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Dahlia

I didn’t follow him.

Kieran didn’t say it aloud, but I knew the look. The way his jaw tightened. The way his breath hitched on words he wanted to throw like knives but couldn’t. Not at his brother. Not when the wound was that old and still bleeding.

So I let him go.

He needed space. Not comfort. Not questions. Just… room to feel everything he hadn’t let himself feel in centuries.

I stood in the center of the research room, alone now, surrounded by decades—maybe more—of guilt and obsession. The air still hummed with everything he didn’t say.

My gaze swept back over the maps. The frantic scribbles. The layers of dust that clung to older piles Silas must’ve given up on. It didn’t feel like an obsession for power. It felt like loss. Raw and stubborn.

With one last look at the underlined Kieran scrawled in desperate red, I slipped from the room and pulled the door softly shut behind me.

Finding Silas was disturbingly easy.

I followed the sound of some orchestral thing echoing faintly through the east corridor, eventually stepping into a sunlit room that might’ve once been a music hall—or a ballroom—or both.

Now it was filled with more mismatched chairs, some too fancy to sit in and others suspiciously shaped like thrones.

Silas stood barefoot on the tiled floor, sipping something from a dark green glass and watching the sea through a wide-open set of terrace doors. His shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, and he looked—if I was being honest—a little tired.

“You don’t strike me as the orchestral type,” I said.

He didn’t jump. Just smiled faintly. “You’d be surprised. I have layers.”

“You have furniture older than democracy.”

“Also true.”

I stepped closer, folding my arms. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

Silas tilted his head. “That I built a conspiracy board to track his prison and spent several decades doing obsessive magical damage control? Yes, I’m sure that would’ve gone over well over breakfast.”

“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But he thinks you gave up on him. That you walked away and never looked back.”

Silas was quiet for a long time. The only sound was the music and the faint brush of wind through the terrace.

“I did walk away,” he said at last, eyes on the horizon. “But I never stopped looking back.”

I blinked, surprised by the honesty. “The room—it’s not just research. It’s grief.”

He gave a humorless chuckle. “And here I thought you’d say it was unhealthy.”

“It is unhealthy,” I said gently. “But so is burying everything under sarcasm and statues you use as end tables.”

Silas took a sip of his drink. “That room was the only place I didn’t have to pretend. The rest of the world—immortality included—wants performance. Wants poise. That room? It was just… me. Screaming into the dark.”

I moved beside him, resting my hands on the cool stone of the balcony railing. “You loved him.”

“Of course I did.”

“Then why didn’t you try harder to save him that night?”

His jaw tensed. “Because I didn’t know how. Because I was afraid. Because I thought if I stepped in, I’d be pulled into the same trap. And because some selfish, scared part of me thought maybe—if he was gone—I wouldn’t have to live in his shadow anymore.”

That last part cut through the air like a blade.

I didn’t flinch. “You don’t live in his shadow.”

“Tell him that.”

I didn’t have a good answer. So I gave him silence. And he accepted it like a balm.

We stood there for a while, the wind brushing strands of my hair across my face. The sea below shimmered like a secret.

Finally, I said, “He saw the wall. With his name. The way you wrote ‘locked.’ Over and over.”

Silas’s mouth twitched. “He was always the one who figured out my tells.”

“He’s angry. But… I think that mattered.”

Silas didn’t answer. But I caught the way his shoulders dipped—like someone finally set down a weight he’d been carrying alone.

“Don’t let the statues and smugness fool you, Dahlia,” he said quietly. “Everything in this house is haunted.”

“Good thing I’ve got a soft spot for ghosts,” I replied.

He didn’t say anything for a while after that.

We stood there, side by side, the sky bleeding slowly into lavender as the sun dropped lower over the water. The music in the background had faded to a low, aching cello. Fitting.

Silas swirled the glass in his hand, watching the liquid move but not drinking. Eventually, he said, “You know, I’d be glad to have you as a sister-in-law.”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

He smirked, but it was softer this time. Less show, more real. “Of all the women who’ve ever turned Kieran’s head—and there haven’t been many —you’re the first one I’d actually wager on.”

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My brain had taken a sharp left turn into what the hell territory.

He tilted his head, studying me. “Not many women would hand-feed their enemy dinner and scold him into being more polite. And even fewer would show me kindness, after what he told you.”

“I’m still figuring out if that kindness was a mistake,” I muttered.

Silas chuckled. “It probably was. But you offered it anyway. That’s rarer than magic these days.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

So I said, “You’re being surprisingly… earnest.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he said, raising his glass in mock salute. “I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Of course,” I said dryly. “Wouldn’t want the world to think you have feelings.”

“Oh, I do. They’re just expensive and inconvenient.”

I rolled my eyes and turned toward the door. “I should go find him.”

Silas nodded, eyes back on the sea. “He’s not as cold as he pretends to be, Dahlia. But you already know that. Just… remind him. When the ghosts get too loud.”

I paused in the doorway. “For what it’s worth—I think he already knows I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Silas said quietly. “Because neither is he.”