POV: Mara
The citadel learns a new kind of quiet. Not safety. Not peace. A pit. A hush that feels like someone placed a hand over the mouth of the whole fortress. People walk softer, like the floor is grieving and they don’t want to bruise it further. Every lantern burns low. Every whisper sounds like a prayer no one wants to claim.
I sit beside his bed and don’t blink because blinking feels like leaving.
“Eat,” Silvie says, setting down a bowl that steams like it wants to remind me the world is still warm somewhere.
“I can’t,” I answer.
“You must.”
“I won’t.”
She doesn’t argue. She covers the bowl, tucks my hair behind my ear, and wipes my cheek with her thumb the way mothers do when their hands won’t stop moving because they don’t know what else to fix. She smells like onion and lavender and exhaustion.
Healers whisper by the door like the air is listening for mistakes.
“Bondshock,” one murmurs. “The seal overreached. The body collapsed. His mind tried to hold both of them.”
“And is he…” the apprentice asks, voice breaking before the sentence can.
“He’s not here,” the healer says carefully. “And yet…”
The words land like stones on my sternum. My throat closes. My fingers curl into the blanket so hard it wrinkles like it wants to run.
I press my palm to Cael’s sternum. The skin is warm with nothing underneath. That’s the part that kills me—the trick of it. Warmth without drum. Candle after flame. A body that hasn’t chosen which side of the world it wants to stand on.
“Talk to him,” Pia whispers, kneeling. “He’s stubborn. He hates missing conversations.”
I swallow until it hurts. “Wake up,” I tell him. “I still owe you a bad joke. Two, actually. I’ve been saving them.”
Nothing. Not even a flicker. The line between us is broken glass—still there, but sharp, faint, scattered. When I breathe too deep it cuts.
Rhun’s presence is a shadow pressed flat under ice. “Cold,” he sends, faint as fog. “Far. Shore… gone.”
That’s when my hands start shaking. “Aster?” I ask inside, desperate.
Finish what you began, she answers. Not cruel. Not gentle. True. A truth that feels like a blade: Half kept him. Half failed him. Finish.
“How?” I whisper. “Here? In a room with law and eyes and rules that want to choke me?”
“Say it out loud,” Jax says quietly from the doorway, and I jump because he moves like guilt and ghosts these days. He looks wrecked—bandage on his forehead, knuckles bruised, eyes red. Determined anyway. “Say what you need. I’ll clear the eyes.”
He does. Within a minute the hallway empties like a tide pulling back. Healers, apprentices, guards—gone. Only Silvie, Pia, and the Regent remain. Silvie with her hands clenched around her apron. Pia biting her lip until it pales. And the Regent—
The Regent stands at the threshold, colorless, listening to her own pain like it’s a bell she can’t silence. She meets my gaze, and I see too much of my future in her face: loss, fury, love that hurts in the bone, and choices that taste like iron.
“I can try something,” I say. My voice doesn’t shake. Everything else does. “It’s wrong by every rule.”
“Break them,” she answers, voice low. “Break all of them.”
My chest twists. Cael would roll his eyes at her and mutter “Mother,” under his breath like she summoned storms for fun. He doesn’t. I do it for him—just a small scoff, a ghost of his tone—because someone has to hold his place in the room.
Then I lean over him and press my forehead to his.
His skin is warm. Not alive-warm. Not dead-warm. The kind of warmth that waits for a decision.
“Last chance,” I whisper into his still mouth. “Choose me back.”
Aster rises under my skin like tide under moon, like breath under ribs. The room blurs at the edges. The air thickens. My hands tremble. My heart stutters.
I take his face between my palms, feel the faintest echo of what he was—command, heat, stubborn breath—and before bravery can run, I kiss him.
It isn’t sweet. It isn’t careful. It isn’t a question.
It’s a door being kicked open.
Light detonates.
The table slams once under us like something inside him refused to stay still. Gold floods my mouth and burns down my spine. The ward sigils light like stars caught in throats. The windows shake. Someone swears—maybe Jax, maybe gods—and Pia drops to her knees with a squeak.
Heat rushes from him to me to him again, a loop that shouldn’t exist. The broken-glass line becomes molten. Rhun howls—alive, furious, returning. Aster spreads through my ribs like dawn spilling over stone.
His hands twitch.
The Regent grabs the doorframe like the world is tilting.
Silvie covers her mouth.
I keep kissing him because if I stop, the light might stop too.
Something shudders through him—like lungs remembering they are allowed. Like a heart arguing with death. Like Cael, stubborn to the last, refusing to be claimed by anything but his own choice.
The light fractures.
Flares.
And slams back into him.