POV: Liora
I went to find him instead, because the words we had not said in that hallway were louder than anything Maw could have interrupted, and I was done letting silence do my talking.
I found him in the great hall, sitting by the fireplace with his back to the door.
The fire had burned low, casting more shadow than light, and I opened my mouth to say what I had come to say — that we needed to stop circling each other, that the push and pull was wearing grooves in both of us, that I wanted to name the thing between us even if the naming terrified me.
Then I saw his tentacles.
They had gone rigid. Not the protective coil I had learned to read as shame, and not the loose drift that meant he was at ease.
This was different. A taut vibration I could see from across the room, every coil pulled tight and trembling with a frequency that looked less like emotion and more like warning.
"What is wrong?" I stepped into the hall. "And do not say anything, because your tentacles are vibrating."
"The full moon is approaching." He said it the way a man announces a storm he has watched build for days.
"Does it matter?" I asked, though the answer was already written across his body. Jaw locking, shoulders drawing inward, tentacles pressing flat against his ribs as though trying to disappear into his own skin.
"During the full moon the curse takes complete control." The effort to keep his voice level showed in the tendons of his neck. "I am not myself. The tentacles move without my will. The darkness expands until the man vanishes."
I sat with that for a moment. The tentacle that had cradled my neck in the corridor an hour ago was pressed motionless against his body. The one that had brushed my hip in the sea was coiled flat and still.
"How long does it last?"
"One night. Sometimes two." He would not look at me. "I lose all memory of what happens. I wake with blood beneath my fingernails and no way to know whose it was."
"And the girls who came before me." I did not frame it as a question, because I already knew the answer, and forcing him to say it would have been cruelty.
"Yes." The word was barely audible.
I stood and crossed to him, stopping three paces away — close enough to see his face, far enough that the tentacles would not have to choose between reaching for me and pressing flat in terror.
"What do you need me to do?"
"Lock your door when the night comes." The instruction came out stripped of his careful control, quiet and terrified and ashamed. "Stay inside. Do not come to me no matter what you hear."
"No matter what I hear. That is a very broad instruction, Thalen."
"I mean it." He looked at me then, and his eyes were already darkening at the edges, the brown giving ground to black. "Whatever sounds come through those walls, you stay behind your door."
I held his gaze. The word promise sat on my tongue, but I could not push it out.
Jorin had promised me. My father had promised to visit my grandmother.
Every promise I had ever been given had arrived already broken, and I would not do that to him.
"I will lock my door," I said. "But I will not promise to stay behind it if I hear you dying. I am not built for that, and lying to you about it would be worse than honesty."
His jaw tightened and a tentacle twitched against his ribs. "You are already planning to break the lock."
"I am planning to keep it. I am also being honest about who I am."
He closed his eyes. "If you come to me during the full moon, I cannot protect you from what I become. This is the truth of what lives inside me."
I wanted to argue. But the terror in his face was not for himself. It was for me, and arguing with a man's fear for the person he is trying to protect is the cruelest thing you can do to him.
"I understand," I said, and the words cost me more than he would ever know.
He nodded once and left the room without another word. The tentacles trailed behind him, pressed so tight against his body they left marks on his shirt.
I watched the fear reshape him throughout the day. He moved through the castle checking locks I had not known existed, sealing windows in the lower corridors, testing the strength of doors that had stood for centuries.
"You have done this before," I said from the corridor, watching him check a bolt for the third time. "Every full moon. Alone."
"Yes. It is the routine that keeps the pieces together."
"And if the routine fails? If the bolts do not hold?"
"Then I am grateful the island is small and the sea is deep."
The flatness of the answer stopped me. He could not die. The curse healed everything.
He knew that. Which meant he was not describing an escape but a wish the curse would never grant, spoken aloud with the weariness of a man who had tested it and been dragged back to shore every time.
I said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a man who wanted to drown and could not.
Maw followed him at a distance, whimpering, its usual boldness replaced by a wariness that confirmed what his body had already told me. Whatever approached with the moon was real enough to frighten the one creature on this island that feared nothing.
Night came. I locked my door and sat on the bed with moonlight filling the room, white and cold and indifferent.
His footsteps moved through the castle — heavy, wrong, the rhythm no longer belonging to a man who walked upright. A crash echoed from deep inside the stone walls, followed by the groan of splintering wood.
Then I heard him lock himself in, and the sound of the bolt sliding shut from the inside was the loneliest sound I had ever heard — a man imprisoning himself to protect the only person left who cared whether he survived the night.
I sat with my back against the headboard and listened. Through the walls, the sounds began. Not screaming, not the crash of destruction.
A low, wrenched noise that lived between animal and human, the sound of a man being unmade and trying to hold the pieces together with nothing but will.
My jaw ached from the pressure of keeping it shut. Every instinct I had pulled me toward that door, toward the sound of him breaking behind a lock he had closed with his own hands.
I stayed because he had asked me to, and because the terror in his voice when he asked had been the most honest thing he had ever given me.
I would not repay that by proving him right about what happens when someone gets close enough to see what the curse does on the nights it wins.
But my hands shook, and the moonlight was cold, and the sounds behind the walls did not stop.