“I was hollow long before that. Before the Court fell. Before the war. Before I ever wore a crown. They carved the shape of a king into me and left nothing inside but duty. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t want… I didn’t hope. I just… obeyed.”
His eyes flickered, gold bright with something raw.
“I didn’t know what it meant to feel alive, Caelira. Not once. Not truly.”
He stepped closer, breath shaking like the truth was dragging itself out of him.
“And then you…” the word broke in his mouth, “you walked into these ruins, into the wreckage of everything I failed to save… and you didn’t flinch. You looked at what is left of my Court like it deserved a second chance.”
His voice dropped, wrecked and reverent.
“And gods, Caelira… you looked at me like I was still someone worth saving.”
My breath caught.
Not because his words were soft, but because they were stripped bare, an admission pulled from a place so deep I wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken from it before.
“Atlas…” His name left my lips on a whisper, my body moving before thought could catch up. I stepped toward him without realizing I had.
He didn’t retreat.
He never did.
He held my gaze like letting go would undo everything we’d woken beneath our feet, like stepping back would shatter whatever fragile impossible truth had just cracked open between us.
Something sharp pricked my palm.
I glanced down to see a thin line of blood where the fractured sigil had split against my skin, the same place my mark had burned not long ago. Silver light pulsed beneath the cut, answering the sting as though even the wound recognized him.
Atlas saw it instantly. His breath hitched, the smallest betrayal of control. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. But the way his expression hardened had nothing to do with anger. It was something else, protective, fierce, terrified in a way I don’t think he’d ever admit out loud.
“Let me see,” he said gently.
He reached for my hand slowly, carefully, as though I were something he feared might vanish if he touched too quickly. The moment his fingers brushed mine, the silver in my skin flared, the gold in his rising to meet it.
The warmth shot up my arm, curling low in my chest, stealing the breath from my lungs.
“Caelira…”
My name in his voice was barely a whisper, but it was enough to undo me.
I should have pulled away.
I didn’t.
The distance between us collapsed to a span of breath, of heat, of something we had been circling since the moment he first said my name in the dark, something that felt as dangerous as it was inevitable.
For a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
The chamber hummed around us, the stormline still warm beneath the floor, but all I could feel was his hand around mine, steady, warm, unguarded in a way Atlas never was.
He lifted our joined hands slightly, his thumb brushing near the cut on my palm, slow enough to feel like a question.
The air tightened.
My pulse stuttered.
