Viktor and Gabriel walked together through the cooling dark.
That was when he saw her.
Through the opening of the command tent, he glimpsed Amerei seated on the floor, her shift pale beneath a satin robe, hair unbound and tumbling gold down her back. She laughed at something said inside—unguarded, radiant, as if war and duty had never touched her.
The sound struck him breathless.
His chest tightened, aching with the need to be near her.
A sharp kick caught his calf.
“Too close to the sun,” Gabriel muttered. “Move along, soldier.”
Viktor forced his legs to carry him past the command ring—past the shadow of her laugh—into his own tent.
The bronze mirror against the canvas wall glinted as he pulled his shirt over his head.
He paused, unwilling, then met his reflection.
Not just his.
His brother’s.
Adamar’s face stared back—young and unlined, the way he had been before sickness hollowed him. But where his brother was forever frozen in memory, Viktor had grown older—sevenyears harder, hair now long and braided at the sides, shoulders built by war.
The lamplight caught in his hair, black as midnight frost, the blue of his eyes cold enough to burn.
He lowered his gaze to the ink below his chest: the raven’s wing etched across his ribs, shadow spread beneath his heart.
Grief coiled sharp as a knife.
Storne’s words followed it.
“I will show you who you are.”
Viktor swiped a hand over his jaw instead.
“I need to shave.”
He sat, scraping the blade mindlessly across his skin until the shadow was gone, then stretched back on the cot, one arm above his head.
His mind refused rest—circling her laugh, her hair, the way her name had already carved itself into him.
“I don’t even know her,” he whispered to the canvas.
Silence pressed back.
His eyes closed, but Storne’s voice still lingered.
“A great and terrible awakening.”
“I don’t even know myself.”
Chapter Nine
The Endowment
What burned in him now could not be undone.
