Page 69 of Legacy Found

"The marks," I whisper, tracing the lines with my free hand.

"A mark permanently ignites when two fated mates touch you at the exact same moment. The combat assessment. The field. Torres and me, both of us handling you at once — it woke the bond." His thumb strokes the sensitive skin of my inner wrist. "And then it's real, but it isn't finished. Sealing it requires this. That's what you felt lock into place tonight. Two bonds, permanently closed. That's why you can feel us now, and why you always will."

I sit with it. It's monumental, terrifying, and vast — and yet it clicks into every single strange, inexplicable thing I've felt since the day I walked through the academy gates. The warmth I could never explain around them. The ache when they walked away. The ink that wouldn't wash off.

"So this is permanent," I say, testing the weight of it.

"It's permanent," Luke confirms without a single hesitation. "You're ours, Jessica. And we're yours."

It should be too much. It probably is too much for a normal person. But there's a heavy, scorching rightness settled deep in my bones where a nameless void used to live, and I refuse to be sorry for a second of it.

Then the harsh reality of the clock hits me, and I sit up straight, the fog clearing from my brain.

"The Trial. You're an upperclassman. You've survived it. So you're going to tell me exactly what's waiting for me in there."

Luke's face instantly hardens, all the raw vulnerability vanishing behind a wall of pure stone. "I can't."

"Luke—"

"I mean I can't, Jessica. Everyone who passes takes an oath — a blood oath, and more than an oath. I physically cannot describe it. The words literally refuse to leave my mouth." He holds my gaze with absolute, unyielding intensity so I know it isn't a cop-out. "And even if I could speak the words — it wouldn't help you. The Trial isn't the same for anyone. There's no strategy I can hand you. No map."

And that, finally, explains the terrifying silence of the upperclassmen. Explains why the faculty just watches us with those cold, assessing eyes. He has nothing to give me except the one thing that actually matters.

He has to go. He can't be found here in the gray light of dawn, and neither of us needs to say it out loud.

I walk him to the silent door. Torres hangs back against the pillows, watching us with heavy, possessive eyes, letting us have this.

Luke stops before he steps out into the corridor, all that iron control wearing paper-thin again. He reaches out, his fingers wrapping around my wrist, pressing right over the mark that is permanently, irrevocably his.

"Whatever's in there tomorrow," he murmurs, his voice rough.

I wait, my heart hammering against the new, heavy beats of the bond.

"Come back."

Not win. Not pass. Not any of the impossible things he can't help me fight anyway. Just come back.

My throat tightens until it aches, and I reach up, pulling him down for one last, soft, devastating kiss. "I will."

He slips out into the dark. I feel the bond stretch like a taut wire as he walks away, and then it settles — steady, heavy, and unbreakable because it's sealed now, and through this invisible web, he is never truly gone.

When I turn back into the room, Torres is already standing up from the bed, his dark gaze locked onto mine, his hand held out.

"Come back here," he says softly, his voice thick with promise.

Chapter twenty-four

Jessica

They load us onto the buses before the sun is up.

Nobody talks. Two hundred freshmen, gray-faced in the dark, rattling deep into the restricted preserve — the enormous wilderness that wraps around Luftis Academy for tens of thousands of acres, the land we've been forbidden to set foot in all year. The bus climbs for over an hour, past the last of the lit paths, into country that gets wilder with every mile, until it stops in the middle of nowhere and we understand that nowhere is the point.

There are dozens of drop points, spread far apart. I can just make out other buses unloading other students on distant ridgelines, tiny and alone. Whatever this is, we're not doing it together.

A staff member hands me a small pack as I step off. Inside: a map. A compass. A water bottle. And a single emergency flare, with an instruction I don't need repeated — firing it is automatic failure, unless your life is genuinely in danger.

The Chancellor's voice comes over the ridge from somewhere, amplified, everywhere and nowhere.