He hadn’t cared.
He didn’t care.
But when Isara said it?—
When she looked him in the eye and voiced that truth, dragging it out into the light?
It had clawed him apart. Ripped into parts of him he’d long thought silent.
He scrubbed a hand down his face as he stepped into the bathing chamber, jaw clenched tight. The mirror greeted him as it always did. A reflection he didn’t recognise anymore.
He undid his tunic and let it fall. The newest wounds were fresh enough that the shirt tugged at them slightly as it slid off his shoulders.
He barely noticed.
His body had long since become a graveyard. Fresh wounds stacked over old ones. Half-healed slashes and burn marks, faded scars that he no longer remembered receiving.
They didn’t ache anymore. Just reminders.
He didn’t look like the male who’d once ruled armies. He looked like the reason they would refuse to follow.
Ashterion yanked on a sleep shirt and stepped back into the room, movements mechanical. A sigh left him before he slipped into bed, keeping as much space as possible between them. Not touching. Not breathing too close.
Still trying to figure out what the hell had possessed him to bring her to him that first night.
He was curious. That was all. Torture had become dull to experience. The same routine. The same games.
It certainly didn’t matter that part of him wanted, without understanding why, to reach out. To press his thumb to the bruises on her wrists. To replace violence with something quieter.
Gods, he needed to figure out a way to get her out of here.
Away from him.
Soon.
The sheets shifted.
Ashterion didn’t look up right away. He heard the subtle change in her breathing—the way it caught, tightened, then hissed out in a quiet, panicked exhale. The kind a person made when their dream had dissolved and the nightmare of waking had taken its place.
He turned another page of his book, letting the silence stretch.
“You dream like someone trying to outrun a blade,” he said, voice low, casual.
A pause. Then the distinct sound of her breath catching.
He finally looked up.
She was propped on one elbow, hair mussed from sleep, eyes sharp despite the exhaustion hollowing her face.
“Breakfast,” he offered, gesturing to the small table with a flick of his fingers. “I thought you might be hungry.”
“I’d rather starve,” she muttered, even as her stomach growled loud enough that he was certain the entire castle had heard.
His lips twitched. “How refreshingly predictable.”
She rose—slowly, stiffly, pain obvious in the careful way she moved—but with that same blade-backed pride.
She sank into the armchair opposite him, spine rigid, expression scathing.
