His thoughts scattered like startled birds—sigils, symbols, recurring visions, blood omens, Thalen, Calveran, gods. He couldn’t catch a single one long enough to hold. But he couldn’t ignore that either. Recurring dreams weren’t just fragments of memory. They were patterns. Something that slipped through the seams of logic.
He nearly asked her to describe the veil. To recall the exact pattern, whether she remembered the placement of the sigils stitched there. Maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe it was connected. Maybe—
No.
His fingers twitched against the edge of the table.
Not the time. Not the place. Not while she sat across from him, barely holding herself together, tea untouched, food ignored.
She was just a woman trying to make it to the end of the day without breaking.
He leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on the table. “You don’t have to explain it,” his gaze held hers. “What matters isn’t why the dream comes, or what some council of greybeards would make of it. What matters is that it’syou. What do you need?”
The porcelain cup trembled in her hands. He wished, stupidly, that he could take it from her—pour the whole dream out with the tea and be done with it.
Her lips parted, a flicker of protest rising.
“Evelyne…” he raised his palm. “I don’t care if it’s omen or madness or both. I care that it’s troubling you.”
She didn’t respond right away. But her shoulders eased, just barely.
Her voice was quiet when it came. “Can we just sit here? A little bit?”
“Of course,” he said without hesitation. “I can tell you a story. Would you like it?”
She nodded once, the smallest movement, but it was enough.
He didn’t need more than that. If sitting still was what she needed, he’d anchor the whole godsdamned table.
Chapter 41
The morning light was too kind for how she felt. She didn’t know why she reached for the white pigment. Her hand moved before thought caught up. A curved petal. Another. And another. Her strokes were careful.
Selanthers.
The drawing room had been aired out, the tall windows unlatched just enough to let in a soft draft. It smelled of rain. Evelyne’s brush drifted toward the water cup, but stopped midway. Her gaze flicked to the windows. The mist was lifting.
She had spoken aloud.
The memory of Alaric sitting across the table, eyes sharper than they had any right to be that early in the day, still made her stomach turn. She’d told him.She hadn’t meant to.
And now her entire body ached from the weight of being seen.
Control. Calm. Focus.
She knew the rhythm by heart now. A triad of survival. But this morning, the words rang dull.
Tiny, trembling fingers. The same ones that had once tugged her sleeve in the middle of state dinners, insistent that she look at some absurdly shaped carrot on his plate. The same hands she’d held through fever and fear and bedtime stories. He had held that cursed veil like it weighed nothing, though the stain bloomed deeper and darker with each second he stood there.
The look that saidyou were supposed to protect me.
Evelyne closed her eyes, breathing slowly. She should have known better. She did know better. Vulnerability wasn’t meant for daylight. It was something you buried in the night and covered with courtly silk in the morning.
She turned back to the canvas and added a second layer. Shading the blooms. Letting the white bleed faintly into duskiergrey. But it looked too clean. Too soft. The pigment clung to her fingertips, smelling faintly of lye and crushed chalk.
So she dipped into red.
A touch at first—a petal, the fine vein of a leaf. But the brush didn’t stop. It pulled her hand further. Stroke after stroke, the red spread, seeping into edges, swallowing white until nothing else mattered. Her grip tightened until the wood of the brush bit into her palm.
