Page 103

Instinctively, my hand flew to my stomach.

The skin beneath my fingertips felt strange—textured, uneven. I pulled the blanket back to look. The wound was closed, but the skin had bubbled and rippled, as if it hadn’t healed quite naturally. Despite its appearance, there was no pain. If anything, I felt… strong. Stronger than the day I first walked into the labyrinth. Before the wound, before the exhaustion, before everything.

I stared at my stomach a moment longer, then let the blanket fall as my gaze shifted across the room. Leif sat by the fire, his broad shoulders hunched slightly as he worked the poker in the coals. The flames danced in his eyes, turning their dark brown into molten amber for just an instant before the light shifted again.

“Someone will see the smoke and investigate,” I said.

He glanced over his shoulder at me. “They won’t. This cottage will look abandoned to everyone outside, no matter what happens inside.” Leif set the poker aside with a soft clink and stood, brushing ash from his hands. “Luke and I stayed here once.”

His gaze wandered over the room, as though it might hold the memory of his brother somewhere in its walls.

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. There must be magic in these walls, because the sheets weren’t dirty from my boots nor stained red from the blood. They were clean and crisp.

I caught a scent of myself, and instantly took another. So was I. I smelled like a garden, and my hair didn’t feel matted against my head anymore. It was soft over my shoulders.

Leif had returned to standing by the fire as if he didn’t know what to do with me. I hesitated, watching him. “I don’t know if I had the chance to say how sorry I am that you lost Luke.”

He stilled, his back to me for a long while before he turned around. When he did, he grinned, but it was a weak effort. The corners of his mouth curved, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’vebeen too busy being a thorn in my side to do much else,” he said, though his voice lacked its usual bite.

I managed a faint smile in return.

Leif crossed the room, coming closer but not as close as he’d been this morning when he sat by my side with a hand on my stomach. “We found this cottage the night before he died. It’d been in a stone maze at the time, down a tunnel of stairs we almost passed by. He pulled back a curtain of flowers, and there it was. We spent the night, Luke giving me the bed while he stayed by the fire, and in the morning, I begged him to let us stay. I couldn’t stomach the labyrinth back then.”

My mind went to Thief, the little boy with silver hair and a mischievous grin. My mind painted a new face upon him, one with dark hair and scared eyes, looking to his brother for safety. That’d been how old Leif was when he first came—at the demand of his father—into the labyrinth.

“Luke said we had to keep moving, but we weren’t going in the direction of the center. He’d found a captain of a small ship who was willing to take us away for a price, sail us to the outer islands and we could start a new life there. We just had to stay in the labyrinth for long enough for witnesses to see us so they could return and tell our father that we had in fact been in the labyrinth. Our fate would be left for him to guess.”

Leif took a few steps closer, but still keeping me at bay. His eyes didn’t quite meet mine. They seemed to drift through me, unfocused, as though he were looking at something far beyond this room, something distant—buried in another time. His expression was unreadable, his jaw tight, but there was ahollowness to his gaze, as if the memories he carried were too heavy to set down, even for a moment.

“Luke died that day,” he said, his voice low and steady, though each word carried a weight that echoed in the small space. “And it took me eight years to figure out that Father was the one who orchestrated it.”

I blinked, the brutal admission hitting me like a physical blow. My breath caught in my throat, and for a moment, I could only stare at him. The firelight flickered across his face, casting shadows that deepened the lines of pain and anger etched into his features.

“Why would he do that?” I finally asked, though my voice barely carried.

Leif’s lips pressed into a thin line, his shoulders stiffening as though bracing against the question. “If Luke and I left,” he began, his tone sharper now, clipped with suppressed emotion, “he’d lose his heirs. Eliminating Luke kept me close. Bound to him, bound to the family. But…” He paused, his gaze finally settling on me, though the storm behind his eyes didn’t abate. “As years have gone by, I think he regrets not letting us both be gone and finding a new heir.”

The silence that followed was deafening, heavy with everything he didn’t say. The flickering fire seemed too loud, its crackles and pops filling the space where words should have been. I felt my chest tighten as the meaning behind his words sank in fully.

“He doesn’t regret killing Luke,” I said softly, piecing it together aloud. The truth tasted bitter on my tongue. “He regrets keeping you around.”

Leif’s mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile—more of a grim acknowledgment of what he’d always known but had rarely spoken aloud. He turned his back to me, running a hand through his dark hair, the motion restless, almost agitated. “You don’t have to pity me, Ren,” he muttered, his voice quieter now, almost hoarse. “I’ve lived with it long enough to know exactly where I stand. But being here? It brings it all back.”

I stared at him, the broad set of his shoulders casting long shadows against the far wall. The weight of betrayal clung to him like a second skin, unshakeable and permanent. It wasn’t just grief that shaped him—it was the knowledge that his family had carved a hole into his life and then left him to fill it on his own.

For a long moment, silence stretched between us, broken only by the occasional crackle of the fire and the faint whistle of wind slipping through the fissures in the cottage walls. I could feel the weight of his presence beside me, steady but uninvited, like a shadow I hadn’t meant to summon.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

Leif tilted his head slightly, his expression unreadable, though the faint crease between his brows deepened. “And yet, here I am,” he replied, his voice a low rumble, more statement than apology.

I turned my head to look at him fully, though the movement made my neck ache. He sat at the edge of the bed, his posture stiff, his hands resting on his knees now that they were no longertending to me or the fire. The faint glow from the firelight played across his features, sharpening the angles of his jaw and catching on the faint scar that ran just below his cheekbone—a reminder of the battles he never spoke of.

“I sent the wolf for someone else,” I told him. “I never intended for it to find you.”

Leif leaned back slightly, resting his hands on the mattress. He looked away, his gaze settling somewhere near the glowing embers in the hearth. “You were bleeding out when I found you. I thought you’d die before I could help.”

I swallowed hard, the memory of the wound flooding back. The sharp bite of steel, the rush of blood, the fear that had clawed its way into my chest. “You could’ve left me,” I said, though the words felt hollow even as I spoke them.