“What about you?” I ask. “Siblings?”
“Rowena,” he answers. “She’s older than me. Married now, so it feels like I have two sisters.”
I blink. “Youhave a sister?”
I just . . . stare at him for a second, trying to picture it. Thane. Someone’s younger brother.
It doesn’t fit the version of him I’ve come to know these past few weeks. The Warlord. The warrior. The man who carries the weight of an entire realm on his shoulders.
But he’s not just that. He’s abrother.
I shake my head, exhaling a breath of something like disbelief. “It never occurred to me that you have a . . . family. You’re just so . . . Warlord.”
As I say these words, they sound ridiculous, even if true. Everyone comes from somewhere.
He smirks. “Did you think I just appeared out of the fire one day?”
“Honestly? Sometimes it feels like you did,” I scoff.
His smirk deepens, a faint glimmer of amusement in his eyes.
“I’d like to meet her,” I say before I can stop myself.
Thane exhales through his nose. “She’d like you.”
Something stirs in my chest. It rises—slow and warm, a temptation I’m not ready to name.
So I bury it. Before it blooms.
Then, his voice shifts. “I had a brother too.”
I feel it before he says the name—the change in him. The way his fingers flex slightly on his knees. The way his shoulders still—drawn taut beneath the leathers.
“Kastiel.”
He says it softly. Like it’s not a name he says often. Maybe not at all. But that single name conveys everything.
I turn to look at him, frowning. “Had?”
He doesn’t look at me. Just stares ahead, his face blank. His voice, when it comes, is flat. Controlled.
“He died when I was eighteen. In battle.”
The words fall like a stone.
I see it then—not just the weight of command, but the grief beneath it. The kind that builds walls and calls it discipline.
No one ever told me about his brother. And Thane . . . Thane doesn’ttalklike this. Not about himself. Not about his past.
Now I can’t unsee it—the shape of his silence. The history etched beneath the armor; not just a warlord. A brother. A boy who lost too much too young.
I should say something. But what do you say to someone who doesn’t want sympathy, or soft words, or anything that pretends it might ever be okay?
So I don’t.
I just sit beside him. Letting the silence hold the weight. Letting understanding settle into the space between us.
Then—before I can stop myself, before I can overthink the way my voice drops into something softer, somethingreal—Iask, “What’s it like?”
