The “clinic annex” was just the palace’s way of saying we want you supervised while you bleed.

  It sat off a narrow corridor behind the servants’ wing—cleaner stone, warmer air, and guards posted like decoration. The smell hit Jina the moment the door opened: boiled alcohol, bitter herbs, hot metal.

  Medicine lived here.

  And so did control.

  “Your Highness,” the Imperial Physician said, bowing just shallow enough to be insulting if you knew how to read it. “How is your pain this morning?”

  He was older, hair cut close, robe hem spotless. His hands were the hands of someone who didn’t scrub floors and didn’t swing swords—long fingers, clean nails, a signet ring that caught the lantern light.

  Jina didn’t stare at the ring.

  She stared at the man’s eyes.

  He looked tired in the way courtiers looked tired: not from work, from calculation.

  “Still breathing,” she said.

  The physician’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. A polite acceptance of her tone.

  “Breathing is not recovery,” he replied. “Sit.”

  A chair waited in the center of the annex. Not a bed. Not a couch.

  A chair, with armrests.

  Jina didn’t miss the leather straps folded neatly beneath.

  She kept her face blank and walked to it anyway.

  Lysander was stopped at the threshold by two guards.

  “Shadow Guard remains outside,” one said.

  Lysander didn’t argue. He simply looked at Jina.

  Not pleading.

  Checking.

  Can you handle this?

  Jina hated that her first instinct was to lie.

  She held his gaze and gave a small, controlled nod.

  Lysander’s jaw tightened, but he stepped back. The door shut between them.

  The lock clicked.

  Again.

  Jina sat.

  The physician moved to a table lined with instruments: glass tubes, a mortar, a set of tiny metal scoops, and a silver bowl already filled with warm water that smelled faintly of disinfectant.

  A real clinic. A real chance.

  Also a real cage.

  “We will assess the poison,” he said, as if reading a grocery list. “Then we will manage symptoms.”

  Manage.

  Not cure.

  Jina’s stomach tightened. “You keep calling it incurable.”

  “It is,” he said.

  “According to who.”

  “The Academy,” the physician replied smoothly. “The court healers. The archives.”

  The Diadem, Jina translated.

  He reached for a cup on a tray—tea, pale and fragrant. The same sweetness she’d smelled in her rooms.

  Jina’s fingers curled under the table.

  “No,” she said flatly.

  The physician paused, cup hovering. “It will ease your discomfort.”

  “It will dull me,” Jina corrected.

  His eyes lifted. Sharp, assessing.

  “You were always suspicious,” he said, almost fond.

  That line landed wrong.

  Because it wasn’t medical. It was familiar.

  Jina kept her face steady. “I’m suspicious when I’m being drugged.”

  The physician set the cup down without argument, as if he didn’t mind losing that round.

  “Then we proceed without it,” he said. “Hold out your arm.”

  Jina extended her forearm.

  He didn’t reach for a needle first.

  He reached for a small blade.

  Old-school. Quick. Hard to argue with.

  He nicked her skin, just enough to draw blood, and caught the drop in a thin glass tube.

  Jina watched her own blood bead and thought, Virella.

  She kept that thought behind her teeth.

  No reaction. No tells.

  The physician capped the tube and set it into a stand beside three other tubes—already prepared.

  Jina’s gaze flicked to them.

  Too many samples for one patient.

  He’d been doing this before she walked in.

  Or he’d been told to be ready.

  The physician lifted a pinch of powder from a ceramic jar—white with a blue sheen—and dropped it into her blood.

  The liquid darkened slightly.

  He watched.

  Nothing else happened.

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  He made a quiet sound in his throat. Dissatisfied.

  “That reagent should cloud,” he murmured.

  Jina’s pulse ticked up.

  Should.

  Meaning her blood wasn’t behaving like expected.

  Meaning she wasn’t matching their records.

  Meaning the “wrong soul” suspicion could become a blade.

  She kept her breathing even.

  “What was it supposed to do,” she asked, careless.

  The physician glanced at her as if deciding whether she deserved the answer.

  “It binds to common venoms,” he said. “Reveals their signature.”

  “Common,” Jina repeated.

  His mouth tightened. “Yours is not common.”

  No kidding.

  Jina stared at the tube anyway, mind already moving.

  In her world, you didn’t get “incurable” without data. You got “untreated,” “unknown,” “underfunded,” “no one bothered trying.”

  Poison was chemistry plus delivery.

  Magic was still rules.

  Rules meant patterns.

  Patterns meant fixes.

  “I want to see it,” Jina said.

  The physician’s brow twitched. “See what.”

  “The poison,” she replied. “Not the symptom. The thing itself.”

  A beat.

  Then, to her surprise, he slid the tube closer.

  “Be careful,” he said, voice dry. “You are not a healer.”

  Jina almost laughed.

  She put two fingers lightly around the glass tube.

  The moment her skin touched it, the threads in her chest hummed—a faint response, like her body recognized the danger in her own blood.

  Her heartbeat stumbled once.

  She breathed through it.

  Then she did the thing she’d been avoiding.

  She reached inward for the Gift.

  Not the splinter-word.

  Not Command.

  The other current—warmth, attention, the sense of hands made of light.

  Heal.

  But instead of pushing it into muscle, she pushed it into perception.

  The world sharpened.

  The glass tube became too clear, too detailed—the meniscus, the tiny bubbles clinging to the inside, the way the blood held itself like it was heavier than it should be.

  And inside it—

  She saw it.

  Not with eyes.

  With something else.

  A dark lattice threaded through the red like ink poured into water and forced to hold shape. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t “floating.”

  It was anchored.

  Barbed.

  Like it had hooks sunk into her blood and deeper—into something beneath blood.

  Her ribs ached.

  The bond-threads pulsed in sympathy, like the poison recognized the soul-channels and leaned into them.

  Jina swallowed hard.

  So that’s why it hurts more when the bonds flare.

  Not because the consorts were “hurting” her.

  Because the poison had made her body a live wire, and every surge across the bond scraped the toxin’s hooks.

  Her hands tightened on the glass.

  The physician watched her too closely.

  Jina forced her face neutral.

  “Interesting,” she said, like she wasn’t staring at death with structure.

  “What do you see,” the physician asked.

  “A pattern,” Jina replied, because it was safe. “It’s not a simple blood poison.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Of course it isn’t.”

  Jina’s mind raced anyway.

  Barbed lattice. Anchored. Soul-adjacent.

  That wasn’t meant to kill fast.

  It was meant to kill inevitably.

  Slow organ failure, escalating pain, helplessness—until the “mercy” was death.

  And if you were a beastkin healer who treated soul and body as one, you’d look at this and say “no antidote” because every attempt to purge it would tear the anchors and kill the patient.

  But Jina wasn’t a beastkin healer.

  She was a vet who’d dealt with toxins that bonded to tissue, sat in fat, hid in marrow.

  You didn’t yank them out.

  You displaced them. Bound them. Carried them out gently.

  You used a chelator.

  Jina’s breath hitched.

  I need a binder.

  Something that loves the poison more than my blood does.

  She didn’t say it out loud.

  She shifted the Gift again, letting that inner warmth “touch” the dark lattice.

  It reacted instantly—tightening, almost… recoiling.

  Not fear.

  Defense.

  Like a living thing that didn’t want to be handled.

  Jina’s stomach clenched.

  Poison with intent.

  Of course.

  Virella would choose something like that.

  Jina focused on one tiny barb and pressed her warmth against it—gentle, steady, patient.

  The barb shuddered.

  Then loosened—just a hair.

  Pain knifed under Jina’s sternum like punishment for trying.

  She bit down on it and kept her breathing smooth.

  The barb loosened again.

  And the dark lattice shifted, like it had just revealed a seam.

  Jina’s pulse spiked.

  Because seams meant you could unravel.

  Not by force.

  By method.

  By time.

  Jina lowered the tube slowly and blinked hard, forcing the world back into normal focus before she gave herself away.

  She set the tube down like it was nothing.

  The physician watched her hands.

  “How did you do that,” he asked, voice too calm.

  Jina shrugged. “I looked.”

  His eyes narrowed further. “You used the Gift.”

  Jina kept her expression bored. “I’m using whatever keeps me alive.”

  The physician stared for a long beat, then turned away as if the conversation didn’t matter.

  It mattered.

  Jina felt it.

  He was filing her away in his head. Not as “patient.”

  As “risk.”

  He reached for a second reagent—pale gold powder—and added it to the blood.

  This time, the blood shimmered faintly.

  Not a normal reaction.

  A magical resonance.

  The dark lattice flared for a heartbeat, like it had been touched.

  The physician’s posture stiffened.

  “There,” he murmured. “That confirms it.”

  Jina kept her face blank. “Confirms what.”

  His gaze flicked to her, and for the first time he looked less like a clinician and more like a man reciting doctrine.

  “Eclipsed venom,” he said. “Soul-anchored. It does not purge. It does not dilute. It does not break.”

  Incurable.

  Jina leaned back in the chair and let out a quiet breath like she was accepting it.

  Inside her head, she smiled with teeth.

  It doesn’t break.

  Fine.

  Then I don’t break it. I move it.

  She spoke carefully. “So your plan is… what. Keep me sedated until I die.”

  The physician’s mouth tightened. “Keep you functional until Council decides what to do with you.”

  There it was.

  Not medicine.

  Politics.

  Jina’s disgust sharpened into something cold and usable.

  “Give me a list,” she said.

  The physician paused. “A list.”

  “Of what you’ve tried,” Jina said. “What reagents. What herbs. What rituals.”

  He stared at her like she’d asked for his private sins.

  Then he said, “Why.”

  Jina met his gaze. “Because if I’m going to die, I want to know exactly how lazy everyone was about saving me.”

  The physician’s eyes flickered—annoyance, then something else.

  Respect?

  No.

  More like: this is inconvenient.

  He reached into a drawer and pulled out a thin ledger.

  He slid it across the table without looking pleased about it.

  Jina took it with steady hands.

  Pages of neat script. Reagents. Dosages. Notes like no change, aggravated, collapse.

  At the bottom of one page, in different handwriting—tighter, sharper—was a single line:

  Do not attempt full purge. Subject convulses. Soul-thread backlash observed.

  Jina’s blood went cold.

  Soul-thread backlash.

  So someone had noticed the connection between poison and bonds.

  Someone had experimented.

  On her.

  Jina kept her face still, but her grip on the ledger tightened.

  Then she saw a phrase that made her breath catch.

  Binder candidates: none tolerated. Requires external anchor.

  External anchor.

  Jina’s mind snapped back to what she’d just felt—the seam in the lattice, the way it reacted to her warmth.

  The poison hated being handled.

  It defended itself.

  A binder would need to grab it and hold it without tearing her apart.

  An external anchor could do that.

  Something outside her bloodstream.

  Something outside her body.

  Something like—

  Her gaze flicked, involuntarily, to her sternum.

  The bond-threads shimmered faintly, as if answering.

  Four soul-lines that already anchored her to other bodies.

  Bodies that could share burden.

  Bodies that could act as stabilizers.

  Or… a single new anchor made by consent.

  A bond formed naturally.

  A fifth line, clean and chosen, not forced.

  A channel she could control without backlash.

  Jina’s throat went dry.

  The idea was terrifying.

  It was also a path.

  Not a full cure today.

  But a way to buy time. To bleed the poison out slowly. To stop the collapse.

  Jina lifted her eyes.

  The physician was watching her again, too intent.

  “What are you thinking,” he asked.

  Jina closed the ledger and slid it back across the table.

  “Nothing,” she lied smoothly. “Just… dying responsibly.”

  The physician’s mouth tightened.

  He stood, robe whispering, and went to the door.

  “You will be escorted back to your chambers,” he said. “Rest. Drink what is given to you. Council is tonight.”

  Jina rose too, careful not to sway.

  Her heart skipped once—then steadied.

  She felt the Gift settle back under her ribs, warm and waiting.

  Not just a healing trick.

  A tool with reach.

  A tool that could shepherd things—wounds, poisons, maybe even bonds.

  As the physician opened the door, Jina saw the guard outside straighten.

  And behind the guard—down the corridor—Virella’s pale gold gown flashed past a doorway like sunlight sliding under a knife.

  Jina’s jaw tightened.

  Virella had wanted her sedated. Compliant. Easy to move.

  Jina touched the inside pocket of Lysander’s cloak where she’d hidden the velvet pouch of vials from the bed compartment.

  Her fingers curled around glass.

  I have a profile.

  I have a seam.

  I have a path.

  And if the palace wanted to keep her sleepy until she died, then she’d do the opposite.

  She’d stay awake.

  She’d get sharper.

  She’d cure what they called “incurable” just to spite them.

  The threads in her chest pulsed faintly—hot irritation, cold discipline, amused sharpness, restless fire—like four distant men had felt the shift in her resolve.

  Jina swallowed, eyes steady.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  And deep under her sternum, the Gift warmed like it approved.

  Not of obedience.

  Of survival.

  [Power]