A beat of silence passed between us. My pulse tightened from the inevitability of it.
“What’s the cost?” I asked.
Cassian huffed out something between a laugh and a scoff. “You already know.”
I dragged a hand across my jaw. “I tried bargaining with them. They refused. Claimed ignorance.”
“Because they want you to be desperate,” he said. “They want you to feel cornered. So you seek them out. So you kneel.”
My teeth clenched. “I will not kneel.”
“Not literally,” he said. “But they know you, brother. They know exactly where to press. They want you powerless enough that joining their circle feels like salvation instead of surrender.”
I stared out the window beyond him, the reflection of my own expression barely recognizable.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Cassian said, quieter now. “Don’t.”
“I might have to.”
Cassian’s eyes narrowed. “You would give in to them? After everything? After they poisoned you, bound you, buried you like a trophy?”
“For her,” I said simply.
His face sharpened. “You would do all of that for a human woman?”
I met his eyes, letting him see the truth. “Yes.”
Cassian blinked once. Twice. As if recalibrating. “Cristian?—”
“I will not allow her to be chained to me,” I said, voice low, steady. “She did not choose this bond. She did not ask to wake me. I will not condemn her to immortality beside a creature she did not intend to love.”
A shadow danced across Cassian’s features. “So you… feel something for her.”
I exhaled. No more running from it. “I love her.”
The words settled in my chest with more certainty than anything I’d spoken in centuries.
Cassian’s expression shifted into one of shock, then something unreadable. Maybe pity. Maybe awe. Maybe fear of what it meant.
“And you’d let them take you for her freedom?” he asked.
“I owe her that much,” I said. “More than that. She gave me life when I had none. And I will not let her die because I am too proud to bend.”
Cassian studied me in silence. He didn’t mock. He didn’t sneer. For once, he didn’t perform. He simply looked at me as a brother. “Then we’d better find another way. Because if you join them, brother… you won’t come back. I know from experience.”
My jaw tightened. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
He gave a slow nod.
Time was running out.
Chapter 27
Nadia
Cristian knocked softly, like he was afraid the door might break under his hand. My heart did that awful seesaw thing—half relief, half fury—but I opened the door anyway.
I kept the frame between us like a moat.
