“For both of us,” he said finally.
The honesty in it knocked something loose in my chest. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But a small, reluctant understanding.
I looked past him toward the keep, where Dawnbreak had walked in and out as if called by my bones. Where Kastor was already plotting angles. Where the Courts would soon be whispering stormborn and awakened and what if.
“I don’t know what I am,” I admitted, the words torn raw from somewhere that still ached like a fresh wound. “I don’t know what the storm wants from me. But I do know this much: I won’t survive this if every decision is made around me instead of with me.”
His throat worked. “I hear you.”
“Do you?” I asked. “Because the next time you keep something from me ‘for my own good,’ I won’t stay.”
The wind stole the edge of my threat, but not its truth.
Atlas went very still. “You mean you’ll leave the castle?”
I held his gaze.
“I mean I’ll leave you.”
The words trembled, but I didn’t take them back.
For a heartbeat, the only sound was the rush of wind and the distant crash of waves. Something wounded and furious and fiercely protective moved behind his eyes.
Then he exhaled, a long, shuddered breath, and nodded once.
“Then I won’t,” he said. “Never again.”
I didn’t fully trust that. Not yet. Trust didn’t come easily, not after everything that had taught me to measure every promise for the hook hidden inside it.
Still, something in my chest loosened—a single thread of that tight, coiled panic easing as if my body had taken comfort before my mind could stop it.
I turned back toward the sea, my fingers uncurling slowly from the rail. The hunger in me was still there—sharp and restless—but it had changed. It was no longer only for answers. It was for agency. For the right to stand in the center of my own life and choose the path ahead.
Behind me, I felt Atlas step closer, not crowding me, not shielding me, simply taking his place at my side until our shoulders nearly brushed. For the first time since the storm had whispered my name, I didn’t feel like it was dragging me somewhere I couldn’t escape.
It felt as though it were waiting.
Waiting to see what I would do next.
And for the first time in my life, I found myself hungry to discover the answer.
Chapter 30
Cry of the Raven
ATLAS
The storm should have been louder, that was the first thing that felt wrong.
Wind scraped along the cliff face beneath the castle, waves breaking far below with their usual violence, but the air up here on my balcony outside the chambers I was staying in had gone unnaturally still.
For several days afterward, we avoided speaking about what had happened. Not because there was nothing to say, but because everything we said would have caught fire. The keep stayed loud with strategy and ward-repair and Dawnbreak eyes at the gates, and it gave us both an excuse to move like soldiers instead of people.
Her anger never left the stone. It lived in the corridors, in the way the stormglass brightened when she passed, in the careful distance we kept without admitting we’d chosen it.
I rested my forearms against the cold stone of the rail and stared out into the bruised horizon, trying to steady the restless churning in my stomach. Caelira’s words still echoed through me, her anger, her certainty. The promise I’d made her still burning like a fresh brand.
I won’t keep things from you again.
