Chapter 236: Taken

Liam stepped back and blinked hard, once, then again, telling himself for one absurd second that fatigue had finally made him see a nightmare. It did not.

Cain Canmore stood on the metallic bridge above Lab V, one hand resting lightly on the rail, expression neutral, purple eyes stripped of everything human enough to be called hesitation.

Empty.

Below him, the work floor seemed to freeze.

Mara went still at the console.

Alexander turned first, hand already moving toward the weapon at his side.

"Lord Liam—"

Cain lifted one hand.

Ether answered, wrapping around the pale, long fingers, dark at the edges, a sickly gold threaded through shadow, as if it had been dragged through something old and hungry before being forced back into shape. It poured from Cain’s palm and struck the Gate.

The entire structure shuddered.

Liam’s stomach dropped.

"No," he said sharply, turning fully toward it. "No, no—"

The Gate woke.

Not with the measured pulse he knew, nor with the clean ring of an ether system answering command.

It opened like a lazy eye waking from a deep slumber.

Golden light split down its surface and rotted black at the edges, and from that impossible seam came movement... long, shadow-like limbs shaped from ether, too fluid to be hands and too grasping to be called anything else. They spilled out in twisting strands, each one tipped with fingers made of light and darkness both, reaching, searching... Reaching for him.

Mara screamed his name.

Alexander lunged off the bridge stairs toward Liam at the exact same instant the first ether-hand struck the floor.

It moved with horrible speed.

One caught the railing beside Liam and crushed metal, bending it like it was nothing.

Another wrapped around his wrist.

Liam’s breath tore out of him.

The contact was cold first, then burning, then neither—a drag straight through skin into channel and bone, as if the thing had skipped his body entirely and grabbed the pattern beneath it.

He stumbled.

"Liam!" Mara’s voice cracked across the chamber.

Black Shadows, elite fighters of Agaron, gathered, ready to strike and eliminate anyone who touched even a strand of Liam’s hair.

Liam reached instinctively for his bond, opening it fully... ripping it open.

Arik.

The answer came like a bullet striking through distance.

Fear.

Fury.

Movement.

Then the Gate widened.

The pressure hit the room like a collapsing sky.

Every Shadow that had been moving toward Cain was thrown sideways. One struck the wall so hard the metal panels dented. Another hit the floor and slid across the polished surface, armor sparking. Alexander made it three more steps before the force drove him down to one knee, then flat against the grated platform, one hand still reaching toward Liam as if refusal alone could overcome ancient ether.

Mara slammed into the diagnostic console. The screen shattered behind her shoulder. She clawed for the emergency lock, but her fingers could not reach it. The pressure pinned her there, hair whipping around her face, eyes wide and furious and terrified.

"Do not—" she gasped, but the rest of the words vanished under the sound the Gate made.

It was not a roar.

A roar would have been kinder.

It was a deep, layered vibration, like stone remembering how to break, like the inside of the world opening its mouth.

The golden hands multiplied.

They came from the widening seam in the Gate, long and thin and impossibly jointed, made of black shadow threaded with violent gold. Not eyes. Not faces. Nothing Liam could plead with. Only hands. Fingers. Claws. Palms opening and closing in slow, hungry recognition.

They reached for him and only him.

Liam grabbed the bent railing with his free hand.

His fingers slipped once.

He tightened them until pain shot through his knuckles.

"No," he whispered.

The Gate pulled.

His shoulder nearly tore from the socket.

A sound left him before he could stop it.

Through the bond, Arik’s terror became something inhuman.

Hold on.

It was not spoken. It was worse than said. It was command, prayer, and desperation shoved through the mark with enough force that Liam’s ward flared bright blue beneath his shirt.

"I am trying," Liam choked.

Cain stood above him on the bridge.

The pressure did not flatten him.

It moved through him.

No , Liam realized with a coldness that punched through the panic.

Not through.

From him.

Cain’s right hand was lifted toward the Gate, fingers spread, dark-gold ether streaming from his skin in thick, unraveling threads. The current did not simply pass from him. It ate him as it went.

His fingertips were already gone.

The skin dissolved into sparks of shadowed gold, then the bones beneath flickered and scattered like ash in water. His sleeve collapsed around nothing. The disintegration moved slowly up his hand, then to his wrist, clean and terrible and silent.

Liam stared.

Cain looked back.

His purple eyes remained empty.

"Cain," Liam forced out, though he did not know why.

Cain’s head tilted slightly, as if hearing him from very far away.

His arm continued to vanish.

The Gate widened another inch.

The room screamed in metal.

A support beam groaned. The maintenance bridge twisted under Liam’s boots. Every ward line around the Gate shattered one by one, blue light snapping into useless sparks as the old ether overruled them with contempt.

Alexander tried to rise again.

The pressure crushed him back down.

A Shadow fired.

The shot bent before it reached Cain, curved into the Gate, and vanished into the abyss without a sound.

Mara screamed something into her comm.

Arik, Liam thought.

Arik, hurry!

The hands tightened around his wrist, waist, thigh, and shoulder. They were not pulling only his body anymore. Liam could feel it. Something inside him was being dragged loose, some pattern the Gate recognized and wanted to take entirely.

His vision blurred.

No, not blurred... Stretched? He didn’t know how to describe it.

The lab bent around the Gate. The bridge elongated. The lights streaked. Mara’s face seemed far away and too close at once. The floor beneath him had ceased to behave like a floor and become a suggestion.

Liam’s panic finally broke cleanly through his control.

He did not want this.

He did not want to be taken by Felix’s trap, Cain’s empty eyes, Goliath’s past, or some ancient machine that knew his blood because Arik had marked him and changed the rules of his body without either of them understanding how far it went.

He wanted Arik.

He wanted Lab V.

He wanted the ridiculous decorative pillows he had used to annoy his fiancé and the terrible spoon and Kamal’s silent judgment and Mara scolding him over misplaced notes.

He wanted ordinary problems.

The Gate pulled harder.

His hand slipped on the railing.

"No!"

Liam caught it again with three fingers.

Cain’s arm had vanished to the elbow now.

Dark cracks climbed beneath the skin of his neck, lit from inside with gold. His face remained calm, but his body was collapsing into the spell, into the opening, into whatever command he had been carrying like a death sentence.

Then he spoke.

Only once.

"If your mate is who he says," Cain said, voice quiet beneath the screaming Gate, "he can save you."

Liam’s blood went cold.

"What?"

Cain did not answer.

His chest split with gold light.

It poured out of him in shadowed streams, feeding the Gate. His body began to come apart faster then, pieces of him peeling away into sparks, into smoke, into the same dark-gold hands that now wrapped around Liam like living chains.

The last thing to vanish was his face.

The purple eyes stayed empty until the end.

Then Cain Canmore disintegrated.

The Gate surged open.

Every person in Lab V was flattened.

Mara hit the floor.

Alexander’s hand slammed down inches from Liam’s boot and missed.

The Shadows vanished beneath the pressure.

Liam lost the railing.

For one terrible second, he hung suspended above the work floor, caught by the golden hands, staring at the chamber that had become his life and the Gate that had come to collect him from inside it.

Through the bond, Arik roared his name.

Liam tried to answer.

The hands dragged him backward into the abyss.

The Gate closed around him before his scream could finish.

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