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I move closer. He doesn’t back away, but he doesn’t look up either. I could swear there’s a war happening just beneath hisskin, the one where he wants to run, wants to laugh it off, and the one where he finally, finally stays still.
“And us?” I ask quietly. “Are you going to fight for that?”
Then finally, he lifts his gaze. It’s not guarded. Not cocky. It’s bare. That same haunted softness I’ve only ever seen when he thought I was asleep.
“I don’t know how,” he says.
That admission? It guts me more than any apology could’ve.
Because it’s not that he doesn’t want to.
It’s what he does, and it terrifies him.
His voice drops into something lower, not seductive but stripped. Raw in a way Elias rarely allows. The smirk fades from his mouth, not because he’s lost it, but because this memory leaves no room for jokes. His eyes flick toward the campfire in the distance, burning low, barely clinging to life. It matches his tone.
“There was another one,” he says quietly, the words thick like ash in his mouth. “Before you.”
I already know this. I just didn’t know he would ever say it out loud.
“She was poison wrapped in perfume,” Elias continues, gaze still fixed on the flames like they might scorch away the memory. “Sin binder. Though the bond made her untouchable. She’d play us against each other me and Silas, mostly. But she didn’t stop there. She wanted to own Riven, too. And when she couldn’t? She made him hate himself for caring.”
He laughs, but there’s no humor in it, just bitterness burned down to its last dreg. “She liked the chaos. That was her real kink. Not the sex. Not the power. Just the fucking ruin.”
I shift, the weight of his words settling on my chest like smoke I can’t breathe through. The bond inside me reacts, not with jealousy, but something colder. Protective. Territorial.
“She turned everything into a contest. Who would she fuck that night? Who would she ignore? Who could she hurt more?” He drags a hand down his face. “Silas got the love-bombing. I got the knives.”
There’s a flicker in his gaze now, guilt or maybe something deeper. A memory he doesn’t want me to see.
“She played us all. And I let her. Because I was young and stupid and wanted to believe someone could love me like that. Then she tried to make me choose between her and Silas.”
I already know the end of that sentence.
“I chose him.”
He finally looks at me, and there’s nothing clever left in his eyes. Just an ache I recognize because it’s a mirror of my own.
“I wasn’t going to let her make me hate the people I bled with. Not for a girl who wanted to set us all on fire and watch us burn.”
There’s a pause. Not silence, just stillness, thick with history and unsaid things. When he speaks again, it’s a confession. Not to clear his name, but to explain why he looks at me the way he does. Like I might be different. Or exactly the same.
“So yeah,” he says, voice almost a whisper now. “Forgive me if I’m slow to trust that this time it’s real.”
I step toward him, close enough that if I breathe too deeply, my chest might touch his.
“I’m not her,” I say.
And I mean it with everything in me.
“I didn’t even care when she died,” he says, voice low. “Not really. Just felt like breathing got easier.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Maybe nothing needs to be said. Maybe it’s enough that I’m here, that I’m not her. That he knows I see him, even the parts he tries to drown in sarcasm and distraction.
“She didn’t deserve you,” I say quietly, and when his head turns, finally meeting my gaze, I see it, bare and vulnerable and real. The part of Elias no one else gets to see.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing to me, Luna,” he says. “But it’s not the same. You’re not the same.”
“I know.”