“You’re thinking too loudly again,” Dagan murmurs, voice rough from sleep and everything we did earlier.
I smile into him.
“I learned from the best.”
He makes a sound that could be a laugh if he’d ever fully commit to one. His fingers flex, possessive without apology.
“Come here,” he says, like I’m not already basically glued to him.
“As you command, Lord of Dirt,” I tease, shifting higher so my mouth can find his jaw.
His arm tightens. “Do not start.”
“Oh, I’m absolutely starting.”
He exhales through his nose—long-suffering, dangerous—and then the bed dips as he rolls slightly toward me, caging me with his body heat and that quiet, storm-contained patience of his.
I expect a kiss. Or a growl. Or both.
Instead, Dagan’s hand disappears beneath the sheets and returns holding something that wasn’t there a second ago.
Metal—no, not metal exactly.
Something that looks like stone remembered how to be silver.
It catches the low light of the room and gleams with a green-gold undertone, like lichen on a cliff face, like sunlight trapped in quartz.
I push up on one elbow, blinking. “What is that?”
His eyes flick down to it. Then back to me.
“An echo,” he says, like that explains anything.
“From the fragment. It will not weaken the power we forged into Nightfall, but, the crown left something behind when it changed hands. A residue. A remaining note.”
He holds it out.
It’s a bracer—wide and smooth, shaped to curve around my wrist as if it’s always belonged there.
And etched into it—subtle, almost hidden—are faint lines like fault fractures that meet and knit together into something whole.
My throat tightens before I can stop it.
“Dagan,” I whisper.
He looks away like the emotion is too sharp to hold in his gaze. “I made it with my magic,” he admits, and then, quieter, “and with your touch.”
My fingers tremble when I reach for it. The moment my skin meets it, warmth spreads up my arm—not burning, not painful. Grounding. Like the earth itself recognized me and nodded.
“Put it on,” he says, voice low.
“Bossy,” I murmur, but I can’t hide the way my voice shakes.
He catches my wrist, guiding the bracer into place.
The second it clicks closed, the bond flares—soft but unmistakable—and the room hums like the Barrow just approved the decision.
I stare at it, stunned.
