Sitting this close to him, it’s harder to maintain the careful fiction I’ve constructed over the years. The lie that we were nothing more than classmates, with shared interests and scheduled study sessions. That I didn’t memorize the way his fingers moved when tending to fractured wings, or how his rare smiles made something flutter in my chest long before Dominic Blackwood tore through my world like a storm and reduced everything tender to dust.
“What happened?” I ask quietly, driven to break the heavy silence. “After Kane took me away. I remember you on your knees, fighting against the enforcers, and then . . .” I swallow hard, twisting my trembling fingers in the hem of his shirt. “Then it’s blank.”
Rowe presses his lips into a thin line. “They sedated me. I was out for two full days.” His tone is restrained, but fury threads through it. “When I woke, I asked everyone—nurses, enforcers, staff. No one would say a word. Alexander eventually appeared and claimed you were ‘fine’, as if that word could erase everything. Like it wasn’t his lab, his hybrid, his—” He cuts himself off, taking a deep breath. “He tried to apologize and patch it over. As if anything could undo what happened. I couldn’t even look at him.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I’m not sure which part I’m apologizing for. Maybe all of it. The legacy. The silence. The irreparable damage his father inflicted. “Are you okay? I mean, nothing strange happened to you after that, right?”
He turns toward me, confusion pulling at his brow. “Strange how?”
I hesitate. “On the way to the estate, I started hallucinating. Visions. Voices. It was bad.” I don’t mention that I saw him in the haze. That my mind conjured memories of us with eerie clarity, blurring the line between reality and buried dreams. “By the time Dom got to me, I was . . .” My throat tightens. “I couldn’t breathe. Everything felt wrong and heavy. I think Kian was there at one point. I heard him talking about punishment and disobedience. Then it all blurred and I blacked out.”
“They didn’t . . .” Rowe’s fists clench, the tendons in his hands standing out in stark relief. “You weren’t taken to the hospital the way I was?”
“No. It was orchestrated, I’m sure of it now. Kian wanted my magical essence degraded and . . .” I choke on the words. They’re acid, but I force them free. “I was clinically dead for a full minute. At least, that’s what Dom told me.”
“What?” He moves closer without hesitation, all restraint forgotten, real fear in his eyes. “That’s not—Dr. Vale said if the toxin spread any further, the effects would’ve been permanent. And they . . .” He breaks off, looking sick. “How are you even breathing?”
My hands begin to tremble uncontrollably, and this time, there’s no concealing it. “When I woke up,somethingwas rewired.” I stare down at my fingers, willing them to steady. “I’m still me, but not completely. As if another presence moved in and took root. Nothing is the same.”
His eyes narrow, scanning me. “What changed?”
“I see and feel things differently. Colors, sound, magic. Emotions hit strange. Sometimes sharp, sometimes too far away. And Dom’s touch . . .” I break off. “It felt wrong. Everything about it did. Like my body knew something before I did.”
“What aren’t you saying?” he presses. “Aria, talk to me.”
“I have a bond with Astrafel.”
The words fall out of me so softly they barely register, but the silence that follows rings deafening. I finally lift my gaze, bracing for rejection, for horror, for anything but the stillness I find in Rowe’s eyes.
“Did you know?”
“That you’re bonded to him?” His voice is hoarse. “No. I didn’t know. I swear to you, I didn’t.”
“But you knew about him.” My voice frays. “About what he is. What blood magic is.”
“Yes.” He exhales. “It’s a Founding Family secret, buried long before our time. They rewrote the records, silenced the witnesses, erased entire histories from every region except Vairen. And even they’ve learned not to speak of it.”
Every answer sharpens the edge of betrayal, and I curl my fingers into my palms to stay tethered, nails carving crescents into flesh that’s gone numb.
“I need to ask.” Rowe’s voice is softer now, like he’s afraid of pushing too hard. “I know it hurts, but what happened at that checkpoint?” His jaw tightens. “For a moment, I thought . . . I thought Kane was Dom. The glamour threw me.”
The truth unravels before I manage to stop it, and my voice breaks apart under the weight of it, each piece falling from my lips in jagged, uneven fragments. By the time the last word slips free, tears stream unchecked down my face, and the sobs that follow shake me until I can no longer speak.
“None of this was mine. Not the choices. Not the relationships. Not the path.Theybuilt me.” I press shaking hands against my face, trying to keep myself together, but the pain seeps through anyway. “Even Dom.Him.He wasn’t real. Nothing was.” A sharp, guttural sound tears from my throat. “He was assigned to me, trained for me. I thought we chose each other, and it was a contract.” Panic claws its way up, raw and relentless. “And now I don’t know if he’s alive. Don’t know if Kian punished him, if he . . .” I can’t say it.
Rowe shifts in my peripheral vision, hands half-raised, uncertain whether touching me will help or make things worse. “Aria . . .” My name sounds like it’s breaking him. “Tell me what you need. How can I help?”
But the walls collapse faster than I can rebuild them, my heartbeat surging until the pounding drowns out everything else. Numbness spreads through my fingers, my skin tingling as the room contracts around me.
“Please. I can’t. Everything is—”
“Tell me what you need. Anything. Just . . .” Rowe’s hands tremble at his sides. “Dammit.” Suddenly he’s there, pulling me into his arms.
I should resist. I’ve spent years reinforcing the wall between us. But I can’t. Not when everything else is collapsing around me.
“Breathe,” he murmurs, pressing my trembling hand to his chest. “With me, Aria. Just like before.”
The familiarity crashes into me—the rooftop, our hidden place, that night after training when I could barely speak, curled in on myself beneath the stars. He had done this then as well, guiding my hand to his chest, and teaching me to steady my breath to his, back when he was the only thing that made the world stop spinning.
