POV: Mara
The citadel door slams like a heartbeat. A hard, final sound that ricochets through my bones. The world outside becomes a muffled roar—war turned into weather, distant and too big to hold.
“Moon Silence,” the Regent says, voice flat, like she’s reading out a sentence she wrote herself.
The ward sigils along the inner arch answer her. They flare to life in a dull gold glow, veins of light threading through carved stone. Runners skid to a halt mid-step. Bells choke mid-ring. Message lines go to sleep like animals that know a storm is coming and choose burrows over bravery.
It’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard—silence switched on like a law.
We roll Cael onto a long table that was made for maps and arguments, not broken men. He is too pale and too hot at the same time, fever and shock fighting in his skin. Ash streaks his throat where someone tried to wipe it and gave up. His eyelids flutter like they’re heavy with stones.
The healer cuts his sleeve with a small, wickedly sharp knife and swallows a curse the moment she sees what’s underneath.
Splints, straps, hands. I help, because if I’m not touching him, I’ll scream. My fingers move on instinct—lift, brace, hold, press.
“Pulse?” the healer asks.
“Flicker,” Jax says. His voice is steady, but his hands aren’t. His fingers tremble as he feels for Cael’s throat again, like he doesn’t trust his own answer. “He’s here and then he isn’t.”
Rhun presses against the room from inside Cael’s chest. It isn’t human. It isn’t quiet. It feels like a storm trying to burst out through bone. The pressure slams into me like a wave, knocks into Aster’s light, crashes down my spine, and throws me forward against the table where my hands already are.
“Anchor.” His voice is a howl inside my skull, raw as a torn note. “Anchor me to her.”
Aster answers, calm as a tide easing over rocks. “We can. If she chooses.”
My own hands are shaking so hard I can feel my pulse in my fingernails.
“I don’t know how,” I whisper, but the words barely leave my mouth. I’m not sure if I say them out loud or only bleed them inside.
“You do,” Aster says, quiet and sure. “Bones remember doors. Hands remember light.”
The healer leans across the table and flicks water into my face—sharp, cold droplets that shock me back into my skin. “Don’t faint,” she says, fierce, eyes blazing. “If you faint, I’ll slap you. I don’t have time to drag you off the floor.”
A hysterical laugh claws at my throat. “I won’t,” I say. It’s half lie, half vow, sewn together with stubbornness.
Cael’s head lolls to the side, ash leaving a smear on the wood. His eyes crack open again, like someone prying apart shutters during a storm. He looks lost and furious about it, as if being unconscious offends him personally.
“Mara,” he whispers, so soft I only know because my name moves his mouth more than sound does.
“I’m here,” I say again. It’s all I have, so I sharpen it and give it to him like a blade and a blanket at once.
The Regent stands at the foot of the table, cloak damp at the hem, hair streaked with ash she hasn’t bothered to wipe away. She looks like a painting of grief that decided to wear a sword and sit on a council. Her eyes move over his face, then to the bruises, then to me.
“Options,” she says to the healer.
“Time,” the healer answers, jaw locked. Her hands are stained with old tinctures and fresh blood. “We need time for the swelling to shift, for the bone to decide if it’s angry or broken. For his heart to realize we aren’t done with him.”
“We don’t have time,” the Regent says, no accusation, just brutal fact.
“Then we need a miracle,” the healer says. “Or three.”
Rhun slams against the inside of Cael’s ribs again, harder. My breath catches. “Anchor. Bond.”
The word scorches my tongue even unspoken. Bond. Forbidden, sacred, dangerous. Not the full vow, not the public mark, not the ritual you bring witnesses to and dress in your best sins. But the first thread. A seal. A knot you can tie in the dark to cheat the drift long enough to drag someone back from the edge.
Aster lays her cool hand on the inside of my spine. “If we do nothing, he drifts,” she says. No judgment. Just weather.
I look down at him—at the cut on his lip, at the ash in his hair, at the wolf pacing behind his skin—and for a second I see past all of it.
I look up and meet the Regent’s eyes. Hers search mine with the full weight of a city behind them. She sees too much—my fear, my love, my refusal to let go—and still she doesn’t see everything. She doesn’t see Aster’s light pulsing in my bones. She doesn’t hear Rhun’s howl begging.
That saves us both.
“What are you about to do?” she asks, voice careful, like she’s handling hot iron.
“Something stupid,” I say. “And holy.”
A blink of silence. Even the healers pause. Jax’s head tips just enough that I know he’s listening with everything he’s got.
“Will it kill him?” the Regent asks.
“It will kill me if it doesn’t work,” I answer. The truth tastes like copper. I don’t look away.
Her jaw flexes once, then sets. She nods. “Do it.”
The room hushes. Not the painful Moon Silence from the wards—this is different. This is people choosing quiet. Choosing to let something they don’t understand take up space.
I step closer to Cael until my hips hit the edge of the table. My fingers hover over his chest for a heartbeat, scared of their own courage. Then I set my palm over his sternum, right where I felt his heart beat under my hand a dozen times in too many hallways and on one terrible, perfect night.
His skin is hot and damp. The heat climbs up my arm like a promise.
“Hey,” I whisper to the skin and the man and the wolf under it. My voice shakes, but it still finds him. “Don’t leave.”
Aster flares in my chest. Rhun lunges toward my hand. For one wild second, I feel both of them—storm and tide, teeth and light—meeting in the space beneath my palm like they’re touching foreheads.
The ward lights along the arch shiver, just once, like someone plucked a string under the stone. The glow flickers at the edges of the sigils, then settles, not quite as calm as before.
The air tastes like rain and iron.