Despite everything, he smiled. Sounds stupid when you say it like that.
No, I said, something clicking into place. It sounds like exactly what he wouldn’t anticipate.
Because I’d spent my entire life learning that love was performance. That relationships were transactions. That the only protection was keeping people at arm’s length while making them think they were close.
And here was Cyrus—blunt, straightforward Cyrus—proposing we do the opposite. Make our attachments visible, structural, protected not by hiding them but by integrating them into our tactical framework.
It was terrifying. It was brilliant. It was everything my parents had taught me not to do.
Because his entire methodology is based on exploiting hidden attachments and isolated vulnerabilities, I continued, working it through. If we’re openly attached to each other—all of us, in ways he can see but can’t exploit because we’ve built protections into the structure…
We disrupt his pattern, Cyrus finished. Make the intelligence he gathers less useful because the relationships aren’t hidden. They’re reinforced.
Echo settled to determined gold on my shoulder, a sign of agreement, approval, maybe even pride.
We sat with that realization.
I’m ready, Cyrus said finally, to stop fighting it. To claim my place in whatever this is we’re building. Not because I’m giving up on wanting her completely…
But because wanting her completely means wanting her to be safe, I finished. Which requires more than just your protection. It requires all of us working together.
Exactly.
Understanding settled between us. Not quite friendship yet—too new, too raw—but partnership. Brotherhood forged through shared realization that we were stronger together than apart.
Even when together meant something complicated and undefined and completely outside what either of us had been raised to accept.
Tomorrow we go home, I said, and face whatever comes next.
Together, Cyrus added. All four of us. No more splitting up and hoping individual strength is enough.
Together, I agreed.
Outside, snow fell silently over the Alps. Somewhere in that darkness, the master’s compound held Raven and gods knew how many other corrupted witches.
We hadn’t saved her. Hadn’t even gotten close.
But sitting here in this cheap hotel room with Cyrus Raynoff—the man I was learning to trust—felt like something real.
Tomorrow we’d go home and face Marigold and Keane. Figure out how to explain that we’d spent two weeks tracking Raven only to come back empty-handed but with a completely reorganized understanding of what we were actually fighting for.
And in its own strange way, that was progress.
11
Cyrus
THE PORTAL’S EDGES DISSOLVED BEHIND us, magic dissipating into afternoon air that tasted wrong. Too clean. Too safe. Like the last two weeks hadn’t happened at all.
Ember flared once on my shoulder, his flames guttering low. Even he didn’t buy the calm.
We should have been back days ago.
I stepped through behind Elio, his shoulders tight from more than just exhaustion. The courtyard behind the royal dorm looked exactly the same—frost-stiff grass, tower shadow stretching long, student commons humming with distant noise beyond the gardens. Like we hadn’t failed. Like Raven wasn’t still corrupted in some Alps compound, being cataloged and weaponized while we ran home empty-handed.
I’d expected to come back to damage control. Instead, everything was already contained—without me.
My jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
