“Maybe. But for how long?” I pause, my next words a decision I haven’t allowed myself to speak until now. “I’ll wait for Margaux and Dom as long as I’m able, but if they don’t show,” my throat catches, grief threatening to surge again. I swallow it down, forcing myself to continue. “I’m going to Wastes, first. I need to find Octavia’s family. If I can’t, she said Vairen still knows the truth. I won’t sit here like prey in a snare, waiting to be dragged back.”
“I’m going with you.”
“You don’t have to—” I start, but the look in his eyes stops me. It’s the same steady determination I remember from long ago, when he’d find me hiding on the roof after one of my parents’ tirades and sit with me until dawn, asking nothing in return.
“I’m not letting you do this alone.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, and then, softly, the question I haven’t dared ask. “If they make it here, Dom and Margaux, will you let them in?”
His expression twists, frustration bleeding into something darker. “Do you even realize what you’re asking?” he says. “Margaux might act like she’s not a Blackwood, but she is one. And Kane—he earned some redemption by getting you out. But Dom?” His fingers tense before clenching into fists. “After what he’s done? This sanctuary is meant to be a safe haven, Aria.”
“Kian will kill him,” I say, the words barely audible. “He doesn’t deserve to die like that.”
“And how many people did he leave to die?” Rowe’s voice sharpens, no longer patient. “You think I don’t know who runs the fight pits? That I haven’t seen what happens to the creatures trafficked through The Den? Dom may not own the empire, but he’s complicit. He carved out a place for himself in it. Every time he had a choice to be better, he didn’t take it. Mercy wasn’t a casualty—it was a rejection.”
“Dom’s not the monster you want him to be.” My voice flares with heat. “He was made into this. Kian didn’t raise him. He broke him. Beat the softness out of him until pain became the only language he understood. Dom never got to choose what love meant. He knew only control, possession, fear. That’s what was taught to him.” My hands clench into fists as I push the words out. “You built this entire sanctuary around saving those the world gave up on. You, of all people, should understand what happens when a child is raised with no other path. You had the opportunity to build a different life. Dom didn’t. Every time he tried to change, Kian reminded him who he belonged to.”
“There’s always a choice,” Rowe says, and though his voice is quiet, the conviction in it leaves no room for doubt. “I understand what you’re saying. But Dom still made his decisions. Maybe he couldn’t tell you the truth because of the contract, but he could’ve refused to be part of it and walked away while sparing you the lies. Instead, he took what he wanted, and left you to carry the consequences.”
“And you think you’d have done it differently?” I ask, voice rising. “That if our places were reversed, you would’ve been some shining beacon of morality?”
“Ididdo it differently.” His gaze locks onto mine, and the raw pain there steals my breath. “I walked away from my family, their legacy. I never wanted power or any of it. But I also walked away from you.”
The confession lands between us.
“I stood by while you fell into that world, piece by piece. Watched you lose yourself to him while I stayed silent. I tried to warn you, but you refused to listen. And I . . .” he stops, jaw ticking. “I didn’t try hard enough.”
He reaches for my hand, and although instinct tells me to recoil, I let him take it. His touch is gentle, almost reverent, and so unlike Dom’s ever-possessive grip. “For whatever it’s worth,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry for how I did it. For leaving the way I did. I know you pretended it didn’t matter, but I saw how much it hurt you. I justcouldn’t stomach the thought of becoming another person trying to dictate your life.”
The silence that follows cuts deep. The kind that settles between two people who don’t know how to bind the rupture time left behind.
His exhale sounds more like resignation than relief. “If—when—Dom shows up here . . . I’ll let him in. Not because I trust him, or I believe he deserves sanctuary, but because I won’t watch you tear yourself apart trying to save him on your own.”
“Rowe—”
“I’ve loved you longer than you realize,” he says, and the cadence of his voice fractures the rhythm of my heart. “That night under our sky—it wasn’t the beginning. It was the first time I let myself imagine what it might mean to reach for more.”
The Solstice Festival at the Darkmoor estate. We were fifteen, cloaked in expectation, and half-drunk on stolen champagne. Rowe, in that tailored black suit he hated, sleeves embroidered in silver like chains he couldn’t shake. He kept tugging at the cuffs as if they were cutting into him. I remember his hand finding mine after our second dance, the way he yanked me away from polished floors and sharpened gazes and out into the cool night air. We tore barefoot through manicured gardens until the wind carried our laughter to the edge of the grounds.
There wasn’t much, only a forgotten piece of the Darkmoor legacy that Alexander had deemed obsolete. But to us, it was everything. The marble floor was cracked with vines curling through the fissures, and the dome had partially collapsed years ago. That broken observatory skylight—that’s what made it perfect and ours. We’d spend hours there, trading secrets under stars that seemed to shine only for us.
I called itour sky, because in that space, we didn’t have to be heirs or legacies, or anything but ourselves. The night air would whisper through the broken dome, carrying away our confessions, our fears, our dreams of something different than the lives laid out before us.
That night, we lay side by side on the cool marble, shoulders touching, watching the stars wink through the jagged opening above. The champagne loosened the weight of our names, turned possibility tangible, courage within reach. For the first time, I let myself imagine Rowe’s hand finding mine in the darkness, closing the distance between us.
“The old observatory,” I whisper, and the way his eyes shift tells me he’s already there, too. Caught in the same fragment of time. “You hated how you looked that night. Not the suit itself, but because—”
“Because it made me feel like I didn’t belong to myself,” he finishes. “That night was the first time I admitted what I truly desired. Not only that I resented the Darkmoor name and the suffocating legacy, but that I had no idea who I was beneath it all. And then you . . .” His voice softens. “You propped yourself up beside me and asked who I wanted to be instead.”
I remember how I’d curled onto my side, watching him speak with more honesty than he ever showed anyone. He’d looked so formal in that stiff black suit, a polished heir pretending he fit the mold. Without thinking, I’d reached up and tugged him closer, coaxing him to rest his head in my lap. He’d let me. And for a long moment, neither of us moved.
The weight of him had pressed down with a trust I didn’t fully understand but wanted desperately to keep. Rowe’s curls were still too perfect, too sculpted to match the vulnerability in his voice, so I’d reached down and threaded my fingers through them, deliberately messing them up until he let out a breathless laugh.
I hadn’t known what to do with the ache it left behind, only that touching him made everything else quieter. That if I stilled, if I didn’t ruin it by speaking, I’d get to keep that version of us for a little longer.
His voice cracks at the memory. “No one had ever asked me that. They just told me who I was supposed to become. But you—you made space for the answer. You didn’t laugh, or call me idealistic.Only said, ‘You’re brave enough. And when you forget, I’ll remind you.’ That’s when everything shifted for me. That was the moment I knew someone finally saw me.”
“You never needed reminding,” I say, my voice barely above a breath. “That part of you hasn’t changed—choosing compassion where others wouldn’t, saving what the rest of the world would rather destroy.” I let a quiet laugh slip through. “Though you did look completely miserable in that suit.”
