“Here,” he murmurs, handing it to me. “Please.”
I shake my head, stumbling back.
“Not you,” I murmur again.
I can’t wear anything that smells like him. Reminds me of him.
Daelen’s cloak lands around my shoulders instead—rough wool, smoke and sweat. It scratches, it weighs, itanchors.
My knees give. The ground rises to meet me.
The silence stretches thin, tight enough to split.
The first sob is silent.
The second isn’t.
It claws its way out, tearing my throat raw.
It wrenches out of me like a death rattle—ugly, shaking, unstoppable. I curl into the dirt, hands over my head, as if I can hold myself together by sheer will. But the tremors come anyway. Every nerve firing, releasing. Every held scream spilling loose.
Kael sits across from me.
He doesn’t reach for me.
He juststays. The night sky coils around him like breath, patient, waiting for me to remember how to exist.
I press my palms into the earth until the grit embeds in my skin.
“I’m here,” I whisper to no one. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Each word smaller than the last. Less convincing.
The wind moves through the pass, cold and clean.
For the first time since Kryntar, the air doesn’t smell like Kael.
But I’m still shaking.
And I know—I’ll keep shaking until my bones believe I’m free of him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
KAEL
She comes apartin front of me.
All I can do is watch.
Every instinct in me screams to go to her—to hold her, to make her rememberus—but the look in her eyes stops me cold.
It’s not fear.
It’s hate.
The kind born of betrayal so deep it twists through bone.
She doesn’t want me near her.
