I take a swig, letting the burn chase away the tension curling in my gut. But I don’t hand it back. Not yet.
Therion exhales through his nose, “So... are we still using her?”
My fingers tighten around the flask.
Therion finally looks at me, gaze cutting and calculating. “Or have you decided to choose a girl over this entire fucking war we’ve been planning for ten years?”
I clench my jaw, restraining myself from punching him in the throat.
Before I can get a word out, he keeps going.
“You’ve had plenty of women before, Kael. It’s never made you reckless.” His tone sharpens. “Or fucking stupid.”
A growl rises in my throat.I will rip him apart for this.
“This isn't about fucking her, Therion,” I bite out, the words like sharpened steel. “It's... more than that.”
He studies me, realization flickering over his face like a blade catching moonlight.
His posture shifts. His anger dims just enough to let something else creep in.
“Then what is it?”
I swallow thickly. My fingers flex. The words feel dangerous, like speaking them aloud will make them permanent.
But I say them anyway.
“I can feel her.”
Therion stills. But not in the way he does before a fight—not the slow, assessing stillness of a warrior calculating his next move. No, this is something else. Something closer to disbelief.
His brow furrows. His fingers tighten around the flask. “What?”
“Even when I’m not with her. I can...senseher.”
The words settle in the space between us, heavy and irrevocable.
And Stars help me, but it’s the first time I’ve let myself acknowledge it.
“It’s like a thread between us I never meant to pull.”
Therion flinches. Not visibly—never visibly—but I see it in the way his fingers tense around the flask, the brief, fractional shift of his shoulders.
“No,” he says flatly, but his voice isn’t as sharp as before. “No,that’s not—” He shakes his head once, as if trying to shake off the words. “That’s not possible. It can’t be.”
But the way his breathing turns shallow, the way his gaze flicks over me like he’s searching for a crack—it tells me he knows I’m not lying.
It tells me he’s afraid I might be right.
I drag a hand over my chest again, pressing against the ache. “It’s like she’s within me. Entwined. Mine somehow.”
Therion’s jaw clenches. His breathing turns shallow. “Fuck,” he mutters, his entire posture rigid. “That’s not... possible. I can’t sense anything within her other than her magic.” But I already know this goes beyond his Aetherstride abilities. This is something...other.
Therion exhales through his nose, eyes locked on the fire, and says nothing.
Silence falls heavy between us.
Therion’s stare sharpens, his mind calculating in real-time.
