Her pulse kicked. “When?” she demanded.
“Now.” They answered in unison.
-Kael-
He stood in the arched window above the training yard, watching the castle breathe as the sky bled toward dusk. He felt her presence before he heard her. The pulse of her fury flaring like embers on the wind. Good. He’d wanted her angry. He didn’t turn when the knock came. Didn’t move as the door slammed open, her boots scuffing against the marble.
“I’m not some possession you can rearrange at will,” she snapped.
Kael finally turned, slowly, deliberately.
She stood like a storm barely contained — cheeks flushed, hair wild from wind and climbing stairs, those pale green eyes alight with fury.
“You need proximity,” he said simply, voice low. “You’ve begun awakening something. The magic is… unpredictable. I will not risk you.”
She scoffed. “You mean you won’t risk losing control over me.”
He let the accusation land.
“I mean — Maris I won’t risk someone else realizing what you are before I fully know myself.”
Silence stretched between them —tight as a drawn bowstring.
Maris crossed her arms, shoulders rigid. “You could have asked.”
Kael stepped closer, stopping just short of touching her.
“I don’t ask when it comes to things I protect.”
Her voice softened —just barely — a sadness in her eyes as she lifted her face to look at him fully.
“Or things you own?”
That made him flinch. But he didn’t retreat.
Instead, he raised a hand and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear slow, reverent.
“I’ve tried to stay away,” he murmured. “To let you grow without my shadow warping it. But you’re already changing, Maris. The something old hums when you move. And I feel it, every time you walk too far from me.”
Her breath caught.
He dropped his hand.
“You’ll sleep in a room within my chambers tonight. That is not a command,” he added after a beat. “It’s a truth. You’re safer there. From spies. From yourself.”
-Maris-
The twin wraiths had left her with little more than a clipped “Your new quarters are at the end of the east wing,” before vanishing into the stone like smoke.
She was reeling from the relocation — from Kael’s words — from the unsettling thrum of something low in her chest she didn’t understand.
Maris needed a distraction from her own thoughts — so she opened the heavy ironwood door to the prince’s private chambers, he wanted her here so badly, he could deal with a little snooping.
She expected stone and shadows.
What she found instead was warmth.
The rooms were grand but not cold. They bore Kael’s touch in the heavy drapes of twilight velvet, the ancient swords mounted along the walls, and the sprawling hearth glowing with embers and quiet heat. It felt like trespassing, like peeling back a corner of his mind.
