“If I had said goodbye, it would have been final.” He takes my hand, bringing it to his lips and kissing the tips of my fingers. His gaze locks onto mine, raw and unguarded. “And I needed something unfinished—a reason to return.”
The words hit me harder than I expected. My throat tightens as the memories resurface—how I’d kept waiting, kept hoping. How the silence, as brutal as it was, had left room to believe he still might return.
I press my forehead to his, eyes shut tight. “You’re a fool.”
He exhales a quiet laugh, barely there. “I am,” he murmurs, the hand not holding my own tracing a slow line down my spine. “But I came back, didn’t I?”
I can’t bring myself to answer, so I lay my head on his chest and hold him tighter. Is that what we’re doing now? Skipping goodbyes, pretending silence makes it easier? That if we don’t say the words, we won’t have to face what they mean? Maybe it’s easier that way. Easier to pretend we’ll always return. Easier to believe that if we never say farewell, the door never truly closes.
Raven kisses my fingers again, and I melt at the tenderness, until he strokes his thumb across the ring on my finger.
“You’re always wearing this,” he says.
“Just something I picked up in the markets at home.” I pull my hand away, ignoring the guilt that tightens my chest at the lie as I hide my hand and the simple gold band beneath the sheets. “It makes me feel like I always have a piece of the Sorrows with me.”
Raven’s hand strokes up my back once more, tangling in my hair. “Perhaps I’ll have to get you something to remember me by.”
I smile up at him, trying to pretend those words don’t fracture my heart. The silence returns, but this time it’s filled with the steady rhythm of his breathing and the calming beat of his heart against my ear.
I memorize this moment—the warmth of his skin, the security of his arms around me, the faint scent of him lingering in the air.
An answer I never thought I would hold settles quietly into place. He never said goodbye back then, and now, I see it for what it was—a silent promise that he’d find his way back.
And for the first time, I understand. Because I don’t want to say goodbye either. Not now. Not ever.
The evening before the thirdtrial, a summons arrives, inviting me to a private dinner with Keres and the remaining contestants—a gathering I can hardly imagine wanting to attend less.
I run a finger along the smooth curve of the laurel-branch belt at my waist, my reflection staring back at me as Nyssa fusses over my hair.
A stranger. That’s what I see—a woman draped in steely blue silk and gold, someone who looks the part of a courtly player in this deadly game. But beneath the thin layer of composure that I force into place, a storm churns.
It hasn’t stopped—not since last night.
Not since him.
My thoughts slip to Raven, unbidden but insistent, like shadows creeping across marble. The memory of his touch ignites my skin, as impossible to ignore as the ache deep in my chest. We broke something between us that has stood steadfast against everything—the trials, danger, even death itself. And yet, it didn’t shatter into ruin.
No, it opened, shifted, evolving into something stronger, fiercer, and far more perilous.
I can’t forget the raw vulnerability in his eyes as he reached for me, the way his walls had crumbled just enough to show the man beneath the assassin’s mask. That moment, when everything seemed to pause, tethered us together in ways I hadn’t prepared for.
Did it make me a fool? Did sitting here now, dressing myself inarmor made of silk and finery while my heart unfurled for someone I could never keep, make me weaker—or stronger?
“All done,” Nyssa announces, breaking my trance. I throw her a grateful smile in the mirror’s reflection, and she grins back. She had taken one look at me this morning and known what had happened. But she knows how raw the subject is, and instead of pressing me for details, she helped me apply cosmetics to cover up the evidence.
“Let’s get this over with, then,” I murmur, before I stand and step past her, every thought of Raven locked away behind a mask I can’t afford to crack.
We leave our chambers and stalk through the palace, passing by endless walls of white marble. With each step, I add more pieces of my armor: my shoulders pushing back, a sway taking over my hips, an eager smile blooming on my face. When we finally step into the dining hall, I’m sure I look like an entirely different person.
The room is much smaller than the formal dining hall, a space for the royal family’s more intimate dinners. A large fireplace takes the chill from the air, and auras flicker in sconces along the walls, casting shadows across the marble floor. The other contestants are already seated at a large oak table in the center, but with Keres still absent, the tension in the room is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Despite the fire warming the space, a chill courses through me as I glance at the other women, and the weight of my close encounters with death settles.
I evaded Sphinx’s claws by a hairsbreadth, avoided plummeting to my doom in the labyrinth thanks to quick reflexes honed at the Aviary, and even survived the ordeal of being poisoned. Each moment feels like a brush with fate, a reminder of how fragile the line between life and death can be. Had the threads of my destiny been woven differently, it might not be me joining the contestants’ dinner tonight.
Cynna lounges to the right of Keres’s empty throne, a sly smirk playing on her lips as she watches Lydia and Zina seated across the table. I slip into the empty chair beside the northern lady, while Nyssa takes her place a few steps behind me.
The matching scowls etched into Lydia’s and Zina’s faces almostmake me laugh, but I stifle it. The unease coiling in my stomach would drain any warmth from the laugh, leaving it sharp and hollow.
