"Never Hide Your Heart"
Katarine stared at him as his finger brushed across her lips.
Her gaze wasn't nearly as hateful as it should have been, given the circumstances. There was anger there, certainly, buried somewhere beneath everything else, but her deep green eyes betrayed her more readily. Mostly, she looked frightened, and, to her shame, curious.
When he finally released her, Katarine rubbed at her jaw and watched him rise to his full, considerable height. Beside him, she felt impossibly small, almost insignificant beneath the shadow he cast across the cell.
His presence filled the room again.
Only now, it was different.
The darkness was still there. She could feel it pressing against her senses, could still feel that familiar pull deep within her blood, but the rush was muted. Controlled. Her thoughts remained clear. The room did not tilt beneath her. Her pulse did not race into that horrible, intoxicating frenzy.
Katarine frowned.
What was in his blood?
The question had been haunting her since he forced it upon her, and now it returned with renewed urgency.
He turned his back to her, and somehow that was worse.
He wasn't mocking her. He didn't need to. He was simply laying out the reality of her predicament, and each calm observation made her feel smaller than his towering height ever could.
Because he was right.
Then he asked about home.
Katarine knew better than to listen. She had survived years of manipulation at the hands of Dark Jedi. She knew how this worked. Monsters rarely began with threats. They whispered. They found wounds and pressed their fingers into them. They took truths you already feared and twisted them until those truths became weapons.
The wisest thing she could do was shut him out.
Yet the word slipped through anyway.
Home.
What did that even mean anymore? Perhaps the girl born two centuries before the Battle of Yavin would have known.
That Katarine had believed in simple things. Love. Duty. Forever.
She had even had a husband once. A story that seemed almost laughably perfect in hindsight. The virginal bride marrying her prince charming, believing that devotion would be rewarded simply because that was how such stories were supposed to end.
James Terran had left her the morning after their wedding night, aand Katarine had shattered.
The spiral that followed had driven her into the arms of a dangerous Dark Jedi and eventually cost her Padawan his life.
There was no home waiting for her in the past. Unless she counted the centuries she had spent frozen beneath the water, trapped in a prison of her own choosing while she attempted to escape the addiction burning through her blood.
Perhaps the cold had been home.
At least it had been quiet.
Home certainly wasn't the Jedi Order she knew today. Most of them barely knew who she was. Katarine spent so much of her life buried in undercover investigations that she never truly belonged anywhere. Her mutation made direct confrontation with the Sith dangerous, leaving her unable to stand on the front lines the way a proper Jedi should.
She had colleagues. She had assignments. She had a title. Yet she had no true peers, and when she disappeared from active duty, nobody had come looking.
The realization settled heavily in her chest.
Perhaps home wasn't a place. Perhaps it was a person.
Her thoughts drifted unwillingly to
Valery Noble
, who had helped guide her after her release from stasis. Then
Connel Vanagor
, one of the few Jedi who had ever truly taken the time to know her. Next, she thought of
Aiden Porte
a friend who had always been there to help her try and find a path in this new galaxy.
Then they turned, inevitably, to her beloved
Mikhail Shorn. The closest thing to happiness she had felt in a very long time.
But could any of them truly be called home? Valery had vanished from the galaxy. Whatever existed between Katarine and Connel had ended.
And Mikhail...
Mikhail was complicated.
She was addicted to the darkness inside him. Worse, she had failed when it mattered most. When he slaughtered those people in the tavern, Katarine had done nothing worthy of the Jedi she claimed to be. She had let him walk away from murder and afterward abandoned her post rather than face what she had done.
Surely that wasn't home.
That was weakness.
There was no home.
Perhaps there wasn't even a Katarine anymore. Not really. Only fragments.
A sliver of the woman she had once been, carrying around values she no longer seemed capable of living by. Her purpose had eroded. Her confidence had disappeared. Every choice she made seemed to belong to someone stronger, darker, or more determined than she was.
She had spent centuries trying to master the thing inside her.
She had failed.
Now that same hunger had delivered her directly into the hands of perhaps the most monstrous man in the galaxy.
Katarine stared at his broad back while the thoughts crawled through her mind. She hated herself for entertaining them. Hated him even more for knowing exactly where to strike.
When he stepped toward her again, Katarine flinched instinctively. She waited for the dizziness. It never came. Her lips parted slightly. No spinning room. No sudden weakness in her knees. No euphoric fog swallowing her judgment.
Nothing.
Then he spoke of thirst. Her brow furrowed as those deep green eyes searched his face. What had he done to her? The thought that followed was absurd enough that she nearly rejected it outright.
A sire bond?
No.
Impossible.
Those were stories from terrible holodramas. Vampires and ancient Sith legends. Superstitious nonsense used to frighten children.
Living humans did not become bound to one another through blood.
Did they?
Carnifex extended his hand.
Katarine stared at it.
Every instinct told her not to touch him.
Every lesson she had ever learned told her that taking the hand of a monster was how one became trapped inside his story.
However, refusing him meant remaining here. Rotting in this cell, or perhaps waiting until he returned in a mood far less patient than this one.
She needed time, information, an opening. The intelligent thing was to cooperate until she found one.
"Katarine Ryiah."
Her voice sounded quieter than she intended. Slowly, she placed her small hand into his.
The reaction was immediate.
A jolt traveled through her body. Katarine inhaled sharply. She could feel him. Not merely his presence in the Force. Something deeper. The liquid moving through his veins seemed almost impossibly vivid to her senses. She could feel the blood beneath his skin, warm and alive, calling to whatever had awakened inside her.
Magnetic.
Just like the darkness surrounding him, but unlike before, it did not consume her. It pulled, patiently, like a tide that already knew she would eventually stop fighting it.
Katarine swallowed hard.
For the first time, she understood that escaping the cell might be the easier part.
Breaking whatever bargain the devil had written into her blood could prove far more difficult.
Darth Carnifex
