"Give me your hand or we both die in here!" Lyra's knife slipped off my throat and slammed flat against my chest, pinning me to the rusted hull.
The whole trench was screaming. Sirens ripping through the water. Searchlights stabbing down from the hunter fleet above us, sweeping the black like knives.
"You think I'm gonna hold hands while they hunt us?" I snapped at her.
"Not hold hands, idiot! Bleed!" She grabbed my wrist, her fingers ice-cold and shaking. "They're not hunting with eyes. They're hunting with hounds. Abyss hounds. They smell life. They smell fear. They smell you."
A howl tore through the water. Not a normal animal. Low and wrong, like it came from inside your skull.
I jerked back. "So what, we play dead?"
"No. We disappear." Her eyes locked on mine, wild and furious. "Blood pact. My curse hides us, but it needs an anchor. Your blood on my blood. One life tied to the other. They won't smell two people anymore. They'll smell nothing."
"And the price?" I said. "Nothing's free down here, princess."
"You feel what I feel. I feel what you feel. Pain, pressure, all of it. Shared." She pressed the blade harder. "And if one of us dies? The other gets dragged down too. You want out? Fine. Stay here and let Silas's dogs chew your legs off."
Another howl. Closer this time. The hull around our little air pocket groaned. Rust flaked down on our heads. We were crammed in a cracked service pipe, maybe three feet wide, shoulder to shoulder, her knee jammed against my thigh, her breath hot on my face.
"You're lying," I said.
"Am I?" She yanked my hand up. "Look out there!"
Through a split in the metal I saw it. A shape, huge, pale, moving wrong against the current. No eyes. Just a mouth full of needles and tendrils sniffing the water. An Abyss hound. And behind it, the lights of Silas's hunters, at least six dive rigs dropping cables.
"Shit," I breathed.
"Yeah, shit," she hissed. "So decide. You want to keep pretending you're the big solo diver who needs nobody? Or you want to live?"
I stared at her hand. Small, cut up, bleeding already from where she'd sliced her own palm open. Blood welled black in the dim light.
"You do this to everyone you meet?" I said.
"You're the first person dumb enough to follow me into the Forbidden Deep," she shot back. "Congratulations. Now bleed."
I grabbed the knife from her. Our fingers brushed. Hers were freezing. Mine were burning up.
"If you screw me on this—" I started.
"I'll be too dead to care, same as you," she cut in. "Do it!"
I sliced my palm. Fast. Deep. Blood jumped out, hot and bright. She didn't flinch. She just grabbed my hand and slammed our palms together.
Skin to skin. Blood to blood.
It wasn't warm. It was like touching a live wire.
"Say it," she gasped. "Say 'I bind my life to yours.' Say it like you mean it."
"I bind my life to yours," I growled through my teeth.
"I bind my life to yours," she whispered back, and her voice cracked.
The air punched out of my lungs.
A line of fire ripped up my arm from our joined hands. Not pain. Worse. Like every nerve got rewired at once. I saw — no, I felt — a flash that wasn't mine.
Cold stone. Chains. Years of sitting alone in the dark while water dripped and something huge breathed just outside the cell. No voice. No touch. Just waiting to be fed to the sea.
Loneliness so deep it had teeth.
"Lyra—" I choked out.
Her eyes went wide. She felt me too. My memory slammed into her — my father's boot on my neck on the dock, the crew laughing while they stripped my diver's badge off, "disgraced" stamped on my record.
"Stop—" she whispered, her hand clenching mine so tight her nails dug in. "Stop, that's enough—"
The mark burned. A thin black line, like ink under skin, raced up both our wrists, twisting into a circle, then snapped shut. A perfect ring.
The hound outside whined. Then went silent.
The searchlights kept sweeping, but they passed right over our crack. Like we weren't there.
"It worked," she breathed. Her forehead dropped against mine. Just for a second. Her skin was damp, her breath shaking. "It actually worked."
"Yeah," I said, my voice rough. "You okay?"
"Don't ask me that," she snapped, but she didn't pull away. Her palm was still locked to mine, our blood mixing. "Don't do the soft thing. We're bound, not dating."
"Noted," I said. "You still feel like you're gonna pass out, though."
"I feel like you do," she muttered. "Which is angry and starving. Great."
I almost laughed. Almost. Then the hull groaned again and a whole section of pipe shifted, dropping us an inch closer.
"We gotta move," I said. "Now. Before that thing changes its mind."
She nodded, finally letting go. The second our hands separated, the cold hit me hard. Like something was missing.
"Stay close," she said, already crawling. "The pact only hides us if we're within ten feet. You wander off, we both light up like a flare."
"Forced proximity, huh?" I said, right behind her, my shoulder brushing her back.
"Shut up and crawl, hero."
We squeezed through the pipe, blood still dripping from our hands, the black ring on our wrists pulsing faintly with each heartbeat. Same beat now. Synced.
We hit open water and kicked. Hard. Up through the dark, past the blind hounds circling confused, past the hunter rigs whose sonar was suddenly getting nothing. My lungs burned. Hers burned too — I could feel her chest tightening like it was my own.
"Almost there," she gasped through the comms bead she'd shoved at me. "My safehouse. Old pump station. No patrols."
"You sure?" I said.
"No," she said. "But it's closer than dying here."
We broke through a curtain of kelp and there it was — a half-buried steel box, lights dead, door rusted but intact. Sanctuary.
I hit the manual wheel and hauled it open. She slipped inside first. I followed, slamming the door shut behind us, sealing out the sea.
We stood there dripping, panting, in a tiny room that smelled like oil and old air. Just us. And the faint glow of the pact rings.
"We made it," I said.
She looked at me, her hair plastered to her face, eyes bright and pissed and alive. "Don't jinx it—"
The inner door — the one we hadn't touched — clicked.
And swung open.
Silas stood there, dry, perfect, leaning against the frame like he'd been waiting all day. He smiled at us. Slow. Cold.
"Well, well," he said, his eyes dropping to our joined, bleeding hands and the fresh black rings on our wrists, "did you really think a little blood would—"