Chapter Four: Teeth in the Walls
The walls whispered at night.
Lyra paced the edges of her cell—no longer chained, but still watched. Shadows twisted across the metal walls like vines. Her claws scraped against the floor with every step. She couldn't sleep. Her half-wolf body ached, but not from fatigue.
From proximity.
Torin was near.
She could feel him again—through the bond, faint and pulsing like a forgotten heartbeat. Not dead. Not severed. Just buried, like the truth they'd both tried to outrun.
And it was getting louder.
Each night the furnace hissed louder. Each step Torin took toward her sent a spark. Every breath between them was heat and rust and longing wrapped in resentment.
But tonight was different.
Tonight, the walls were breathing.
A faint metallic clicking crawled through the vents above her.
She looked up. "You hear that, Cinder?"
Cinder stirred from her place in the corner, flame-marked ears twitching. "Something's moving inside the ducts. Too big to be rats."
Lyra crept toward the nearest grate and crouched low. Her nose twitched—oil, fur, silver.
Not scent. Taste.
Whispers curled from the opening, but not the Gutter Children this time. These voices were older. Thicker. As if they were speaking through the metal.
"Blood opens the door…"
"…what was broken cannot be undone…"
"…he took what wasn't his…"
Cinder growled softly, pressing a burnt paw to Lyra's ankle. "Something's bleeding upstairs. It's not pack. Smells... wrong."
Lyra stood. "Time to pay Vesper a visit."
---
The alchemy lab pulsed with flickering light.
Vesper worked alone tonight, her hands slick with some black resin. Vials hissed on the burner behind her. The floor near her workbench was scorched—deep claw marks etched into the stone. Something had been restrained here.
And had fought.
Lyra stepped inside, silent as shadow.
"What are you building?" she asked, voice like frost.
Vesper didn't flinch. "Perfection."
Lyra's eyes narrowed. "Is that what you call them now? The things crawling through your walls?"
Vesper smiled without turning. "The bondless don't understand purpose. I gave them one. They're loyal. Obedient. Unlike you."
"Because I didn't roll over and let you dissect my soul?"
"You're a failed experiment," Vesper said flatly. "But you taught me something valuable."
Lyra stalked closer. "That you can't kill fate without it killing you back?"
"No." Vesper turned then, holding up a small glass vial filled with silver-black fluid. "That even broken bonds bleed."
Lyra froze.
The liquid pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Her wolf whimpered.
"What did you do?"
Vesper's smile was ice. "I harvested the severed end of your bond. The part that still screamed for him. It's alive, you know. It still wants. And when bound to metal…"
She held up a shard of corroded steel, humming with magic.
"…it becomes more than memory. It becomes control."
A roar tore from Lyra's throat as she lunged.
Vesper was ready.
The shard flared—and Lyra's body locked mid-air, muscles seizing. Pain bloomed like fire through her ribs where the bond used to live. Her knees hit the floor.
"You still don't understand," Vesper murmured, crouching beside her. "You're not cursed because he rejected you. You're cursed because something ancient tried to own you both—and I stole its leash."
A bang echoed in the corridor.
Torin.
The spell snapped.
Lyra surged up, claws slicing the air between them. But Vesper was already gone, vanishing into the steam like a ghost.
Behind her, the alchemy lab began to tremble. Vials shattered. Rusted pipes hissed. Something big thudded against the walls, again and again, like it wanted out.
Torin burst through the doorway. "Lyra!"
She grabbed the shard Vesper left behind, wincing at the pain that skittered up her arm.
"Help me," she gasped, "before this whole place rips open."
---
They retreated to the mill's old central lift shaft, where the walls were thickest and the noise could be muted by steel. Slag met them there, pale and shaking.
"I saw one," he whispered. "In the vents. Looked like a wolf—barely. More wires than fur. Eyes like molten glass."
"Bondless?" Torin asked.
Slag nodded. "But not empty. It remembered something. It whispered Lyra's name."
Lyra sank against the wall, clutching the shard.
"It's part of me," she whispered. "She's using our bond—my pain—to make them. That's why they crawl toward me. They think I'm still theirs."
"They're drawn to the broken end," Torin said quietly. "To the hook still inside you."
Lyra looked at him.
His rust had spread to his neck now, creeping up like ivy.
And yet… where she touched him, it receded. Even now.
"What if we reconnected it?" she asked suddenly.
Slag tensed. "You mean… the bond?"
Torin's eyes darkened. "It could kill us both. It wasn't meant to be stitched back together."
"Then what was it meant to do?" Lyra snapped. "Rot us until we're statues? Leave a generation of pups coughing up nails?"
She stood, towering in her half-shifted form, breath steaming.
"You still have the locket, don't you?"
Torin looked startled.
Then ashamed.
He reached into his rusted coat and pulled it out. The silver locket—Lyra's—dented and tarnished, but intact. Inside: a lock of her hair and the rune of their first kiss carved in ash.
Lyra stared at it.
Then at him.
"We try," she said. "One more time. Bond-to-bond. No interference."
"And if it kills us?" he asked hoarsely.
Her lip curled. "Then at least we die ourselves."
They stood before the furnace again that night.
No chants. No ceremony.
Just two broken things daring fate to look them in the eye.
Torin opened the locket. Lyra pressed the shard of severed bond into her palm.
Their hands met.
Pain roared.
Heat followed.
And the mill screamed.