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Luna’s expression twists. She does. I can see the war in her, the one that hates me for saying it, and the one that knows I’m not wrong.
Layla shifts, drawing both our attention back to her. Her voice is quiet, small in the way that makes the entire world still to listen. “He’s in my head. Not all the time. But sometimes. Like… echoes. I don’t think he can force me. But he’s waiting for something.”
“What?” Luna asks immediately.
Layla shakes her head. “Permission. Invitation. I don’t know. But I can feel him pressing at the edges of my magic like he’s looking for a door I haven’t opened.”
The fire crackles. The silence around us isn’t empty. It’s loaded.
“If you don’t want to go,” I say again, “then we’ll fight. We’ll keep you with us, and we’ll find another way.”
She meets my gaze. There’s something resolute there now, something that hadn’t been earlier.
“I want to know,” she says. “I want to know what he’s planning. What he’s made me for. If I am going to stand against him… I have to understand what I am to him.”
Luna’s breath hitches. “Layla, ”
“No.” Layla’s voice sharpens. “Don’t protect me from this. Not this. If you want to save Caspian and Ambrose, we can’t afford for me to be the weak link. I’m not just your sister. I’m something else. And I need to find out what.”
Luna looks stricken. I can feel her rage, the chaos of it threading through the air like a live wire. But she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t curse. She just closes her eyes and nods, once, like it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.
And it might be.
I stand slowly, watching both of them as I do. My power hums beneath my skin, coiled and ready. But this decision, it wasn’t mine to make. Not truly.
“She goes when she’s ready,” I say. “Not before. And if Severin tries to take her before that, he’ll learn what true Dominion feels like.”
Luna looks up at me then, and for once, she doesn’t look like she wants to gut me.
Progress. Of a kind.
I turn, retreating into the darkness beyond the firelight, because there’s planning to do. Paths to chart. Every move from here has to count.
And I’ll be damned if we lose anyone else to the void.
Silas doesn’t look at me when I sit beside him, and I don’t blame him. His shoulders are slumped forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands dangling like they’ve lost their purpose. The fire behind us crackles, distant, and the rest of the camp is tucked into uneasy quiet. But he’s out here alone, brooding in the dark like the fucking weight of the world decided to press on his back, and I helped set it there.
I exhale, slow and deliberate. “I shouldn’t have made you do it.”
Silas hums, low and bitter, like he’s chewing glass. “Yeah, no shit.”
His voice isn’t cruel. It’s tired. Like something in him cracked when Luna turned her eyes from him, and now it’s leaking out slow, drop by drop.
“I thought…” I trail off, searching for the words. “She trusts you more than the rest of us. Or maybe I just hoped that if it came from you, it would feel softer.”
He snorts. “Soft? You think I ever come off soft to her?”
I glance at him then. His jaw’s tight, lips pressed in a hard line, but there’s a rawness bleeding through the corners of his expression. The kind he never lets anyone see unless he’s breaking. Not in battle. Not in rage. Just here. Gutted.
“She hates me now,” he mutters, more to the void than to me.
“No,” I say. “She’s angry. Hurt. There’s a difference.”
His head lifts just slightly. “Feels like the same thing.”
Silas has always been reckless. Loud. The first to leap into madness with a joke and a grin and no real plan. But with her… he was different. Unhinged, yes, but careful, too. Obsessive in the way only someone who didn’t know how to love properly could be.
“You didn’t deserve to be the one to tell her,” I admit. “That was my call to make. My burden.”