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He starts to protest again, but I keep talking, the words tumbling out of me like water out of a burst dam now that I’ve gotten going.

“With everything that’s going on and everything your court needs from you right now, I don’t want to be one more worry. I just want to be… I want to be…”

“What?” he prompts.

“I just want to be useful.”

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, Eren tenses. When he hooks a finger under my chin and makes me look up at him, his expression is soft and searching.

“What makes you think you aren’t?”

I can’t answer him right away. It’s obvious, isn’t it? No one has ever needed my magick before. There’s never been any point to it. Now that I might be able to actually make a difference, I need it to mean something. If all I’m doing is distracting him and taking his focus from things that really matter, it would be better if I weren’t here at all.

When I stay silent, Eren pushes me a little harder.

“The children you taught back in the human realm, did you not make their days better, their lives a little brighter?”

“Yes, but—”

“All of your friends, your mother, Joan, do you not think they value you?”

“I know they do.”

“All the work you’ve already done to unravel the bargain’s secrets and to renew its magick is invaluable to this realm. So much more than merely ‘useful.’”

I make a small, protesting noise in the back of my throat, but Eren isn’t finished.

“And besides,” he tells me, pressing soft kisses on my cheeks, my forehead, the tip of my nose. “Your value does not lie in what you can provide for others or what ‘use’ you render, my bride. Your value lies in the simple fact of your life, your existence.”

I’m crying again, staring up at him through eyes welling up and spilling over with tears.

Eren readjusts me in his lap, tucks my head into the hollow between his neck and shoulder, and swipes away those tears with the pad of this thumb.

“Never doubt your value, little witch. Never with me. There is nothing more precious in any realm or universe than you, to me, nothing more valuable.”

“Thank you,” I tell him in a raspy whisper. “And I’m sorry for… for being like this.”

“Never be sorry for your struggles or for trusting me enough to share them with me. Just let me help you through them.”

I nod, swallowing hard around the lump in my throat.

“Will you tell me?” he asks softly. “Will you help me understand why this is so important to you?”

I haven’t yet, have I? As much as I’ve told him about my life in Beech Bay, the bare details I’ve shared about my mother and the coven, I still haven’t given him the full story. Whatever he’s assumed or been able to guess, he still deserves to hear it all from me.

I tell him about it in stops and starts, in halting sentences that still don’t come easy even with as much as I want him to know. My childhood. My strained relationship with my mother. The loneliness I felt at not measuring up to the coven’s standards or to my mother’s. The pride I felt at building a good life for myself despite all of that.

Eren doesn’t interrupt me, even when I have to pause to find the right words. No, he simply keeps one hand on my back, one wing curled protectively around me and listens until I’m finished talking.

When I’m done, we’re both silent for a long time, sitting in the warmth of the crackling fire. The silence isn’t awkward or weighty. It’s comfortable. It’s a silence that feels like understanding, like acceptance.

“Thank you,” he says finally, pressing a kiss to my damp cheek. “Thank you for trusting me with all of that.”

Simple. The words are so simple, the act of him listening and accepting and making me know I’m seen and heard andappreciated,just as I am, is so simple.

We stay together for a long time, trading more quiet words and stories, touching and relaxing in front of the fire. His heart beats steadily beneath my cheek and those familiar, gentle threads of understanding stretch and weave between us.

Tomorrow is the full moon. Tomorrow everything changes.