caught in a dream @zarteyaz - Tumblr Blog

Trial By Fire - 7

❥ Pairing: Reader x Eris Vanserra

❥ Summary: Eris Vanserra has perfected the art of being hated — sharp, cruel, untouchable — and you’re the noble he’s always publicly despised. But when Beron discovers the mating bond between you and moves to have you killed, Eris doesn’t beg. He doesn’t break. He calls in his debt with the Night Court—and decides Beron won’t just die—he’ll be dismantled for daring to touch what’s his.

❥ Warnings: depictions of violence, mentions of past trauma

A/N: i leave tumblr for a bit and i miss so much, there's two new books coming???? but anyhoo after over a month here we are at last, i PROMISE i wasn't planning on such a big break after the cliffhanger esp but life just hit me hard all at once, forgive me if this one is a bit rusty its been a while ahhh, but ty tysm for sticking with me <3 this one nearly hit 12k words lol, plz enjoy!!

<- Part 6 | masterlist

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Eris is warm when she wakes.

That is the first thing, before the pale bleed of dawn through the curtains, before the low tick and settle of the banked fire. Before thought. Before names.

Just warmth.

His arm heavy across her waist. The slow press of his breath against the nape of her neck, each exhale a small, unconscious confession. For one heartbeat she cannot place herself in any room, any court, any world at all. There is only weight. Only heat. Only the devastating, impossible shape of a man who has no earthly business being this gentle.

She has seen him sleeping before. That is not it.

It is that Eris does not sleep the way other people sleep. He takes it in slivers, in stolen mouthfuls, the way a starving thing eats. Even then he wakes the instant the air around him shifts, as though rest is a territory he enters illegally and expects, always, to be caught.

But now his face is half-lost in the tangle of her hair, and his brow is smooth, and the whole careful architecture of him—the court-built indifference, the silk-and-razor ease—has come undone in the night.

He does not look innocent. He will never look innocent.

Only unsharpened.

As if sleep crept in while he wasn't paying attention and gently, gently pried the blade from his hand.

She turns on the pillow. Just enough.

Copper hair in disarray. Dark lashes against skin the light has not yet reached. The faintest ghost of a line at the corner of his mouth, like even unconscious he is composing something terrible to say.

And there it is. That ache.

The kind, the deep, bone-deep, kind that comes from holding something you were never supposed to be trusted with. Something the world it belongs to would break on sight if it knew where to look.

His hand rests open against her waist.

Slack with sleep.

Trusting.

That is the word that cracks her open.

Because Eris Vanserra does not trust by accident. He does not fall asleep in rooms that are not his own. He does not leave his hands open where someone could read them.

And yet.

Her gaze falls to his wrist. To where his cuff has ridden back in the night and bared the thing beneath: a burn scar, old and ugly, slashed pale across the inside of his wrist like a word in a language she wishes she did not speak.

Her throat closes.

Carefully she lifts one finger and touches the edge of the mark.

Eris wakes.

There is no transition. One heartbeat he is sleeping and the next his eyes are open, gold and clear and lethally alert beneath the soft gauze of dawn, and his hand tightens at her waist like a reflex he has never learned to unclench.

Neither of them breathes.

Then his voice, roughened with sleep, dropped low by the strange, shared quiet of a room that belongs to morning and no one else, curls through the stillness between them.

"If you wanted to touch me, Wildfire," he murmurs, "you might have chosen somewhere more flattering."

She exhales. It almost becomes a laugh. She doesn't let it.

"You were asleep."

"I was resting my eyes."

"Naturally."

His gaze drops. To her hand still resting on his wrist. To the place where her fingertip has not moved from the scar.

Something crosses his face then—not shame, exactly. Something older than shame. Colder. A door he learned to close before he learned to walk through one.

He begins to pull his wrist away.

She catches it.

The room contracts around that single point of pressure, until there is nothing else. The fire goes quiet. The light holds still. Even the dawn seems to lean in.

"Don't," she says. Softly.

His mouth curves, but it is the wrong kind of smile. Thin at the edges.

"You've become very authoritative before breakfast."

"And you are insufferable before breakfast."

"I'm insufferable regardless of the hour," he says. "Precision matters."

But he does not pull away again.

The fire gives one soft crack. Light is gathering now at the edges of the room, turning the air first to silver, then to something close to gold.

She looks at the scar. Then at him.

"You always cover these before anyone can see."

His brows lift. Elegant. Deflective. "How devastating. And here I thought inscrutability was among my finer qualities."

"Vanserra."

It lands.

Only a fraction, but enough. His eyes go sharp, because she almost never uses his surname unless she means it like a knife—held carefully, aimed well.

She traces the scar again with the pad of her finger. Lighter than breath. No tenderness in the way he would recognize it, because he would recoil from tenderness the way a burned hand recoils from a stove. Just presence. Just I see this, and I am not looking away.

He searches her face with that terrible golden stillness of his, looking for what the world has taught him to expect: the flinch, the pity, the soft, instinctive recoil of someone confronted with what Beron does to the things he owns.

He finds none of it.

Only her.

Only the fury she has never once thought to gentle on his behalf.

His gaze drops to her mouth. Stays. Returns.

"You are making an extraordinary production out of an old scar."

She lifts a brow. "You call me dramatic at least once a week."

"And I have yet to be wrong."

Her mouth twitches despite itself.

She shifts beneath the blankets then, turning fully toward him, and his arm slips from her waist as he turns too, and suddenly they are face to face in the pale hush of the room, close enough that she can see the flecks of darker amber in his eyes, can count the places where sleep has pressed the pillow's crease into his cheek.

Too close.

Never enough.

He watches her the way he watches everything, like the answer to something lethal is written just beneath the surface, and he is deciding whether knowing it is worth the cost.

She lifts his wrist again. Slowly. Giving him room.

He does not take it.

She bows her head and presses her mouth to the scar.

A small and furious thing—that kiss. A declaration of war against every hand that ever taught him his pain was not his own to grieve.

Eris inhales. Sharp. Involuntary.

When she looks up, something in his face has come unlatched.

His free hand rises and finds the side of her face. Warm. Rough-palmed.

"Wildfire," he says, and for once the word carries no barb, no clever cruelty. It sounds almost like a warning. Almost like the first syllable of a prayer he doesn't know the rest of.

She lifts her chin. "What."

His thumb traces once across her cheekbone.

Then his hand moves lower, down the line of her throat, unhurried, deliberate,until his palm comes to rest flat over the center of her chest.

Right above the bond.

It is still new enough to feel like a miracle when he touches there. Still startling, the way something invisible and enormous can narrow itself to a single point beneath skin and answer, like a second pulse learning to keep time with the pressure of his hand.

His gaze follows his fingers.

Then lifts to her face.

"Can you feel it," he asks, and his voice has gone very low, stripped down to something almost raw, almost afraid of its own asking.

The bond answers before she can. A warm, bright swell beneath his palm—embers remembering, suddenly, what they were made for.

"Yes," she whispers.

Something crosses his face then that she has to look away from and look back. Wonder sharpened to a blade's edge by fear. Reverence burdened by the knowledge that in this house, reverence has only ever been another word for vulnerability—the thing they find first when they come for you.

He shifts closer. Their foreheads touch.

His hand stays over the bond, steady, warm.

"If it ever hurts," he says, barely above a breath. "If anything in this house so much as turns its gaze wrong in your direction—"

She smiles against his mouth. She cannot help it. If she does not laugh she will come apart beneath the tenderness of this male.

"What," she whispers. "You'll feel it through the bond and come running?"

His lashes lower.

And for one bare, ruinous heartbeat, she sees how completely he means it.

Then his eyes open, and the old wickedness is there again, but worn quiet at the edges by something too deep and too true to mock.

"Something like that," he says.

"You are unbearably smug for someone who fell asleep in my bed by accident."

"I did not fall asleep."

She laughs. Real and low and startled out of her, and the sound hits him somewhere badly guarded—she can see it, the way his eyes close for half a second, the way his breath changes, as though her laughter has found an old wound he'd forgotten to cover and laid its hand there, gently, without asking.

When he opens his eyes he is looking at her with that same unbearable attention, as if every small thing she does is rearranging him in places he cannot afford to let move.

And then he kisses her.

Not suddenly. Not like a man who has decided something.

Like a man who has surrendered something, and is calling the wreckage holy.

Slowly. His mouth warm and deliberate against hers, and there is nothing uncertain in it, nothing practiced. Only hunger held so carefully it has become its own kind of worship. Only the quiet, catastrophic gentleness of a man who has hoarded softness his whole life like a sin, now spending it—recklessly, deliberately—as though he has finally found the one thing worth going bankrupt for.

His hand stays over the bond.

His thumb moves once across the fabric at her sternum.

The kiss tastes like sleep. Like woodsmoke. Like the kind of tenderness that should not exist inside a house that was built to burn it out of people.

She lets herself fall into it.

Lets herself believe—just for this one impossible, paper-thin moment—that as long as his hand is there, over the bond, over the place that belongs as much to him now as it does to her, nothing in the world can reach her. Nothing would dare.

He kisses her like he knows exactly how borrowed this is.

Like he means to make it permanent in her memory anyway.

His mouth lingers at hers, then draws back just far enough that his breath warms the skin it has left. His forehead stays pressed to hers. His hand does not move.

And when he speaks, the word is not possession.

Not command.

Not the way his father would say it—like a fist closing.

It is wonder. Made audible. A prayer spoken by a man who has never believed in prayer, who has knelt for nothing and no one, and who is kneeling now with a word the size of a world held open on his tongue.

"Mine," he whispers, against her mouth.

And means: the first thing I have ever held without being taught to break it.

⸻

"Again," Beron says mildly.

The rune flares.

Pain detonates through her.

One heartbeat ago she had his hand over the bond, his mouth warm on hers, mine still echoing like something sacred.

Now her fingers claw at the slate beneath her. Her back arches before she can stop it, breath splitting in her throat, and for one horrible, blinding instant she cannot tell whether it is her own body being unmade or the bond itself—only that somewhere, wherever he is, Eris will feel this too.

That knowledge is worse than the pain.

No.

No, no, no.

The pain comes again—sharper this time, a vicious wrench deep in the center of her chest—and she bites down hard on the sound that claws its way up her throat.

Beron steps closer.

"Remarkable thing," he murmurs. "Love."

She lifts her head.

Hatred steadies her faster than courage ever could.

Beron's smile widens by a hair. "Men spend their whole lives pretending they are not ruled by it," he says. "And then the right female screams, and suddenly they become very easy to understand."

Her fingers tighten against the slate.

"You bastard," she spits.

Beron tilts his head, studying her like something pinned and interesting.

"Tell me," he says pleasantly. "Do you think he knows yet?"

She closes her eyes.

Not in surrender.

In refusal.

Don't, she thinks.

Don't come.

⸻

Azriel was getting very tired of shadowing Eris Vanserra like a problem no one else wanted to touch.

He had been doing it since this entire cursed alliance began, and tonight was no different - trailing the male since the message about Lucien came through.

Not openly. Not foolishly. Eris had requested the meeting through the kind of channels designed to suggest discretion and urgency in equal measure. Rhys had wanted confirmation before committing anything more than bare courtesy. Cassian had called it a trap outright. Mor had gone still in that way she did when stillness was angrier than speech.

And Azriel—Azriel had trusted Eris least of all.

So he had followed.

Through Autumn's outskirts and across the scarred road toward Spring, keeping far enough back that even Eris's paranoid instincts would find nothing but trees and weather and the ordinary shape of the night. He had watched the male ride like someone trying very hard to look unhurried.

None of that had surprised him.

This did.

Eris Vanserra was on his knees in the dirt, half out of his mind, Lucien at his side, and whatever was tearing through the bond in his chest was real enough that even Azriel's shadows had gone still.

Which was deeply, catastrophically inconvenient.

Because Azriel had very much preferred the version of the evening in which Eris was lying.

The clearing was washed in thin moonlight and the taut, strained quiet that came just before weather broke. Lucien crouched beside his brother, one hand locked around Eris's arm as if brute force alone might keep him from bolting headlong into whatever stupidity waited on the other side of panic. Eris's other hand was clamped over his own chest, fingers twisted in his coat like he meant to tear the pain out at its root. His breathing came ragged and wrong. Not theatrical. Not performative. Animal and involuntary and edged so close to terror it planted something cold beneath Azriel's ribs.

His shadows hated it.

They had gone still the moment Eris said it—my mate—the words ripped out of him so raw that Azriel knew, instantly and unwillingly, that this was truth. No performance. No careful manipulation. Eris had said it like a male being flayed alive by the admission. Like naming her had cost him more than silence would have.

A mating bond.

On Eris.

That, perhaps, was the most irritating part.

Not because Eris did not deserve one—Azriel was not sentimental enough to think fate cared about deserving. But because the existence of it complicated everything. Eris had always seemed built for harder currency: calculation, survival, saying exactly enough to tilt a room and never enough to hand anyone a blade he could not survive being cut with. Azriel knew that version of him. Mistrusted that version of him. A male like that was not supposed to end up on his knees in the dirt because one invisible thread had gone taut and stripped every lie clean off his face.

And yet.

Azriel's gaze narrowed.

A fresh wave hit.

He saw it before Eris made a sound—the way his spine went rigid, the way his head snapped back like something unseen had driven claws into his sternum and dragged. Lucien caught him before he could pitch forward, swearing under his breath.

Not lying, then.

Not performance.

And worse than that—not random, either.

Because this had timing.

Azriel's shadows slid down his arms in one cold, whispering wave.

Rhys's voice brushed the edge of his mind, sharp with distance and impatience. Well?

Azriel kept his eyes on Eris in the dirt, on Lucien braced beside him, on the shape of a panic no male could counterfeit for long.

Beron's prisoner in Emberward, he said across the bond. She's Eris's mate.

Silence.

Not a pause. A full, stunned blankness, as if even Rhys's mind had stopped moving for half a heartbeat.

Then, at last:

What?

Azriel set Rhys aside for the moment as he was beginning to understand the full scope of the veritable shitshow they were now in.

Eris had not asked for Lucien because he was desperate for reconciliation. He had asked because he needed a bridge to the smallfolk, a name they would trust more readily than his own. That had already been irritatingly plausible. But this—this changed the scale of the problem entirely.

Beron had found the lever.

And Eris, who had made an art of appearing untouchable, had somehow and grown a mate, exposing the single vulnerability Beron's court was best designed to weaponize.

Azriel exhaled once through his nose.

Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

He watched Eris drag in another fractured breath, watched Lucien's face sharpen with horror as the implications caught up to him, watched the whole ugly geometry of the thing settle into place.

This was not a random punishment.

This was bait.

And unless someone intervened quickly, Eris Vanserra was about to do something catastrophic in answer.

⸻

Lucien had seen Eris angry before. He had just never seen him undone.

He had seen him cold, elegant, cruel in that polished way that made other people mistake calculation for ease. Had seen him with blood on his hands and silk on his shoulders and boredom painted across his face while the court around them rotted in plain sight.

He had never seen him like this.

Never seen his eldest brother on his knees in the dirt, one hand clawed so hard into his own coat it looked like he meant to crack his ribs open and drag the pain out by force. Never seen his face stripped so bare that terror could stand there undisguised and breathing. Never seen him reach for something invisible with the kind of desperation Lucien remembered from only one place in his life.

For one ugly heartbeat, Lucien hated him for that too.

Because Eris was not supposed to be allowed this shape of suffering. Not in Lucien's head. Not after everything. Not after a lifetime of silences and half-truths and cruelties worn so well they had ceased to look like masks at all.

And yet here he was.

Shaking.

"Cauldron boil me," Lucien muttered, voice rough with disbelief. "You really do have a mate."

It came out harsher than he meant it to. More stunned than mocking.

Eris didn't laugh.

Didn't even snarl.

His head was bowed, shoulders rigid, breath sawing in and out of him like the air itself had turned hostile. Another shudder ran through him—not wholly physical, not wholly magical, something stranger and worse. Lucien could feel it only by its aftermath, by the way Eris's entire body locked around it like a fist closing on something too hot to hold.

"Eris." Lucien tightened his grip on his arm. "Look at me."

No answer.

Just that same awful, distant stare fixed on something Lucien could not see.

The bond.

The word still felt wrong in his head when attached to Eris. Like hearing a wolf described as gentle. Like being told winter has a heartbeat.

Mate.

It should be absurd.

"Mother above," Lucien breathed.

He had never seen Eris beg for anything.

Not forgiveness. Not mercy. Not affection. Not once in all the years of their shared, misshapen childhood.

But he had heard the last word Eris spoke before the bond hit again. Heard it dragged out of him ragged and raw, like a confession to a god he despised.

Please.

Something cold moved through Lucien's chest.

It was not pity.

He did not know what to call it.

"Who is she?" he asked, because the question was ridiculous and beside the point and yet suddenly the only thing in the world that seemed capable of anchoring any of this to something real. "Eris—who is she?"

Eris's laugh was broken in half before it fully existed.

"What," he got out, voice shredded, "exactly do you plan to do with that information?"

"Work with it, preferably," Lucien snapped, because anger was easier than fear, because his brother's panic was beginning to infect the air between them and Lucien refused to drown in it. "Unless your plan is to kneel here until your heart gives out."

That landed.

Not much. Not cleanly. But enough.

Eris dragged in a breath that sounded like punishment and lifted his head a fraction. His face had gone bloodless beneath the moonlight, eyes too bright, pupils blown wide. He looked fevered. Hunted. Nothing like the male who had strolled into this meeting wearing arrogance like plate armor.

Lucien hated that he could not stop seeing the resemblance anyway.

The bones were the same.

The mouth.

The Vanserra face, built for cruelty and beauty in equal measure.

It was simply missing the mask.

"She's in Emberward," Eris said at last, each word bitten off like it cost him to let them exist. "That is all you need."

Lucien swore under his breath.

Emberward.

A polite word for a cage.

He had not thought Beron capable of surprising him anymore. That had been optimism, apparently. A reckless one.

"And he is doing this through the bond," Lucien said, trying to force his own thoughts into lines that made sense. "How."

Eris's mouth twisted. "Would you like a full scholarly analysis while he tears her apart?"

The old instinct rose quick and hot, the one that always lived under Lucien's skin with Eris, the reflexive urge to bare teeth and answer every barb with two of his own. But it died before it fully formed.

Because Eris was trying to stand.

Lucien felt the shift in him before he saw it. The wild, dangerous gathering of motion. A male pulling himself together on nothing but rage and terror, already turning toward the tree line as if distance could be devoured by force of will alone.

Lucien caught him hard by the shoulder.

"No."

Eris jerked against the grip with sudden violence, nearly taking them both down. "Let go."

"No."

"Lucien—"

There was no familiarity in the way he said it. No plea. Just warning edged with something feral enough to make Lucien's pulse jump.

He held on anyway.

"You run into Autumn like this," Lucien said, low and vicious, "and Beron will have exactly what he wants."

Eris went still.

Not calm.

Still in the way a blade goes still when it is deciding where to cut.

Lucien leaned closer, forcing him to hear every word through whatever screaming was happening inside the bond.

"She could die if you do this wrong," he said.

Eris's head snapped up.

The expression on his face was so nakedly violent that Lucien almost stepped back. Not because he thought Eris would hurt him. Because for a split second he understood with perfect clarity that if anything in this clearing—any god or male or court—stood between Eris and that cell, Eris would burn through it without pausing to remember its name.

It was not menace.

It was devotion in its ugliest, purest form.

"Don't talk to me about what she could be," Eris snarled. "She already is."

The words came out wrecked and feral, torn raw from somewhere below speech. Not argument. Not fear. Something worse—certainty. As if every pulse of the bond was another proof carved into his ribs, as if he could feel her being dragged toward the edge in real time and Lucien's warning was an insult only because it was late.

Lucien's pulse kicked harder.

Jesminda flashed across his mind so fast it was barely an image at all. Dark hair. Laughing mouth. A hand slipping from his. Blood where there should never have been blood.

His stomach twisted.

No.

Not this again. Not another woman turned into a lesson while the males who love her choke on helplessness and timing and all the things they should have done sooner.

Something moved in the shadows beyond the clearing.

Lucien was on his feet in an instant, sword half-drawn before his mind caught up. Eris twisted too, faster than he should have been able to in his condition,fire flickering wild and unsteady along his knuckles.

A figure stepped out of the dark.

Azriel.

"Well," Azriel said softly, and there was no humor in it. "This is… inconvenient."

Lucien's laugh came out thin and incredulous. "You have got to be kidding me."

Azriel's shadows coiled close to his shoulders, too still to be calm. His gaze flicked once over Lucien, then settled on Eris with a cold, measuring sharpness that carried no comfort whatsoever.

Eris did not waste a breath on surprise.

Of course he didn't.

Lucien barely had time to register the shadowsinger's face before Eris was already moving—if what he was doing could still be called moving, and not simply obeying the violent pull of panic. He lurched upright on sheer fury, half-stumbling, half-launching himself toward the tree line like the whole clearing had narrowed to one direction and one purpose only:

Her.

"I do not have time for this," Eris snarled.

His voice was wrecked. Raw enough that Lucien felt it land in his own ribs.

He took one step. Two.

Azriel's shadows lashed outward.

They did not strike him, not exactly. They swept low and fast across the ground like spilled ink given purpose, curling around Eris's boots, his calves, not binding but tangling just enough to check his momentum. Just enough to buy a breath.

Eris whirled.

It was the fastest Lucien had ever seen him move without a weapon already drawn.

For one terrible heartbeat, Lucien thought Eris was actually going to set the clearing ablaze and damn whoever was standing in it.

Azriel stepped directly into his path.

Not aggressive. Not defensive.

Just there.

A wall made of stillness and bad decisions.

Eris looked like he might kill him.

His face had gone bloodless beneath the moon. Sweat shone cold at his temples. One hand was still clamped over his chest as though the bond were something he could physically hold together if he pressed hard enough, and the other had gone bright with a wavering, savage flame that guttered harder each time another invisible shock tore through him.

He looked less like a prince than a wound given legs.

"What do you want, Shadowsinger," Eris said, and Lucien had heard death threats delivered with less conviction.

Azriel's shadows tightened, but he did not move.

"I wanted to know whether you were lying."

Eris laughed.

The sound was ugly enough to make Lucien's skin prickle.

"And?"

Azriel's gaze dragged over him, the tremor in his shoulders, the way his jaw kept locking each time the bond hit, the way his attention split between the clearing and something far away and horrifying, the way his eyes had gone feral with a terror no amount of court training could mask.

Azriel's expression did not soften.

It did, however, change.

By a fraction.

Not sympathy.

Something colder. Clearer.

Recognition.

Because whatever else Eris was—liar, manipulator, opportunist, bastard—this was not performance. No male alive could counterfeit this for long. Not the panic. Not the desperation. Not the way he kept reaching, reaching toward something no one else could see.

"You aren't lying," Azriel said.

Lucien's jaw tightened. "No," he said, before he could stop himself. "He isn't."

Azriel's gaze flicked to Lucien, then returned to Eris.

"You can't go back to the Forest House like this," he said flatly.

Eris's eyes blazed.

"Watch me."

He tried to move again.

Lucien was not prepared for how ugly it was to witness.

Not because Eris was clumsy—he wasn't. Even half out of his mind, there was grace in him, some leftover court-bred precision in the way he shifted his weight and drove forward.

But the bond caught him mid-step.

Lucien saw it happen.

The full-body jolt. The violent, involuntary lock of muscle. The sharp intake of breath that never became enough air. Fire flashed at Eris's hand, guttering wild and unstable. His face twisted—not elegantly, not subtly, but openly, like the pain had stopped caring whether it humiliated him.

His knees almost buckled.

He caught himself with pure spite.

"Cauldron," Lucien muttered.

Eris made a sound low in his throat, more animal than speech, and pressed harder over his chest.

Lucien could see what he was trying not to do.

Run. Winnow. Tear through anyone standing between him and her. Anything but remain here while someone else hurt her.

Azriel's voice stayed infuriatingly level.

"If you winnow into whatever kill-box Beron has prepared," Azriel said, "you'll get her killed and hand him your throat with a ribbon on it."

"I am not taking strategic advice," Eris said, each word stripped down to something sharp and barely controlled, "from a male who has been skulking through the trees eavesdropping on me like a particularly self-righteous fungus."

Lucien would have laughed, in another life.

Azriel only folded his arms. "And I am not particularly interested in your opinion tonight."

That did it.

Eris moved.

Not with the polished precision he wore at court. Not with that measured, poisonous elegance that made every threat sound like wit. This was faster. He shoved Azriel hard in the chest—hard enough to drive him back half a step, hard enough that shadows lashed outward in warning.

"Do not stand there and tell me to wait," Eris snarled.

There was nothing refined in him now. No careful phrasing. No princely veneer. Just a male flayed down to nerve and devotion, shaking with the force of the bond tearing through him.

Azriel caught his wrist before Eris could surge forward again.

Eris jerked against the hold, flame flashing bright and unstable over his knuckles.

"She is alive," Azriel said.

Eris's head snapped toward him, eyes burning so bright Lucien almost looked away.

"You don't know that."

The words came out wrecked. Raw enough to scrape.

Another pulse hit.

Lucien saw it in full this time—the violent seize of Eris's body, the way his breath cut short, the way his free hand flew back to his sternum as though he could physically hold her to this world if he pressed hard enough. The sight sent something cold and old down Lucien's spine.

Jesminda rose first in his mind, as she always did when Beron's cruelty turned intimate: dark hair, warm hands, blood where blood should never have been.

Then, treacherously, another face followed.

Elain.

Soft-eyed and impossible. The female the Cauldron had tied to him whether either of them asked for it or not. Lucien had spent so long trying not to look too closely at that thread between them, trying not to examine what it might become if either of them ever stopped running, that the thought arrived like a quiet knife sliding between ribs he'd thought were guarded.

He imagined feeling this through a bond.

Imagined not knowing if the female on the other end was still breathing.

His stomach turned.

Azriel shoved Eris back—not cruelly, but with enough force to make him stop trying to barrel through sheer panic.

"If Beron meant to kill her tonight," Azriel said flatly, "he would have done it already."

Eris stilled.

Not calm. But still enough to listen through the wreckage.

Azriel pressed on.

"He had days," he said. "He had privacy. He had her in Emberward with no audience to satisfy. If death were the point, you would not be standing here feeling pulses. You'd be on your knees with a severed bond and no question left to ask."

The words landed like stones dropped one by one into deep water.

Lucien watched Eris absorb them and hate them and understand them anyway.

Azriel's grip tightened once on Eris's wrist, then released.

"He is hurting her to pull you into the open," he said. "To see what shape of stupidity love makes you choose. To turn the bond into a leash and watch whether you come when he yanks."

Eris's face changed.

Not much. Not enough for anyone who didn't know what he looked like beneath the mask.

But Lucien saw it—that awful split-second where relief and horror arrived together and neither left room for breath.

Lucien reached for him before he thought better of it.

This time Eris did not shake him off.

Lucien exhaled slowly through his nose. "He wants you to make it worse."

Eris's hand curled into a fist so tight the fire guttered white at the edges.

Lucien's grip tightened on his arm.

"I know what this looks like," he said quietly, and hated how true the words sounded even to himself. "I know what it is to think that if you move fast enough, if you get there hard enough, you can still crack the world open and take back what it's trying to steal."

Jesminda.

Elain.

A future he had never dared name.

Lucien swallowed once.

"But Beron wants you running blind," he said. "So don't."

The clearing went very still.

Eris lifted his head at last.

His face was wrecked. Bloodless. Eyes too bright. Every line of him drawn so taut he looked one hard breath from flying apart entirely.

But beneath all of it, the fury and the terror and the grief wearing panic's face, Lucien saw the thing he had spent his whole life trying not to credit in his eldest brother:

Discipline.

Ugly, brutal, hard-won discipline.

The kind you forge in a house where breaking in front of the wrong person costs you something you don't get back.

It was the only thing keeping him standing.

It was also the only thing that might get her out alive.

Lucien looked at his brother.

At the sweat at his temple. The bloodless mouth. The fingers that kept twitching toward his sternum as though some buried part of him still believed he could hold the bond together by force.

This was real.

That thought should not have felt like grief.

And yet.

"When did it happen," Lucien asked quietly.

Eris looked at him as if the question were an insult.

"The bond," Lucien said, sharper. "When."

Eris's face shuttered.

For a second Lucien thought he would refuse outright.

"A while ago," Eris said.

Lucien stared.

Azriel's brows lifted by the smallest degree.

"A while," Lucien repeated. "That's the answer you're giving me."

Eris's gaze went murderous. "Would you prefer a date? A written statement? An annotated timeline of my personal humiliations?"

"Who is she, exactly?" Azriel cut in.

Eris's gaze snapped to him, lethal.

"No," Eris said, and it was a command.

Azriel's jaw tightened. "Beron already knows enough to hurt her. I need to know what I'm protecting."

Eris's eyes blazed. "You don't."

Azriel's shadows stirred, impatient. "If she is your mate, she is a pressure point. That makes her my concern too, if this plan collapses and Autumn fractures."

Eris's laugh was sharp and ugly. "How generous."

Azriel's gaze went colder. "Don't mistake practicality for kindness."

Eris's nostrils flared.

Lucien's voice cut through. "Stop."

Both of them looked at him.

It landed harder than it should have, perhaps because neither was accustomed to hearing that tone from him.

For a heartbeat, silence.

Eris breathing too fast. Azriel's shadows gone sharp and restless around his shoulders. The clearing one wrong word from violence.

Lucien dragged a hand over his mouth and said, more tightly, "You can hate each other later. Preferably after she isn't being used as a knife."

That did it.

Not cleanly. Not all at once. But Lucien saw the shift happen in Eris like watching a door slam shut somewhere deep inside him.

The panic did not leave.

The terror did not ease.

But something colder rose through it—older, sharper, familiar. The part of Eris that survived things. The part that could still think while drowning.

When he spoke again, his voice was still hoarse. But it was no longer wild.

"We do not go in blind," he said.

Azriel said nothing.

Eris turned to him fully, all that fire and ruin narrowing into something dangerously precise.

"You're coming with me."

It was not a request.

Azriel's mouth went flat with mild disdain. "Am I."

"Yes." Eris took one step toward him, and Lucien saw how much effort it cost to make the movement look deliberate instead of desperate. "You wanted to know whether I was lying. Congratulations. You have your answer. Now make yourself useful."

Eris kept going.

"I want eyes on Emberward before I put a single boot over that threshold," he said. "I want the wards mapped. The guards counted. I want to know who Beron brought in tonight, what changed, what he thinks he's hidden, and whether he's foolish enough to believe nullstone and a rune-circle make him subtle."

Azriel unfolded his arms. "My shadows can get closer than we can."

"Then send them," Eris said. "And if your spies in Autumn are still worth the trouble you swear they are, I want every whisper they've heard in the last two hours."

Azriel studied him for a long moment. Then, because apparently because hell had frozen over and impossible things were simply happening tonight, he gave a single curt nod.

"They're already moving."

Of course they were.

Eris closed his eyes once—briefly—then opened them again.

"Good," he said. "Then we move now. We scout first. If Beron wants to pull me into the open, I'd like to know exactly where he intends to plant the knife before I oblige him."

Eris looked toward the tree line, toward Autumn, toward whatever invisible thread was still sawing him open from the inside. For one terrible second Lucien thought he would bolt anyway—strategy be damned, shadows be damned, the whole clever plan consumed by the one unbearable fact that she was still there and hurting.

Instead, Eris dragged in a breath and said, "We go to the eastern rise first. It gives sight on Emberward's outer wall if the cloud cover breaks, and there's an old servant road Beron never bothered to seal because he thought no one remembered it."

The forest shifted around them, wind moving through the branches with a sound like something ancient waking.

Lucien looked at him.

At the sweat still drying cold at his temples. At the strain carved into the corners of his mouth. At the terrible effort it was costing him not to abandon sense altogether and run straight for Emberward like a blade thrown badly.

Not again.

The thought came hard enough to bruise.

Not another woman. Not another pyre. Not another male dragged to his knees too late while Beron turned love into a lesson and called it law.

Lucien dragged in a breath and said, before he could think too hard about what it cost him, "I'm coming."

Eris's head snapped toward him, eyes bright and raw and dangerous.

Lucien held his gaze.

Then he heard himself say, flatter than he meant to, because if he let too much into his voice the whole thing would split open: "You said you refused. With Jesminda."

Her name landed between them like a struck match.

Eris went very still.

Lucien pressed on, the words awkward in his mouth, half disbelief and half memory. "You said Beron trapped you. That you got word to Tamlin. That you got me out before they could kill me too."

A pulse of pain flickered across Eris's face, but this one had nothing to do with the bond.

Lucien looked at him and hated how much his own chest tightened.

Because some part of him had always known.

Not cleanly. Not in a way he ever wanted to examine. But the knowledge had lived beneath all the bitterness anyway, buried under years of rage and exile and the much easier story in which all his brothers were one pack, one cruelty, one wound with too many faces.

And yet.

Tamlin had come too fast.

Something had gone wrong in Beron's careful ending.

Some part of Lucien had always known there had been one hand in that house—hidden, filthy, compromised, but still reaching—that had not let the final knife fall.

He had simply hated Eris too much to call it mercy.

Too much to call it care.

Too much to call it what it was.

Lucien swallowed once.

Then, because there was no graceful way to say it and grace had never belonged to either of them, he said quietly, "I believe you."

Silence.

Eris did not speak.

But something in him shifted.

His face stayed hard, his breathing still rough, his body still tight with the effort of not turning and vanishing into the dark toward her.

Yet his eyes—

His eyes flicked once to Lucien's face as if he did not quite know what to do with the words now that they existed in the air between them.

Lucien almost wished he could take them back.

Almost.

"I'm coming," he said instead, rougher now. "And I'll speak to the smallfolk. The outposts. The toll houses. The estate workers. I'll get their support, whatever it takes."

Eris's expression said nothing for one beat.

Then it changed.

So slightly Lucien almost thought he'd imagined it.

But there, beneath the strain and the fury and the raw edge of fear, something flickered—something startled, stripped down, and painfully unpracticed.

Not gratitude, exactly.

Not trust.

Something older than either and stranger too.

Recognition, perhaps. Of blood choosing, for once, not to make itself another weapon.

Lucien hated how much it unsettled him.

He hated more that he kept speaking anyway.

"Do not make me regret it."

Eris's voice, when it came, was low and frayed and nothing like court. "Lucien—"

"Don't," Lucien cut in. "Don't say thank you. It would ruin the moment."

The corner of Eris's mouth twitched. Not a smile. Nothing so clean. But something dangerously close.

And for one impossible, flickering second, something passed between them that was not hatred.

Not forgiveness. Not absolution. Nothing nearly so tidy.

Just history.

Just blood.

Just two sons of the same monster standing in the same dark and choosing, however badly, to point themselves in the same direction.

⸻

They stopped short of Emberward on the eastern rise.

It was less a hill than an old wound in the land, a lift of earth and stone overlooking the back edge of the Forest House where the prettier walls ended and the practical cruelty began. From here, through breaks in the canopy and the thin, shifting wash of moonlight, Eris could see the dark sweep of the outer wall. The sharper line where Beron's masons had reinforced the older wing generations ago. The faint suggestion of Emberward's roof through the black lacework of branches, if he narrowed his eyes and held still enough.

Close.

Not close enough.

The bond throbbed low and wrong beneath his ribs.

Not the catastrophic ripping from the clearing. That had eased into something quieter now. Crueler for its persistence. A pulse of hurt that was not his and yet threaded through him so intimately his body no longer bothered pretending it could tell the difference.

Alive.

Still alive.

He clung to that with a violence that felt beneath him and beyond him and entirely, humiliatingly necessary.

The others spread out without speaking.

He didn't.

Not because there was nothing to say.

Because there was too much.

I believe you.

The words kept circling back like a blade that had not yet decided whether it meant to defend or cut.

Eris had not expected them.

Not from Lucien. Not from anyone, perhaps, but certainly not from the brother he had spent years allowing to hate him because hatred was easier to survive than explanation. Easier than trying to build anything honest inside a house where honesty got skinned alive and hung out to dry.

He had always known there would be no glorious moment of revelation. No scene in which truth, once spoken, rearranged the past into something cleaner. Jesminda was still dead. Lucien was still scarred in all the places that mattered. Eris was still Beron's eldest son in a court where eldest meant first to bleed. Nothing undid itself simply because someone finally looked at the right piece of the board.

And yet.

I believe you.

It landed in him like grief. Like relief. Like some ancient locked room in his chest had cracked open just enough to let in the cold.

He hated that it mattered.

He hated more that it did.

A male should not be able to spend years teaching himself not to need tenderness and then be brought so low by a few flat words from a brother in a clearing. It felt like weakness. It felt like something his father would sneer at and know exactly how to use.

Perhaps that was why the gratitude came barbed.

Not warm. Never warm.

Just bitter and startled and strangely old, the shape of something that should have existed between them years ago, before Beron got his hands around all of their throats and taught them to call it upbringing.

Eris stared at the distant roofline of Emberward and did not let himself look toward Lucien again.

Because if he did, he might say something he could not take back.

Because if he did, he might remember too vividly that there was a time when Lucien was small enough to trail after him with more stubbornness than sense, looking for scraps of approval in the places Eris was least capable of giving them.

Because if he did, the whole night might begin to feel too much like mourning, and he had no time for mourning.

She was still in there.

The thought hit him so hard his vision blurred.

She was still in there.

Still in that engineered cold. Still with Beron's hands all over the edges of something that belonged to Eris in a way nothing had ever belonged to him before and nothing ever would again. The knowledge sat inside him like a nail driven slowly through bone.

He should have told her.

The thought arrived with all the useless fury of a wound reopening.

He should have said it when he had the chance. In her room, with dawn at the curtains and his hand over the bond and the whole world suspended for one impossible breath. He should have said it every time it rose in him and lodged against his teeth like prayer strangled before it became sound. He should have given her the words before Beron could give them a battlefield.

Now all he had was the certainty of it and no guarantee she would live long enough to hear him stop being afraid.

A shadow peeled away from the trees below.

One of Azriel's spies. Lesser fae by the look of him, wrapped in the dark anonymity of someone who had lived long enough under other people's power to make invisibility into a craft. He climbed the rise without wasted motion and knelt near Azriel, murmuring too low for anyone but the shadowsinger to hear.

Azriel listened, expression blank.

Then his gaze cut to Eris.

"There's a wardmaster in Emberward."

Eris went still.

"What kind."

"The useful kind," Azriel said dryly. "Old. Court-trained. Brought in less than an hour before sunset."

Eris's hands curled at his sides.

Azriel continued, because apparently that was the sort of night it was. "They're not using the nullstone only to suppress her power."

Eris already knew what the answer would be. He heard himself ask anyway.

"Explain."

Azriel's shadows stirred at his shoulders, one slipping down his wrist like black smoke before vanishing into the grass. "Nullstone dampens magic," he said. "Most of the time. But if someone knows what they're doing—if they have the right runes and enough time—they can turn suppression into pressure. Force the magic downward, inward, into whatever tether is carrying the most strain."

The bond.

The words did not need saying.

Eris's stomach turned.

"He's not hurting the bond itself," Azriel added. "Not directly. He's creating conditions that force it to carry more than it should. Pain. Interference. Magical compression." His gaze sharpened. "Enough to make you feel it. Enough to make you move."

Enough to make a male lose his mind in a clearing and nearly run into a trap so obvious it would be insulting if it were not working.

Eris's laugh came out low and awful. "So my father found a wardmaster clever enough to weaponize architecture."

Lucien's mouth hardened. "Can he kill her this way?"

Azriel glanced at the spy. Then back to them.

"No," he said. "Not quickly. Not unless he pushes far past testing and into outright damage, and that would defeat the point." A pause. "This is controlled. Deliberate. He's measuring the response."

Alive.

Again.

Still alive.

For one treacherous instant, relief loosened something in Eris's chest.

Then self-hatred slammed over it hard enough to make him dizzy.

Because she was alive and still hurting. Alive and still being used. Alive and still paying the price for his father's curiosity and Eris's own inability to become fully unlovable.

He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and tasted blood where he had bitten the inside of his cheek without realizing it.

Tomorrow.

The word arrived fully formed.

Not the trial. Not Beron's drawn-out spectacle of procedure and punishment. Not another day of pressure and bait and whispered testimonies and the whole court gathering like crows over some lovely thing they were prepared to call a lesson.

Tomorrow.

The structure of the plan rearranged itself in his head. Not abandoned. Tightened. Accelerated. A line of dominoes no longer afforded the luxury of falling one at a time.

Beron was escalating.

So they would too.

He looked at Azriel. "The trial is dead."

Lucien turned sharply. "Eris—"

"The trial was a stage," Eris said. "A pretty excuse for time. He's done pretending he needs it." He looked back toward Emberward, toward the roofline he could not burn down yet. "If he's willing to bring in a wardmaster and start pulling on the bond before the hearing, then he's bored of his own script."

Azriel's attention sharpened visibly.

Eris kept going.

"We move tomorrow," he said. "Everything."

Azriel's shadows slid in restless circuits around his wrists. "Beron's inner circle isn't fully cracked yet."

"No," Eris said. "But they're frightened, which is close enough if pressed correctly."

He began pacing the edge of the rise, because movement gave the thoughts somewhere to go besides his throat. Strategy reassembled itself around the panic, not because the panic had lessened, but because there was no other way to remain standing.

The nobles had seen the ledgers, the exemptions. The guild liaisons had begun doing their own arithmetic, which meant by dawn there would be whispers moving through Beron's loyalists like mold through wet grain. Hallen and Soryn and Ralwyn had already started pulling Beron's countryside hands out of position. Lucien would carry Jesminda's name back through the outposts and toll roads, and grief was a language smallfolk trusted when they trusted nothing else.

The machine was already slipping.

Now he only needed to ensure that when Beron reached for it, nothing obeyed.

Tomorrow meant the corrupted lords who had begun sniffing rot in the ledgers would be forced to choose sides before Beron could reassure them with violence.

Tomorrow meant the smallfolk had to hold the line long enough for truth to stop sounding like rumor.

Tomorrow meant his mother came out.

That thought landed with its own clean brutality.

His mother.

Beron's last and oldest leash. The one he had kept polished for decades because it never failed to cut.

He turned fully to Azriel.

"I want my mother out before dawn."

Lucien inhaled sharply but said nothing.

Azriel folded his arms. "If Beron notices her missing too early, he'll accelerate."

"He's already accelerating."

"That doesn't mean we hand him another excuse."

Eris stepped toward him, and even now Azriel's shadows tightened, wary.

"I am not leaving her there for him to use when the rest of this turns loud," Eris said. "If he loses the court tomorrow, he'll reach for whatever still belongs wholly to him." His voice dropped. "My mother comes out."

For once, Azriel did not argue immediately.

Perhaps because he could hear that this was not negotiable. Perhaps because even he was not fool enough to misunderstand what Beron did when cornered.

At last he nodded. Once. "I can do it."

"Good."

Eris had spent years planning for this moment in so many different forms that his mother's extraction sat in his head like a second skeleton. Routes. Staff rotations. Which attendants were loyal to Beron, which were merely frightened, which could be bribed, which had children and therefore predictable thresholds of fear.

"The new lady-in-waiting in her rooms is ours," Eris said. "She'll be waiting. There's a linen passage behind the south chamber that feeds into the old storage tunnels. It comes out below the orchard steps if the secondary latch still works."

Azriel nodded once. "It will."

Eris almost asked how he knew.

He almost did not want to know.

"Take two shadows and no more," he said.

Lucien shifted, the leather at his belt creaking softly. When Eris glanced toward him, his brother was already looking at the forest beyond the rise, toward the outposts scattered like fading embers through the countryside.

"The smallfolk will move faster if I start at East Hollow," Lucien said. "The old orchard district still remembers Jesminda best. Word runs quickly from grief."

Eris said nothing for a beat.

Lucien continued, more briskly now, perhaps because he, too, would like to survive this conversation without anything in him breaking. "From there I can push through the toll road and the Sanford line. If Hallen and Soryn are already repositioning Beron's clerks and paid mouths, I can reach the workers before his men do."

He paused. Looked at Eris.

"The farther the message gets before dawn, the harder it'll be for Beron to buy silence back by morning," he said. "They won't trust your face. They may trust mine long enough to hold position."

Eris inclined his head once.

A small thing. Almost nothing.

He could not seem to make it any bigger.

"Don't die before I get back," Lucien said.

The line was sharp enough to pass for wit.

The look in his eye was not.

For one thin heartbeat in the dark, Eris could almost see the outline of what this might have meant in a less monstrous house. A brother standing beside him not because Beron commanded it, not because cruelty had arranged the room that way, but because blood had chosen—just this once—not to be a weapon.

Something in his chest gave once. Hard.

He said, because anything else would be unbearable, "Try not to get sentimental in front of the farmers. It will damage your reputation."

Lucien actually huffed a laugh at that. Brief. Bitter. Real.

Then he turned and disappeared into the trees.

Eris stared after him longer than he should have.

Azriel watched the space Lucien had vacated for only a moment before looking back. "And you."

The words were flat. Not a question. A challenge in plainer clothes.

Eris knew exactly what he meant.

The inner circle.

The lords who had begun reading too closely, asking the wrong questions, realizing too late that Beron's protection looked suspiciously like theft with better branding.

He would have to finish that tonight.

He would have to make certain that when Beron reached for them tomorrow, they were already too suspicious, too frightened, too resentful to form a clean wall at his back.

He would have to turn years of accumulated disgust into one final, useful night of politics.

The thought filled him with a weariness so profound it felt almost holy.

"I know what I'm doing," he said.

Azriel's brows lifted a fraction. "Do you."

Eris turned to look at him fully.

"I have spent decades," he said, "building this court toward the edge of a blade so that when the time came I could choose exactly where to press. My father's allies are already turning. His ledgers have started eating him alive. The outposts are being quietly hollowed out beneath him. The smallfolk will have a voice by dawn. And now my mate is being used as a live wire in his experiment." He stepped closer. "So unless you have suddenly mistaken me for a fool, do not ask me whether I know what I am doing."

Azriel did not move.

"That," he said coolly, "was not what I asked."

Of course it wasn't.

Eris's temper, already ground thin by pain and exhaustion and the sightline to Emberward just beyond the trees, went bright and ugly.

"What, then."

Azriel's gaze was steady. Merciless in the way only very disciplined males could manage, only the hard, old dislike he had carried toward Eris for years, polished almost as carefully as Eris had polished his own masks.

"I'm asking," Azriel said, "whether you intend to let what he's doing to her break the plan you've spent decades building."

Eris went very still.

The rage that rose in him was almost a relief. Cleaner than fear. More familiar than grief.

"You astonishing bastard."

Azriel's expression didn't change. "That isn't an answer."

"It is the only one you deserve."

Eris took one step toward him.

"Be very careful, Shadowsinger."

Azriel's jaw hardened. "Why? Because I said what no one else will?"

"Because," Eris said softly, "you are one sentence away from making me forget that I need your help."

Something flashed in Azriel's eyes.

Old anger. Old contempt.

And then, inevitably, because the night was not yet finished inventing ways to test him, Azriel said, "You expect me to believe this is different. That she matters more to you than the last female whose life became a convenience."

The words landed like a slap.

For one beat, the whole rise went silent except for the wind in the branches and the ugly, living throb of the bond beneath Eris's ribs.

"You do not," Eris said quietly, "get to speak of her like she is my latest cruelty."

Azriel's face hardened. "And you don't get to pretend you haven't earned the suspicion."

"You hate me," Eris said. "Fine. Hate me later. If you say one more thing about her in that tone, you stop being useful."

Azriel's eyes narrowed.

"I've seen what happens when you decide a female is tolerable collateral."

And there it was.

The old rot.

Mor.

Of course.

Even now. Even with Beron playing his mate's agony through runes and nullstone and whatever abomination of a wardmaster's craft he had paid for. Even now, Azriel still carried that story around like a blade with Eris's name on it, still reached for it the instant he wanted blood.

Eris went absolutely still.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet enough to cut.

"Have you."

Azriel's jaw tightened. "You left her."

"And you," Eris said, fury sharpening every word until they sounded almost calm, "have spent centuries admiring your own outrage without once stopping to ask what, exactly, was avoided."

Azriel's shadows lashed once.

"You thought leaving her at the border was monstrous." His smile was all teeth now, all ruin. "Do you know what would have happened if I had touched her? If I had claimed her? If I had brought her into Autumn under my father's roof after she arrived with another male's scent on her and no use left except scandal?"

Azriel said nothing.

Good.

Let him shut up for half a second and hear a truth he had avoided because outrage was so much easier to carry than complexity.

"My father would have made a lesson of her that your precious indignation would not have survived hearing described."

The bond pulsed again. Hard.

He barely felt it beneath the surge of old hatred rising hot in his throat.

"I gave her a story she could live with," he said. "A wound and a border and enough disgust to keep Beron's hands off the rest." Another step. "But by all means—keep telling yourself I was the villain. It must be so much easier than admitting you never understood the shape of the cage you were judging."

Azriel's mouth went hard.

For a moment Eris thought he might actually strike him.

Instead the shadowsinger only said, colder than before, "If that were true, why wouldn't you have said something earlier."

Eris laughed.

The sound was brief and vicious and exhausted all at once.

"When this is over," Eris said, "ask her what she was spared. Then decide what to hate me for."

Azriel's gaze flickered.

Not understanding. Not acceptance.

But uncertainty.

Small. Almost nothing.

Also the first crack Eris had seen in years of stone.

He closed his eyes for half a breath.

When he opened them, the fire in him had changed shape. Narrowed. Aimed.

"This plan," he said, "exists because of her as much as because of me. The countryside turning against Beron is turning because she fed it when he starved it. Because she built loyalties without ever calling them that. Because she believed Autumn could be dragged into something better with both hands if no one else would do it." His voice went low. "Do not insult either of us by implying I would ruin that for sentiment."

Azriel held his gaze for a long moment.

Then, finally: "Fine."

He went on as if the last five minutes had not happened, and Eris found himself almost grateful for the efficiency of it. "Get your lords in line. I'll get your mother out and send word once she clears the orchard road." He glanced once toward Emberward. "And if the wardmaster changes technique, my shadows will know."

"Get my mother out," Eris answered.

Azriel inclined his head.

Then his shadows gathered. The dark around him deepened, folded, swallowed.

He was gone almost before the leaves finished stirring in his wake.

Eris stood alone on the rise.

Below him, through the dark tangle of trees and the thin wash of moonlight that kept catching on things it shouldn't—the edge of a wall, the glint of a ward-stone, the distant pale line of a path Beron had forgotten to close—Emberward waited.

He could feel her.

Not clearly. This was muddied. Strained. The bond thrumming through layers of nullstone and rune-work, each pulse arriving muffled and wrong, like a voice calling through water.

But there.

Still there.

He pressed his palm flat over his own chest, the way he had pressed it over hers that morning, and let himself feel the distance between the two.

It was the worst thing he had ever measured.

He turned toward the Forest House.

There was still work left to do. Lords to bend. Loyalties to fracture. A court to hollow from the inside until the throne sat on nothing but rot and silence and his father's own name turned poison in every mouth that spoke it.

He had been building this for years.

He had never expected to build it while breaking.

The wind moved through the branches above him, carrying the smell of smoke and wet bark and the first faint suggestion of a dawn that was still hours away.

And somewhere inside Emberward, behind stone and ward and the cold, meticulous architecture of his father's cruelty, she was still breathing.

He did not pray.

He had never seen the point.

But he thought of her face in the dawn light. The way she had lifted his wrist and kissed the scar there without pity, without flinching, without any of the practiced gentleness he had been taught to expect from a world that only touched wounded things in order to assess how deeply they could still be cut. He thought of the way the bond had surged under his hand when she whispered yes. He thought of the word he had given her—mine—and the way it had felt leaving his mouth.

He was going to get her out.

Not because he was brave. Not because he was good. Not because the plan demanded it or the alliance required it or the court would benefit from her survival.

Because she had kissed the ugliest part of him and called it hers.

And Eris Vanserra—liar, prince, monster's eldest son—was not going to let the world take the one person who had ever made that word sound like it meant something worth surviving for.

He descended the rise.

The Forest House waited below, lit faintly from within, patient and sprawling and rotten at its roots.

He walked toward it the way he had always walked toward it—straight-backed, unhurried, with the easy, poisoned grace of a male who had learned long ago that the safest way through a burning house was to look like you were the one who set the fire.

Only now, for the first time, the fire was real.

And it was not his father's.

A/N: this part was a bit more setup-py but we getting real close to the big showdown soon, and finally I have much more time to write so no more month long wait btwn parts, thank you to you all for being patient and waiting and all the kind words 🥹

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