“I need you,” I continue, eyes locked onto hers, unrelenting. “To make the drug.”
She stills, the color draining from her face. “Zephyra,” she whispers, barely audible.
“An improved version,” I confirm. “For the Order.”
The betrayal in her eyes guts me. She recoils slightly, her fingers curling into fists. "So that’s what this was?" she whispers. "You let me believe—"
I clench my jaw, my father's words ringing louder in my head. Weakness gets you killed. I can’t be weak again.I won’t.I let myself believe, for even a second, that I could have something else—something more.
I smirk, a cold, and empty thing. “I let you believe what you wanted to believe.”
She flinches, like I struck her. And maybe I have. Not with my hands, but with the truth—the one I wish she didn’t make me say. The one that cuts me as deeply as it does her. I don’t want to see the betrayal in her eyes, don’t want to feel this ache in my chest. But she asked, and I answered, and now it’s too late to take it back.
She swallows hard, her eyes darting over my face like she’s trying to find something real, something to hold on to. Tears well in her eyes, shimmering in the dim light, but she blinks them back, refusing to let them fall. Then, voice barely above a whisper, she asks, "Was any of it real?"
The fevered whispers. The way I reached for her in the dark. The confessions I barely remember spilling. And now, she’s the one asking if any of it was real—when I could ask her the same damn thing.
I hold her gaze, let the silence stretch between us, let her hope for something, even now.
I close my eyes. Not willing to see the pain my words are about to inflict. “Does it matter?”
Her breath catches, her throat working as she swallows whatever response she might have had. And then she turns away, shaking her head like she’s trying to clear it.
But I see it. The hurt, the doubt, and the way she still wants to believe, even after everything. The way she looks at me like I might still be something more than what I am. Because if she believes it, I might start to believe it too.
And that? That’s what makes her dangerous.
Chapter 44
Where Her Warmth Was
Asher
The room is quiet in a way that feels wrong.
Not peaceful. Not calm. Just heavy, pressing in on me until I’m painfully aware of every breath, and every pull of stitches when I shift. My body is wrecked—exhausted, sore, and dulled by painkillers—but it isn’t the wound that gnaws at me.
It’s the silence.
I shouldn’t have let myself have that moment. That brief, reckless glimpse of something that felt like happiness. Waking with Violet warm against me, her breath sliding over my skin, and her heartbeat steady beneath my palm. For a few hours, lost in fever and haze, I forgot what I am. Forgot what always happens when I let myself want something I don’t get to keep.
Now she’s gone.
Not physically. Worse than that.
Three days pass in a slow, suffocating blur. She still comes in several times a day—efficient, distant. Checks my temperature. Presses careful fingers to the bandages around my ribs. Hands me my pain pills and waits until I take them before slipping away again. No lingering. No warmth. No quiet reassurances like before, when she held me through the worst of it and whispered my name like it mattered.
Boris brings food and sets it down without his usual jokes. Even he feels it—the fracture in the room, the thing Ibroke.
I did this.
I know I did.
Knowing doesn’t make it hurt less.
Every time she enters, I wait for something. A look. A crack in her armor. Any sign that what happened between us wasn’t already boxed up and labeled a mistake. But she never meets my eyes. Never softens. She treats me like a task. A responsibility.
Like a patient.
