“Filthy suits you.”
Her glare deepened, but he only laughed, straightening.
He turned on his heel and strode toward the manor, his parting words lingering in the air like a challenge. For a moment, she just sat there, dirt clinging to her skin, sinking into her thoughts, her boots, her hair. Her mind raced, teetering between irritation and—gods, something else, something warmer, twisting tight in her chest. She shook her head, refusing to acknowledge it, biting back the laugh that threatened to spill out.
Elara scrambled to her feet, brushing dirt from her cheeks as she hurried after him, that unwelcome warmth settling deep inside her.
Chapter 45
The spell ricocheted, a piercing crack ripping through the library as light splintered and rebounded. Elara flinched, hands flying up—but the Hunter was there, arms locking around her as he hauled her down, shielding her with his body against the stone floor.
It should have hurt. It didn’t.
All she felt was the aftershock—energy still shuddering through the room, heat and light flashing like lightning before burning out.
When the last hum of ether faded, the room fell still. His breath brushed her cheek before he pulled back, muscles taut. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t tense beneath him. It was almost second nature now, the proximity. She swallowed, forcing her thoughts away from it. From how little she minded his nearness. From how his presence had become something she could almost rely on.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he muttered, his eyes darting around the room as though searching for what had gone wrong.
“No.” Elara stood, pacing. “The anchor didn’t hold. The link between the subcurrents and the main current was too unstable.”
He sighed. “We accounted for that. I triple-checked the core parameters before we started. There shouldn’t have been any volatility in the primary flow.”
She shook her head. “The framework works, but the fluctuations are too volatile. The spell overreacted. The subcurrents move faster than we can compensate.”
He rubbed his temples. “We calibrated the tether for rapid shifts. It should have handled that instability. If anything, the issue should have shown up in the feedback loop, not the main stream.”
She stopped pacing and faced him, arms crossed. “But that’s the thing—the feedback loop wasn’t the problem. The tether held, but the connection wasn’t flexible enough to handle the shift. The core pattern changed too fast for the translation to adapt.”
The Hunter pressed his lips into a thin line. “So, we’re dealing with a translation issue?”
Elara sank into the chair at the desk. “I think so. We might have to rewrite the entire response structure. If the mechanism can’t adapt quickly enough, it will just keep rebounding like this, which means recalculating how much ether the spell can pull before it overloads.”
“Which will take time,” he muttered, his eyes drifting over the scattered notes on the table.
Time they didn’t have. Only two more days until Osin expected her back in the Pit. They hadn’t been talking about it—both of them pointedly ignoring the looming deadline—but Elara felt every second slipping away, ticking at the back of her mind like a countdown. If they didn’t figure this out, none of itwould work. No memories, no Thane, no way to send the Sidhe home. Not that the Hunter knew about that last part.
“I need to head out for something.”
Elara’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing. He never left this early...
“All right,” she said, suspicion threading her voice as she watched him go. Wherever he was headed, she’d find out later.
For now, with him gone, she could sneak in more practice.
As soon as he was out the door, she moved to the back of the library. The window seat was her favorite spot—his too, judging by the state of the cushions—and she reached for his journal, flipping it open to the familiar pages where she had been slowly piecing together phrases. It wasn’t enough to simply read the language; she had to speak it, to feel it on her tongue if she wanted to get anywhere close to having a real conversation with Reynnar.
Her fingers skimmed over the words, searching for phrases and constructing sentences in her mind. “Tell me about the Aelfhenge,” she whispered in brokenTírrísh, her tongue stumbling slightly over the foreign syllables. “What is the Sidhe’s connection to it? How were you taken from your home?”
Her heart tightened at the thought of him—ripped from everything familiar, everything he loved. This wasn’t idle curiosity or a language exercise. It was his story. His suffering. And every word she whispered felt like stepping into a wound that might never truly heal—a part of him she wasn’t sure she had the right to touch.
She sighed and leaned back against the window, cold glass pressing into her spine as she whispered the words again and again, coaxing them into something that felt natural. The language was still clumsy on her tongue. She adjusted her phrasing, muttered a correction, frowned when it still sounded wrong—then tried again.
And again.
Eyes closing, she focused?—
A sound—quiet, but unmistakable. The creak of the library door. Footsteps.
