Storm-Bound: The Axis of Ruin

Jax has spent five hundred years in a cage.
Not metaphorically. Not politically. Literally—chained, controlled, and broken down until survival meant becoming exactly what his captors needed him to be.
So when the door finally opens, he doesn’t hesitate.
He runs.
The problem?
Freedom doesn’t feel real. The world outside is too quiet, too empty—and Jax has learned the hard way that anything that feels safe is usually a lie waiting to snap shut.
The only thing he trusts is her.
Shadewick is the one who came back for him. The one who broke him out. The one person he believes is real enough to follow into anything—whether that’s freedom, war, or another kind of cage.
Because escape isn’t the end.
It’s the beginning of something worse.
The Fey courts aren’t done with him. They never will be. To them, Jax isn’t a person—he’s a weapon, a problem, a thing that needs to be controlled before it tears something important apart.
And in their world, refusal isn’t an option.
Dragged into a game of court politics, forced alliances, and carefully disguised threats, Jax and Shadewick have one goal:
Stay together.
Because separation is how people like them get owned.
The longer they survive, the more dangerous they become—to the courts, to the people trying to control them… and to the fragile illusion of peace holding everything together.
Jax doesn’t want power. He doesn’t want revenge.
He just wants one thing no one has ever let him keep:
Choice.
And if the world refuses to give it to him—
he’ll tear it apart until it does.