The moment Luna's terror and desperation flooded through our bond, every rational thought fled my mind. There was no time for planning, no weighing of risks, no map in my head of the distance between us. Only a single imperative pounded through my chest: reach her.
"Daddy!" Stella's voice chased me as Grey burst off my skin like a storm breaking out of clear sky. The power answered raw instinct, not finesse. It gathered in a choking pressure and then unspooled, thinning the world until distance felt like a rumor.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. The bond thrummed—taut, golden, unignorable—and I locked onto it the way a drowning man locks onto air. The Grey belonged only to me; no one else could pull at reality the way it let me, no one else could make the horizon fold and the ground forget how to be beneath a body. It scraped through me in hungry sheets as I forced it to obey.
