So very dearly.
In times like this, that was half the trouble.
And when it came to our son, that love… the weight of it… sometimes it was unbearable. Yet, it was also every fucking thing.
No matter what I had to do, what I had to face, what I had to sacrifice, I wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to take that away from us.
“The world doesn’t want me.”
I couldn’t get those words he’d uttered out of my head.
It wasn’t about want. It never had been.
It was about what it always was. Fear and misunderstanding.
If the events of today got out, if Ruxnoth’s intentions for Winter became known beyond our inner circle, they should be fucking afraid.
Of me.
Because there’d be no more playing the game. No more treading oh-so carefully as I had for many years now.
If they came at my son, I would unleash.
Everything.
7
~Zayn~
It had been a long time since I’d set foot inside this place.
Hell, it felt like a lifetime ago.
But it was definitely a comfort that Glacialis Arx—the frost castle come to life—had remained the same welcoming, warm, and safe place it had been to me when I’d sought refuge here for a little while as a boy.
The floors in some spaces were marble, and in others, sleek gray stone, depending on the specific room. The pale stone walls and the corridors were covered with pictures of the family in humorous or loving poses all throughout. There was plush furniture in amethyst, ivory, forest-green, and soft blues. The gothic arches framing the tall windows did the job of lighting the place in the daytime—or what was the artificial daytime inside this Rifted Cradle that was similar to a pocket dimension situation—while at night the crystal lights shaped like starlight hanging from the ceilings were turned on.
As I looked around Winter’s childhood bedroom, I took in the extras, the stuff that was all him.
The cobalt-blue cozy armchair over by the arched window, two of its legs resting on a purple and blue rug with a geometricpattern that was kind of like the one in their living room. Beside it was a storage table that had one of his motorcycle helmets on top. Just beyond that was a massive floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, which I knew he’d made hella good use of, given that his time outside in the world had been so limited before coming to Loxley Academy just a couple of months ago. The shelves were full of fantasy and adventure books, research about real places in the world, even stuff about war and strategy. That last thing was clearly Cassius’ influence, always with the bigger-picture eye on things. Actually, that was also his grandpa, Remnant’s deal, come to think of it.
There were pieces of all of them in the room, parts Winter had taken and made his own. Lazriel with the motorcycle thing, Cassius with the strategy stuff, Ketheron with the tourist-like books. Then Velra with the little jewelry-making table over on the other side of the room where there were wire spools, metal hammers, pliers, gemstones, and scraps of metal. But Winter had made it his own, in that he didn’t make jewelry, he twisted the wire into made-up magical creatures—wrongly-shaped things, like with two heads, or extra limbs, or strangely shaped fangs, tails growing from odd places. Then he decorated them with gems and stuff. He’d told me it was about taking something that seemed wrong and frightening and making it sparkly and beautiful.
My gaze went to his desk at the far end of the room opposite the bed and adjacent to the closed ensuite bathroom. It had his journals on it. His feelings journals. And some of the pages were pinned to a corkboard above, all charcoal drawings. I’d heard that Sylas had been all about the charcoal drawings when he’d operated as a loner before meeting his loves. But unlike him, Win didn’t consider technique or style, nothing like that. He just found it faster and more therapeutic to swiftly and often roughly draw out his feelings into a picture rather than write them down.And that connected to him spelling that painting into my dorm room, the one of me that would change magically depending on my emotional state—well, what I was shoving down and denying.
Like now.
Like what I was fucking trying to shove down now so I didn’t lose my shit all over the place about Win being kidnapped, hurt, and the offender still being free out there.
And… and… Win lying here tucked up in his bed unconscious.
Still.
Winter Nox.
He wasn’t just anybody.
Him being hurt in a way that actually managed to knock him out like this—for hours now—was no small thing.
