[Draven's POV]
I find her on the eastern wall, standing at the parapet with her arms wrapped around herself, watching the sea.
The moonlight catches her silver hair and I have to stop walking.
The ache is physical — a compression behind my ribs, sharp enough to steal breath. Not pain.
The particular devastation of seeing something so fierce and fragile that looking feels like holding a blade by the edge.
She doesn't turn, but she knows I'm here.
I cross the remaining distance and wrap my arms around her from behind. She stiffens for half a second, then leans back against my chest.
Her body is still trembling — faint, residual, the aftershock of what Sera's address cost her.
"You're shaking," I say against her hair.
"It's been happening on and off since the hall. My body apparently has opinions about being publicly dissected."
"Do you want to go inside?"
"No, the wind helps; and the sea doesn't care about my bloodline."
We stand like that for a while. The waves break against the cliffs below, rhythmic and indifferent, and the salt air carries the cold that comes off deep water after dark.
"Tell me something that doesn't matter," she says.
"What?"
"Something small, something that has nothing to do with prophecies or wars or houses. I need to think about something that doesn't weigh anything."
I rest my chin on the top of her head. "I hate fish."
She turns slightly in my arms. "You live on a coastal fortress and you hate fish?"
"Every kind. Khaira loves it — she'd eat nothing but tuna if I let her. But every time the kitchen serves grilled mackerel, I have to keep my face neutral while my stomach tries to leave through my throat."
"The feared Lord of the Black Dragon, brought low by a fillet."
"What about you?"
"Porridge, of any kind and preparation. My mother used to serve it cold as punishment — plain oats, no salt, no honey. Three meals of it when I'd done something wrong, which was most days."
She pauses, and I feel the tension in her shoulders shift — not deeper, but sideways, into something she can hold.
She continues. "I used to steal bread from the kitchen in Mintia. I waited until the cook's back was turned and hid rolls in my sleeves, and I got caught twice. The second time, my father locked me in my room for three days."
"For stealing bread?"
"For being hungry without permission and wanting things I hadn't earned — that was the real offense."
The words land in my chest and stay there, quiet and heavy.
"Khaira once ate a fishing boat," I say.
Evelyn turns fully in my arms, eyebrows raised. "An entire boat?"
"She was young, barely two years bonded. A fisherman moored his skiff too close to the roosts, and Khaira decided the hull was a very large, very crunchy fish. Ate half of it before I could reach her. I had to pay the man with my father's ceremonial silver, and the father didn't speak to me for a week."
She laughs.
The sound hits me like a wave. Not the controlled breath that passes for amusement in polite company — a real laugh, full and startled, breaking loose from somewhere she keeps locked.
Her head tips back, and her eyes crinkle. The moonlight catches the moisture still clinging to her lashes from earlier, and for a moment she is just a woman laughing on a wall, unburdened, young, alive.
I watch her laugh and the truth I've been circling for months lands with the full weight of certainty.
I want this woman beside me permanently. Not as a political arrangement or protected asset under the Luminary Protocol. As a consort!
The formal bond — public, irrevocable, declaring before every house in the realm that the Lord of the Black Dragon chose the eldest daughter of Mintia and would choose her again.
The thought terrifies me. The scale of it, the permanence, the political earthquake it would trigger across every allied house and enemy territory.
The vulnerability of standing before the realm and saying this is mine and I am hers and nothing changes that.
The terror is how I know it's right. The only decisions that have ever mattered were the ones that frightened me.
Lyanna stirs. It’s not a ghost, as I stopped believing in them years ago. It’s a memory.
Her face, the way she'd tilt her head when she thought I was being dense about something obvious. She would have laughed at me for taking this long.
She would have liked Evelyn, — the stubbornness, the fire, the refusal to stay down — and she would have told me to stop circling and land.
I don't propose. The timing is wrong — war bearing down, the household still fractured, her wounds still fresh from the hall.
She deserves more than a desperate declaration on a wall with salt wind stealing the words.
She deserves ceremony and intention and the knowledge that it's a choice made in daylight, not a reaction to crisis.
But I take her hand, lift it, and press my lips to her knuckles — gently, deliberately, letting the contact say what my mouth won't.
Her fingers tighten around mine. Her eyes find my face, and I see her reading the unspoken words the way she reads everything — carefully, completely, with the particular attention of someone who learned early that what people don't say matters more than what they do.
She doesn't ask. She holds my hand and leans into my shoulder, and the words I haven't spoken sit between us, warm and patient, willing to wait.
The sea breaks below and the moon tracks across the sky. For five minutes, the world shrinks to two people on a wall and the silence between them that holds more than language can carry.
Then footsteps, running. Sera's runner — a young woman named Lira — appears at the stairwell, breathing hard.
"My lord, Commander Sera sends an urgent word: intelligence report, priority one."
The warmth drains from the moment like water through cracked stone. I straighten, and Evelyn's hand slips from mine as I turn.
"Report."
"The second spy, my lord. Commander Sera has confirmed the coded channel Venna established is still active. Someone inside the compound has been feeding it fresh intelligence — updated patrol routes, defensive positions, the timing of the Alliance loremaster's arrival. The information is current as of yesterday."
My expression goes cold. I feel it happen — the warmth of the last ten minutes retreating behind the mask I wear when the world demands a lord instead of a man.
"Who?"
"She doesn't have a name yet, my lord, but she says she has a plan to flush the source. She's requesting your authorization to proceed."
"Tell her she has it: full authorization and whatever she needs."
Lira nods and disappears down the stairwell at a run.
I stand at the parapet, the sea wind cutting through my shirt, and the gentle minutes we just shared feel like something viewed through glass.
Real but unreachable, separated from the present by the cold fact that someone in my household is still feeding my enemies the information they need to destroy us.
Evelyn stands beside me. Her hand finds mine again — not tender this time, but firm. A grip that says I'm here and we deal with this together.
I hold on. The moonlight bends around her fingers, silver traces crawling beneath her skin, and the war that's coming suddenly feels very close.