Page 24

Only when she exhales again, soft and stirring, does he finally step away. One foot, then another. Each motion too slow, tooreluctant. And I know—gods, I know—he wants her to say something.
Anything.
Wants to hear her voice before Branwen tears it out of him again.
But he walks. Not because he chooses to. Because he has to. Because the second she says his name, Branwen will rip it from his throat like a war cry.
And none of us are ready for that yet. So we leave. And behind us, the girl who ruined gods stirs in her sleep, and none of us dare admit how close we are to falling.
Lucien moves to sit across from me, his shoulders rigid despite the fire’s warmth, his gaze locked on the flames like they might offer absolution. They won’t. He knows that. We both do.
But we watch them anyway.
It’s safer than watching each other.
The fire throws shadows long and low across the ruined stone circle we’ve claimed for the night. Not quite shelter, not quite ruin—something in between. Like us. Half-formed things waiting to be finished, or destroyed.
Lucien hasn’t spoken in twenty-three minutes. I know because I’ve been counting. Not out of impatience, but necessity. When it gets to thirty, he usually breaks. Not with anything useful. Nothing close to truth. But he’ll mutter about formations, or the density of the air, or the way the ruins seem to shift slightly when no one’s looking.
Safe things.
Dead things.
Things Branwen can’t use.
Because that’s the thing about sharing a bond with a monster.
You learn how to speak around her teeth.
I sip from the metal cup between my hands—lukewarm, bitter, but passable—and tilt my head toward the fire. “Wind’s shifting. Might be rain.”
Lucien’s mouth twitches. It isn’t a smile. Just muscle memory. A ghost of civility. “You always say that.”
“Because it always might.”
“Predicting the weather now, Orin?” His tone is dry, almost amused, but I hear the strain beneath it. The pull. The way her hooks twitch when he dares to feel anything too sharp.
“You prefer I speculate on our odds of surviving the week?”
His silence answers for him.
We lapse again into the hum of crackling wood and night creatures just beyond the trees. The ruins breathe around us—slow, ancient, untrusting. Even here, in what remains of Daemon’s earliest bones, nothing is still. The world itself shifts in her presence, and while Luna sleeps under Elias’ ward, Lucien and I sit apart from it.
Because we have to.
Because we can’t afford to feel what they feel. Can’t afford to hope, or ache, or let her name slip past our teeth like a secret.
I’ve sealed my bond to her so tightly it aches in my bones, a vice of silence and steel. For now, it holds. She leaves me alone, obsessed with the first thing she ever owned—the piece of Lucien she never stopped craving.
So we speak of nothing.
Of old training grounds we once razed. Of books half-remembered from lifetimes past. Of ash and frost, and the way the world used to feel when it wasn’t watching our every breath.
He looks at me suddenly, sharply. Not the commander now—just the man buried under it.
“She’s not going to stop,” he says, voice low and hard.
“No,” I agree. “She isn’t.”