Something in my chest fractures, not with a crack, but with a slow, unbearable split.
“He saved my life,” Liam says softly. “Once before the forest. Before the Wendigo. Before any of this. And he paid for it.”
My fingers curl around the sketchbook until my knuckles ache. The forest blurs in my periphery.
Ares saved Liam’s life as a child.
And they punished him for it.
And I...I didn’t remember him at all.
The realization sits inside me like a stone sinking deeper and deeper.
Liam kneels beside me, wrapping an arm gently around my shoulders.
“That’s how I know him,” he finishes. “And maybe… maybe why he felt the need to save me again.”
I stare down at the leather book in my lap, the initials A.P. faintly etched into the corner like a whisper from a past I forgot existed.
I don’t speak.
I can’t.
“They beat him,” I whisper, the words scraping out of me as if pulled through thorns. “They beat him for saving you?”
I try to imagine it, Ares small enough to be overlooked in a hallway, hungry enough to be nearly invisible, and still brave enough to pick my broken brother up off the floor. I’ve seen the aftermath of my father’s punishments. I’ve worn it on my own back. But whatever he gave me was calculated, deliberate, his twisted idea of shaping me. Punishment dealt to an outsider? To a servant child accused of harming his heir?
Liam must hear the spiraling in my breath, because he lets out a long exhale and crouches to pull a stray pine needle from the grass.
“The world has been cruel to anyone unlucky enough to fall near our name,” he murmurs. “Crueler still to the ones who didn’t ask for it.”
I slip the sketchbook into my bag, burying it beneath a few folded papers and a half-empty ink vial, as though hiding it will somehow still the questions rattling around inside myribcage. My fingers linger on the leather before I force myself to let go.
“Do you trust him?” I ask. The words come out tight. Fragile.
Liam slings his bag over his shoulder and places his hands on his hips, considering the tree line before answering.
“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” he says finally. “You’ll follow whatever your heart decides to do.” A faint smile tugs at his mouth, not teasing, just… knowing. Too knowing.
He inhales deeply, eyes traveling toward the edge of Vireldan’s silhouette. For a moment he closes his eyes as if picturing Theo waiting for him, counting the seconds.
“I told him I’d only be gone an hour,” Liam says, rubbing the back of his neck. The gesture is tired, but there’s something lighter in it now, like he’s rediscovering the gravity of being wanted by someone.
“Go,” I tell him, pulling my knees to my chest and letting my back rest against the rough bark. “I’m gonna stay a little while.”
“You know how to find me.” He leans down and presses a kiss to the top of my head, lingering long enough for warmth to settle somewhere deep inside my chest.
“I always do.”
He straightens, gives me one last look, the kind that tries to memorize a person in a single glance, and then turns toward the path. His figure slips between the trees, shrinking, dissolving into the dimming light until he’s nothing more than a shifting speck of shadow moving farther and farther away.
Only when he disappears completely do I finally release the breath I’ve been holding, letting my head fall back against the oak. The chill seeps into my skull, down my spine,rooting me in place while the world around me refuses to stop spinning.
A sharp joltsnakes through my body, dragging me out of sleep so abruptly that my breath catches in my throat. My eyes snap open and meet his, Ares, crouched above me, shadowed by the soft orange glow of a sun beginning its slow descent. The light haloing him is gentler than midday, diffused enough to make him look almost unreal, like the forest sculpted him from dusk itself. I push myself upright, rubbing the remnants of sleep from my eyes as I take in my surroundings. I’m still beneath the same tree where Liam left me. I must have drifted off.
Ares remains still, hands buried in the pockets of his black trousers, his coat draped around him like armor. Not a scrap of skin visible. Every inch of him shielded, contained. Controlled. Except the eyes, those refuse to obey any boundary, sweeping over me as if cataloguing every weak point, every shiver, every shift of breath.
He kneels so we’re closer, enough that I feel the heat radiating through all that damn fabric. “Why are you sleeping out here?” he asks, tilting his head, a stray curl falling across his brow. He doesn’t push it away. He just watches me, waiting, as if daring me to lie.
