“Stop calling me that!”
Even in the dim light, I see his bronze skin pale and his eyes go wide. “I just want to be able to help you. I can’t stand seeing you like this.”
A shattered laugh escapes me, shaking free from the charred depths of my soul. “You can’t stand seeing it? I can’t stand being it.” The words are meant to be bitter, but they come out broken instead, my voice cracking over them as tears slip free from my eyes.
“Maybe talking about it will help…”
“What if I told you I don’t know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what happened.” My body shakes, and my voice trembles as the words pour from the cracks in my heart. “I don’t know how long he held me there, chained and collared. How many minutes, hours, days. I don’t know what I told him. What truths and secrets passed my lips after he forced poison down my throat. I don’t know if he violated me, or if the fear and poison and pain just twisted my mind so much that it was truly broken by that point. I don’t know what was real and what was not. So, no, I can’t tell you what happened.”
He watches in helpless silence as I unlace the ties of my tunic. Laying myself bare for him, even as it flays me alive.
“What I can tell you is how a collar with just the rightgoiteíaburns through your flesh to your throat, until it hurts just to breathe. I can tell you which parts of the thigh are the most sensitive to the cut of a blade. I can tell you the thoughts that flash through your mind just as you think you’re about to die. But I don’t want to tell you that.”
His throat bobs as he stares at the scar around my neck. His eyes meet mine, and the anguish I find in them would break my heart all over again if there were anything substantial left of it.
“Then what do you want?”
The question rages in the back of my mind like a storm I can’tcontrol. His voice, his eyes—every glance, every word feels like salt on an open wound. I know now. I know about the promises he broke, the lies he wove so effortlessly into his soft words, and the betrayal that cuts through me sharper than any blade. He doesn’t realize it yet. He talks to me, oblivious, as if everything is fine, as if I don’t know. I want to scream at him, to throw his lies back in his face, to demand why he thought I wouldn’t find out. I want to trust him, to believe there’s still something good in him, but the weight of what I know is too heavy. Trust isn’t just broken, it’s shattered, and the pieces will never fit together again. He looks at me with those pleading eyes, and all I can feel is the cold, unrelenting ache of what we’ve lost and the wall I’m already building to keep him out. The only words I find myself capable of giving are the same that have been echoing in my mind since my escape from Keres’s chamber. “I don’t know.”
He exhales, long and slow, and though I don’t lift my head, I feel the shift in him. “You never ask for what you need. That’s part of the problem.”
“Don’t act like you know what I need.” The words come out harsher than I intend, the edges jagged and defensive. Even as I say them, I know they’re more about me than him.
“Don’t I?” he asks. His voice is soft, but the weight of his question slams into me. “I’ve known you for years, El. I’ve seen what they’ve done to you—what they’ve taken from you. Don’t pretend I haven’t.”
My chest tightens, a dull ache spreading through me. His words scrape against the raw knowledge of his betrayal that I’m barely holding back. Silence crashes over us, thick and unbearable. I want to look away, to break the grip of his question, but I can’t. “Why not start with the truth, Raven? That’s what I need.”
“The truth about what?”
“How long has the Eagle been pushing you to get close to me?” The question falls from my lips even as a voice inside me begs for me to stop. To drop the accusation and let Raven have his secrets. But I can’t back down now. Not when my entire life has shifted so drastically in such a brief span of time.
Raven’s expression flickers with confusion, his brows knittingtogether for a moment, before it hardens into something more guarded, like a door slamming shut. His eyes narrow, as if bracing for whatever is coming next.
“Was it before we left?” I ask, my voice steady but probing, taking a slow step closer. “Or when you first came back?”
Another step. The space between us shrinks, but he doesn’t move, his shoulders stiff and unyielding.
“Was it when you first showed me kindness?” I continue. Step.
We’re standing toe to toe, so close I can see the faint rise and fall of his chest, the tension in his jaw.
“Am I getting closer?”
“Aella—”
“No.” I bite the word out. My true name on his lips cuts too deep, the sound slipping past my defenses and nestling somewhere I don’t want it to reach. How many times had I wanted to hear him say that name? And now I wish he didn’t know it at all. “Answer the question.”
“Before you arrived at the Aviary.”
With those words, everything between us falls apart, unraveling the bond we had built over time. The trust, the shared moments, the unspoken understanding—all of it collapses in an instant, crumbling like a fragile structure under too much weight.
What remains is an aching silence, heavy and suffocating, filling the space where connection and warmth once lived. It feels as though the air has been sucked from the room, replaced by a stillness so dense that neither of us knows how to cut through it.
I take a step back. “Leave.”
