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It takes me a moment to stumble into it.

A letter.

‘If you have not enough courage to face the one you want, write a letter to him.’

Words I spoke to Aleana on the ice-floor.

My mouth rounds into a circle. I hesitate before I speak careful words, “Folk write to you? Must be nice.”

His smirk tightens but his eyes remain soft. “What you do for her is generous,” he says as gently as any dark male can manage with accents like sandpaper and barbed wire, and so I think he keeps his voice low to avoid overhearing from anyone who lurks in the shadows of Hemlock. “But you overstep boundaries.”

I slump and my mouth puckers with a pout. “I’m to die anyway, so what does it matter?”

Rune hums something curt. He looks over his shoulder to the short steps he came from, as though he’ll find a lurker there.

But we are alone, so as he turns back to me, he says, “Aleana won’t make it to the close of the Sacrament.”

This truth, I suspected already. I knew it in my heart. But still, to hear it spoken aloud is not unlike being struck with a sword.

“Daxeel will hurt,” Rune adds, low, and steps closer to me. “He, like all of us, knows it’s coming, but it will tear him open and bleed him dry.”

I flinch at the horrible truth of it, the wretchedness of the looming pain to plague him.

“If there was a way for you to save yourself,” Rune adds, “it would be that.”

My brow knits.

I stare at the rug that softens the stairs, but I chew on his words until, “You think I can change my fate?”

I hear Rune’s bitter smirk in his words, “What male wants to lose everything all at once? Use that boundary-less compassion of yours, force yourself into his space and offer the comfort. Love his ugliness as he loves yours. We have at least one week to climb that mountain—one week that you have to change his mind… if it isn’t changed already.”

I run my tongue over my teeth.

Such different advice to what Dare told me.

Suppose they are such different males though. But they both go out of their way to help.

Slumping against the banister, I fold my arms over my chest. “It’s a wonder why his friends encourage this. Shouldn’t you all loathe me?”

If he’s surprised by my insinuation that he’s not the only one to offer me advice on Daxeel, he doesn’t show it. Samick says little to me, nothing about Daxeel, so of course Rune understands it must be Dare who has helped me, or at least tried.

Dare would be the gossipy one between them.

“Loathe,” Rune scoffs, and that alone is a dismissal. “I propose a trade,” he says, and draws in my watchful gaze. “I say nothing about you interfering with Aleana and I. And you,” he says with a flick of his hand, “will ask nothing about what came of it.”

An eyebrow arches, tugs on my face, and his words skitter all around me.

‘What came of it…’

I almost,almostask.

But that’s not the deal, that’s the opposite of the trade Rune wants from me.

My silence for his.

Help each other—and shut up about it.

He lets those words linger for a moment. An understanding to say nothing, and ask nothing, but to suspect that he will fulfil her wish.