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“You’d best not make me regret this,” I murmur, my voice low—part warning, part wish.

She doesn’t stir again. The only answer I get is the wind whistling through the cracks in these ancient stones. Staring at the small fire, I slip into a rhythm of waiting—listening for footsteps, scanning for flickers of movement.

She’s not a job,I remind myself.She’s a person in trouble.

I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what she is, or what I’ve signed myself up for.

But I do know one thing: I made a choice. I stayed.

And until she’s back on her feet again—strong enough to stand, to look me in the eye without swaying—I’m not going anywhere.

Aria

Icomeawakeslowly,the damp chill of mid-morning clinging to my bones.

It takes me a moment to remember where I am: tucked against a crumbling wall with my shoulder bandaged and the remains of a small fire nearby. Above me, the sky glows in a cloudless blue, and sunlight slants through the broken archways, golden and sharp.

My breath catches in my throat. Not from fear, exactly—but surprise. I never see the sky like this. Not so open. Not so exposed.

My clan keeps to a strict nocturnal schedule, our world ruled by velvet shadows and moon-silver silence. To wake beneath an open sky—beneath thesun—feels jarring. Foreign. Like I’ve crossed into another life by accident.

The sun is no enemy of mine—it won’t burn me to cinders or reduce me to ash like the old myths claim. That fate belongs to theturned—those cursed by a bite and left to rot in their hunger. But still, it’s so bright, almost too bright, burning across the ruins with a clarity I’m not used to.

That’s the real danger.

The sun doesn’t kill us. But it reminds us that we don’t belong to its world.

It lays us bare, strips away the veil of darkness where we thrive. Makes us look too human, too soft. Makes us want things we shouldn’t.

I lift my hand—the one not bound tight with bandages—and stretch it out of the shadow. Sunlight pierces through a crack in the stone above, sharp and gold, like a blade held to my skin.

The light kisses my palm first. Warm. Brighter than I remember. No fire. No smoke. Just the press of morning against my skin, as if the sun itself is daring me to believe in something more.

I watch, mesmerized, as the light glows along the curve of my knuckles, settling into the pale of my palm. I turn my hand, slow and trembling, letting it catch in the golden spill.

For a breathless second, I forget the gnawing hunger. I forget the ache in my shoulder, the weight of fear, even the chase that brought me here.

I feel something else instead. Something I don’t have a name for.

And then—

“You always greet the dawn like it’s a god, or is today special?”

I jolt slightly, snatching my hand back into the shadows. My head snaps toward the voice before I can stop myself.

Roan.

It’s startling how close she’s come without a sound. She’s watching me—not with suspicion, not with fear, but with something like…curiosity.

I look at her then—really look. The sun catches in her hair, brushes gold across the edge of her jaw. And for one impossible moment, I feel caught between worlds.

One foot in shadow. One in the light.

And she’s the tether between them.

Roan raises a brow when I don’t respond. Then she shifts her weight, tilting her head slightly, voice gentle but teasing. “You’re awfully quiet in the morning, huh?”

The remark—simple, unthreatening—cuts through the strange hush between us like a blade into silk. I let out a breath that edges toward a laugh.