“Rose, anything that happened in that dreamscape wasn’t real. You didn’t kill anybody.”
“I might as well have. I made the decision—thatwasn’t fake.” Iclosed my eyes, fighting the urge to pull away. “But he—he had killed all those innocent patients. I didn’t have a choice. He smelled like them. Heenjoyedit, he—” I cut myself off, realizing I wasn’t making any sense. Again, Leo stayed silent, letting me figure out how to tell my story.
“I followed the chaos to the central sector, trying to find Morgana and Beau. It was…a nightmare.” I shuddered, and his fingers came up to skim my arm, the touch featherlight but grounding all the same. “Bodies fell left and right, and there was so much smoke it was hard to see through the haze. Magic against metal. Houses were set on fire, children were—were screaming through the streets, and you couldn’t step anywhere without the scent of blood and copper and burning wood?—”
I stopped again, taking a deep breath to expel the smoke clinging to me. “I helped get some people to safety. There was a shelter we were trying to get as many civilians to as we could. But then…I saw Beau. In the back of a prisoner’s carriage. And I think…I think that was the point of the whole trial.”
“What do you mean?” Leo asked.
I shifted onto my back and stared at the ceiling, forcing his arm to fall away. “The carriage was taking off in another direction, toward the Scarre River. At the same time, I found out a group of Mysthelm soldiers were planning to drop an explosive on the shelter.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “I had a choice.”
Save Beau, or save an entire building of frightened, innocent people.
“Rose, none of it was?—”
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t real, Leo,” I snapped. “You weren’t there. It was theonlyreal thing. The fighting, the death, the terror. It’s still here, buried in my skin, in every breath I take. I made the choice to sacrifice all those people for the sake of my cousin. Nobody may have died, but that doesn’t change the fact thatI still did it. I would do it again, real or not.” I paused, twisting my fingers in the edges of the sheets. “A ‘test of the heart’…well, they know mine now, don’t they?” A bitter scoff left my lips. “Selfish and cold.”
“You can’t honestly believe that,” Leo said. “You were given an impossible choice in an impossible situation. This trial was out of line. They should haveneverput you through such cruelty, Rose. I don’t fault you for a moment for choosing to save your cousin.”
I rolled my eyes and twisted my neck to face him. “Oh, really? The noble Zareleon Aris would have left those innocent people to die?”
“For my sister? Or my mother?” His features turned icy. “Without a second thought.”
“Then perhaps we’rebothselfish and cold,” I whispered.
Leo’s hand found mine on top of the sheets at my waist. “You risked your life to take the place of your uncle so your entire province could have hope. You agreed to help a rebellion full of strangers in order to see the wrongs of this empire righted. You are the furthest thing from selfish, Rose.” His fingers drifted across my knuckles. “As for the other…” He turned my hand over and brushed his thumb along the sensitive skin at my palm, sending lightning through my arm. “What does this feel like?” His warmth seeped into me. It covered the icy shame I’d been edging toward. It felt…burning. Consuming. “Is that cold to you?”
I met his gaze. “What are we doing, Leo?” My voice was barely a breath as it flowed over the moonlight.
His lips quirked up the smallest amount. “Talking. Isn’t that what friends do?”
Just like that, he slipped back into our easy rapport, but this time, I didn’t think it was to hide or run away. I think he recognized how close to some sort of metaphorical cliff I was, how deeply this second trial had messed with my mind. In the small amount of time we’d known each other, he’d learned my masks put me at ease. That I needed a semblance of control when everything inside me felt like spiraling. And here he was, sharing that control with me.
I raised an eyebrow. “This doesn’t look like you want to be myfriend.”
“I asked if wecouldbe friends. Not that that’s what I wanted.”
My lips parted. I was used to this—banter filled with insinuations, lingering looks, meaningless words. Where anything bordering on significant was drowned beneath the reminder that nobody trulysawme, that nobody truly wanted the strange, doomed orphan Alchemist.
But this…this didn’t feel meaningless. Nothing with him ever did.
“Then whatdoyou want?” I asked.
His hand drifted higher, a finger coming up to twirl around a lock of my hair. It was as if our embrace in the forest earlier had unlocked some part of him that couldn’t stop touching me. “I want you to be open with me. I want you to trust me. I want to get to know therealyou, not a shadow version.” He released my hair and traveled to my jaw, lightly running his finger up to my cheek. His eyes tracked the movement, like he was reveling in the freedom our solitude provided. Even the barest of touches from him was much more intimate than I was used to.
“I want that too,” I whispered.
We lay in the silence, each testing the waters, finding our own comfort in this admission. His arm fell between us again, and I caught sight of the tattoo I’d seen the first time we were in this cottage together.
I brushed my fingers against the black ink on his forearm, noting the way goosebumps rose in response. It was a beautiful drawing of an animal face: half of it was a fox, and the other half looked to be a wolf. Delicate vines swirled around it and down his arm all the way to the top of his hand. Leaves and henbane flowers sprouted from the stem.
“What does it mean?” I asked softly.
His eyes were on my fingers as they moved across the design, his features contemplative. “It’s my family. It was a way of keeping them with me. The fox is Rissa, the wolf is our mother. Thehenbane petals represent my father. It was his favorite charm, and I inherited these rings from him.” He twisted a dark gray ring on his middle finger. “He taught me how to infuse them with his favorite combination of henbane and amaranth.”
I hummed, tracing the pattern of the flowers with the tip of my finger. “You haven’t said much about your mother. She was a wolf Shifter?” I asked, diverting the conversation away from his father.
“She still is.”
