Sera closed her eyes.This was the part that hurt the most.After.The quiet.The safety.The way it could make her believe in a future she didn’t think she was going tohave.
She forced herself to stay steady.Stay present.Stay honest.
The firelight flickered.Time drifted.Sera’s thoughts slowed, thickening with exhaustion.Alaric’s hand brushed her palm again, the Brand there humming faintly, stubborn, alive.Demanding.Evennow.
She slept.Not all at once.She drifted in and out, her body sinking into warmth and his arms.At some point, the world shifted.She was lifted, the rug leaving her skin, air cool against her back for a brief second.A sound escaped her,soft.
Alaric murmured something low, areassurance she couldn’t quite catch.She didn’t open her eyes.She didn’t need to.He carried her.Careful.Sure.
He laid her on the bed and pulled the covers over them both.Shecurled towardhim.
He gathered her close. Safe. Held.
The room was darker here, the firelight distant, awarm glow at the edge of her vision.Sera’s cheek rested against his chest.She listened to his heart.Steady.Strong.It made something inside herache.
Half asleep, her guard dissolved.The words slippedfree.
“I love you,” she whispered.
She didn’t wake.
Didn’t see his eyes open in thedark.
Something inside Alaric cracked open, sharp and sudden and irreversible.He drew her closer, his arms tightening around her as if letting go was no longer an option.
He didn’t say anything.He didn’t needto.
He lay there listening to her breathe, the echo of her words burning quietly through him, and for the first time in a long time, the control that had held him upright all day wasn’t armor.
It was a cage built of duty and logic and restraint, bars he’d lived behind his entire life without questioning them. Loving her hadn’t created the cage. It had made him aware of it—and made the thought of staying insideunbearable.
ALARIC WOKE FULLY ALERT,already aware.
Not the way most people did, drifting up from sleep through disorientation and memory, but instantly clear-headed as his eyes opened. His body lay still against the sheets, breath steady, heart calm, Sera warm and naked against him, her back fitted into his chest with unconscious certainty. His arm was around her waist, his hand resting low on her abdomen, holding her the way his body always did when it decided something mattered.
And yet something in him had shifted. Not danger. Not urgency. Amisalignment. The same internal sensation he got when a system returned data that looked correct but wasn’t.
His first conscious thought was that something was off. His second was that the source wasn’t external.
The bedroom was quiet, filtered morning light sliding across clean lines of glass and stone. The house was doing what it always did. Climate steady. Security green. No alerts. No anomalies. Nothing externaldemanding attention. Sera slept on, warm and solid, her body familiar and grounding againsthim.
It should have steadied him. Proximity always did. Instead, his palm ached.
He became aware of it gradually, the way awareness crept in when something refused to resolve. The Brand lay under his hand, muted beneath her warmth, the signal dampened instead of sharpened. Skin to skin. Pressure. Contact. All the variables that should have aligned the response. Instead, the sensation remained wrong.
Alaric lifted his hand slowly, eyes narrowing as he studied the lightning-bolt Brand etched into his skin. It wasn’t gone. It wasn’t flaring. It wasn’t doing anything dramatic. It simplyfeltwrong. Not painful. Not hot. Just… muted, as if the signal had been dampened or slightly misaligned, the way a frequency slipped when it was being interferedwith.
He flexed his fingers. The sensation didn’t change.
That should have been impossible. The Brand didn’t fluctuate without cause. It responded to proximity, to pressure, to contact. It didn’t drift on its own. It didn’t go quietfor no reason.
Carefully, Alaric shifted his arm, easing it from around Sera’s waist a fraction at a time, testing her breathing, making sure she didn’t wake. She murmured softly and settled again, her body compulsively seeking the warmth he was withdrawing. He froze until she stilled, then continued as if any sudden movement might fracture something he couldn’t afford to break.
He sat up at last, sheets sliding down his waist, and paused there, one hand braced on the mattress. He looked at her then. Really looked. The curve of her shoulder. The fall of her hair across the pillow. The faint, unguarded softness of her mouth in sleep. He catalogued it the way he did everything that mattered, aware of the quiet pull tightening in his chest.
Only then did he drag a hand through his hair and recalibrate what might be causing the issue with his Brand. Injury. Fatigue. Grief. Residual adrenaline from the night before.
The night before.
