POV: Mara
The war room feels too small for this many people, this much fear, this much urgency. It’s built for strategy, not desperation. Maps cover the table—layers upon layers, new ink bleeding over old scars. The parchment curls at the edges from heat and damp. Someone knocked over a lantern earlier and now the wick flickers low, whining for more oil we don’t have. Every breath tastes like metal and worry.
“We reinforce the south bridge,” Cael says, voice tight with sleeplessness and pain he’s pretending he doesn’t feel. “All shields forward. No gaps. Kade hits hardest at dawn.”
“Civilians?” a captain asks, voice shaking just slightly, like he already knows the answer and hates it.
“We keep them inside the citadel,” Cael answers. “It’s safer.”
Safer. I stare at the map—lines, arrows, choke points, dead ends. Safer is a lie with a polite name.
I step forward. “Not if the gates fall.”
Several heads jerk my way. The tension in the room tightens like a rope.
“If the people are trapped behind walls,” I continue, steady, “they die behind walls. We need to open the inner gates for evacuation routes. Give them a path out, not a cage.”
A few council members nod. More shake their heads. A lord scoffs quietly, like practicality is an insult.
Cael’s eyes snap to mine—sharp, startled, wolf-bright. His jaw ticks. Rhun pushes through the bond like a warning drum.
“Mara—opening gates during siege is suicide.”
“And closing them,” I snap before I can swallow it, “is slow murder.”
Silence crashes over the war room. Heavy, electric. Jax stops mid-sentence. A scribe freezes with his quill suspended above the page.
Cael’s jaw flexes. The bond hums between us—heat, pressure, fear, anger—too tangled to tell apart. Everyone feels the tension, even if they don’t understand it.
He steps closer, voice low and dangerous. “If we open them—”
“If,” I cut in, taking a breath that feels like a gamble, “we guide the people, control the flow, guard the exits—it becomes protection, not panic.”
He drags a hand down his face. His eyes flick to the map, then to me. Back to the map. Back to me. He hates it. He knows I’m right anyway.
“You’re asking me to risk thousands,” he says.
“I’m asking you to trust me,” I whisper, and that lands differently. A bone-deep truth. A blade offered hilt-first.
His shoulders drop a fraction—tension leaking like water from a cracked jug. The bond softens, warming at the edges as something in him gives in. Or gives up. Or gives to me.
Slowly, painfully, he nods.
“Then we do both.” He touches the south line with his finger. “My line holds the bridge.” He touches the citadel corridors. “Yours runs the escape routes.” His voice lowers, rough. “No one gets left behind.”
My throat tightens. I nod. “No one.”
The war room erupts—crates dragged, runners dispatched, armor buckled, keys rattling at belts. Plans shift like tides. Sandbag formations multiply. The Regent’s advisors debate in heated whispers. Shadows flicker across maps like ghosts trying to warn us where we’ll fall.
I turn toward the door, ready to run, ready to work, ready to burn myself hollow if it means people live.
But Cael catches my wrist—gentle, warm, a question hidden under the touch.
“Mara,” he murmurs. “We can’t keep fighting each other.”
The bond curls around his words like a hand gripping mine from the inside. I swallow hard.
“I know,” I say quietly.
He steps closer, close enough that the rest of the room fades into smudges of color and breath. “Come here,” he whispers.
I shouldn’t. Not now. Not with war clouds thickening over the river. Not with Kade marching toward us like a storm that knows my name. Not with the Regent half-poisoned and Seris sharpening knives in the dark.
But I do. I step into him like it’s a reflex. Like it’s gravity.
He kisses me the way a dying man drinks water—hungry, reverent, desperate. His fingers slide into my hair; my hands grip the back of his neck, pulling him closer as if I can fuse us for one stolen heartbeat.
His breath shudders. Mine trembles. The bond glows hot—gold, fierce, reckless. I feel his fear, his need, his certainty that we’re standing on the edge of a blade.
I kiss him harder because I need something human before dawn tries to kill us again. Because I want him in my blood when the world breaks open. Because tomorrow is not guaranteed—not for him, not for me, not for us.
A distant thunder crack shatters the moment.
Jax bursts through the war room door, armor askew, eyes bright with urgency. “Enemy horns!” he shouts. “Dawn assault forming at the river line!”
Cael pulls back from me, breath ragged. “It begins,” he says, voice steady even as his hand trembles in mine.
I squeeze his fingers once. “Then let’s go save what’s ours.”