from beneath her feet, falling silently down into a deep, pitch-black void.

She crawled back three steps, her chest heaving as she looked ahead.

She was trapped.

The path had ended completely at a massive, sheer cliff edge. Ahead of her lay a drop of thousands of feet, an absolute abyss filled with swirling dark clouds and jagged peaks that looked like iron teeth. There was no way forward, no way down, and no way around.

She scrambled to her feet, turning around to face the way she had come, her back pressed hard against the cold, solid rock wall of the cliff face. Her fingers dug into the stone behind her, her eyes wide with desperate panic as she stared into the narrow opening of the path through which she had just run.

The fog inside the path began to swirl violently, parting like a curtain as a dark, massive silhouette slowly took shape.

The pressure in the air grew so intense that

Lin Wan felt her knees buckling, a heavy, suffocating warmth wrapping around her throat like an invisible iron collar. The black mark on her neck was burning now, a bright, purple light leaking through the collar of her ragged dress, signaling her position to the approaching hunter.

The heavy footsteps stopped just ten paces away from her, hidden within the thick white mist.

Lin Wan clutched her dress tightly, tears streaming down her pale cheeks as she stared at the dark shape. She felt a deep, hollow sense of finality settle over her soul. She had run with everything she had, she had bled, she had suffered, and it had all led her right back to the edge of his blade.

"Don’t come any closer!" Lin Wan screamed into the fog, her voice cracking with pure emotion, shaking against the roaring wind that had suddenly returned. "If you step forward, Cassian... I swear I will jump! I will drop into this abyss before I let you lock me in that room again!"

She looked out over the dark edge of the cliff, her heart cold. She wasn’t lying. She had spent weeks feeling her soul slowly wither away under his possessive gaze, and she would rather break her body against the stones below than become a nameless, mindless bird in his golden palace.

The silhouette inside the fog moved slightly, the long, dark shape stretching out as the figure took a slow step forward into the dim light.

Lin Wan closed her eyes tightly, her body shivering violently as she braced herself to face the wrath of the Sovereign, waiting for the cold, predatory purr that would seal her fate forever.