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Taly shut her eyes, and for a moment, the darkness wasn’t endless. It was soft. Familiar. The rain on her skin became the gentle patter of water against a garden’s edge, the scent of earth and summer curling around her. A worn wooden door stood open, light spilling onto the porch.

She opened her eyes to cold rain and gray streets. “No,” she said.

Ren shook his head, laughing without humor. “You’re a shitty liar, Caro.”

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t change that I’m taken.”

She blinked, and the vision returned. Ren leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, watching her like she was late coming home. Flour dusted his shirt.

“You were supposed to be back before the rain.”His voice was easy, unbothered, like this was normal.

Taly scrubbed at her eyes. If only her Sight shut off when her aether ran dry. Instead, it just got weird—glitching at the worst moments, feeding her half-truths and ghosts of things that weren’t really there.

Ren was watching her, brows drawn, like he’d also felt the moment slip away. “Are you really going to throw yourself away on him?”

Taly didn’t answer. Just looked up at the boy she might’ve loved, in a life untouched by magic, by war, by fate.

“You’re human, Taly. You’re nothing to him.”

But she shook her head. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know Skye. Didn’t know he was different. He didn’t know there was no longer a human left to love, just all these fragments of a person she was barely holding together.

Taly glanced at the bar. “We should probably split up. You go left. I’ll go right. Just in case.”

“Taly, I watched you drink enough to embalm a horse. I’d feel better walking you home. Or to a hospital.”

If only that was the problem. In reality, she was sobering up too fast. Damn Fey metabolism. “I’m going to skip over the part where you just admitted to being a creepy stalker.”

She lifted a finger, squinting in concentration, and just barely managed to tap her nose.

“See?Stone cold—” She missed on the second try. “Like I was saying, mostly sober.”

Ren only narrowed his eyes.

“They water down the whiskey,” she offered as an explanation, nudging his shoulder as she pulled up her hood. “Thanks for the save,cousin.”

Ren swallowed, throat tight. His mouth twitched like he wanted to say something, but all he managed was a hoarse, “Yeah.”

She ducked into the rain, jogging across the street. Hugging the wall, she kept her pace brisk. The glow of shop windows flashed in her peripheral vision.

Then a glint caught her eye. A reflection in the glass, warm and golden.

She turned before she could stop herself.

Firelight flickered in the window, pooling around a worn rug and a low table cluttered with half-finished things—a cup of tea gone cold, a book left open, a candle burning low in its dish. A pair of boots rested near the door, carelessly kicked off, like their owner had meant to put them away but never did.

It was nothing. Just a home. A place that spoke of presence, of permanence, of a life left unattended because there was no need to guard it.

Rain soaked her, but Taly didn’t care. She stepped closer.

Ren sat by the fire, legs stretched out, a glass resting loose in his hand, his other arm draped over the back of the couch—overher,where she leaned against him, tucked beneath his shoulder like she had never known any other place to be. The ring on her finger caught the firelight, a quiet, simple thing.

That was what made her stomach twist. Not Ren, not the ring, not the brush of his fingers against her arm—but the stillness of it.The quiet certainty of a life where she wasn’t running, wasn’t looking over her shoulder, wasn’t clawing for the next escape.

The liquor hadn’t worked. Death wouldn’t take her. And this life—the stillness, the warmth—it wasn’t hers to claim.

She pressed a hand to the glass, just once. Just to see if it would feel warm.

But all she felt was cold glass and rain.