A frantic knock jolted me awake.
I sucked in air, sitting upright so fast my head spun. The room swam back into focus as the fire burned low, Keegan shifted beside me, and his breathing was heavy but steady. My hand still rested over his, grounding me in the reality of his warmth.
The knock came again, louder and more urgent.
“Maeve!” a voice hissed through the door. “Open up, quickly!”
My heart slammed in my chest.
I slid carefully from the bed, tucking the quilt back over Keegan’s shoulders. He didn’t stir beyond a faint groan, lost in his own troubled dreams.
I padded across the floor, my bare feet soundless against the rug, every nerve in me taut. The dream still clung to me, Gideon’s broken words echoing,If I die, no one will care.
I reached for the door, pulse hammering, the urgency of the knock rattling straight into my bones.
And as my hand closed over the latch, I whispered to myself, “This better not be about him.”
Because I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I pressed my palm flat against the door, the frantic knocking vibrating into my bones, but I didn’t open it right away. My breath came in shallow bursts, my body still caught between the nightmare and the waking world.
I turned, and my gaze landed on Keegan.
He was still asleep, chest rising and falling, his lips parted in a quiet, uneven breath.
Keegan did not deserve any of this.
His hair clung against his forehead, the fever not fully broken, but steadier than it had been hours ago. He looked fragile, breakable, in a way that made my chest ache.
And that’s when the guilt rushed in.
Why couldn’t I dream of him? Of his strength, his touch, the way his lips had tasted of kindness and longing only hours before? Why was it that the moment I closed my eyes, Gideon was the one clawing into my mind, his voice raw and broken, his fears seeping into my bones?
It felt like betrayal.
I pressed my fist against my chest, as though I could scrub the guilt out.
But his words clung like burrs:If I die, no one will care.
I hadn’t expected it to echo like that. I hadn’t expected it to matter. And yet, it did.
Because if he was right, if no one ever cared, if his family had turned their backs, then wasn’t that exactly how Malore had sunk his claws in?
I’d always told myself Gideon was arrogant, ruthless, and cruel for the sake of cruelty. But what if that wasn’t the whole story? What if loneliness had been the soil Malore planted his seeds in?
What about his family?
I didn’t know. I realized with a jolt how little I actually knew of Gideon’s past. He was legend, rumor, and nightmare, but never flesh-and-blood memory. Had he been abandoned? Forgotten? Had he spent his youth watching the people around him thrive while he withered, unseen?
And was that why Malore had been able to manipulate him so well?
The thought made my skin crawl. Because if that was true, then Gideon wasn’t just an enemy. He was proof. Proof that Malore didn’t just prey on power. He preyed on the lonely, the discarded, the ones who feared they didn’t matter.
And hadn’t I felt that way, too, in the quiet after Alex left? In the aching silence when Celeste pulled away into her own life? In the long nights when I wondered if I had already faded, already become invisible?
The knock rattled again, sharp and insistent, pulling me back.
