I'd been back in my chambers for twenty minutes—boots off, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the obsidian ceiling while my body processed the accumulated charge of the afternoon like a battery that had been plugged into something it wasn't rated for—when I reached for the weight on my shoulder and found nothing. No claws. No scarred ear. No small warm body pressed against my neck.
I searched the corridor. The lower halls. The old armory where the nesting pack huddled in their shredded leather. No Soot. The other imps watched me with their ember-eyes and offered nothing.
He'd slipped away. Somewhere between the Teeth and the citadel, the little creature had dropped from my shoulder and scampered back toward the only place in this realm he'd been comfortable—the hot springs, the ash-flower beds, the warm black glass beyond the pass.
Beyond the Teeth.
The contract's clause surfaced in my mind with the cold clarity of a medical alert: she does not enter the Borderlands beyond the Teeth without escort. I'd signed it. In blood. The magic had sealed it into the same architecture that held the Veil between worlds.
But it was Soot. He was small, and hurt, and alone out there, and asking Wrath to send someone—asking him for anything after the afternoon we'd had, after the canyon, after the confession on the glass plain, after the five sentences that had dismantled my nervous system and left me walking on legs made of warm water—felt like an imposition I couldn't bring myself to make. Asking for help had never been in my repertoire.My repertoire was handling it. Quietly. Efficiently. Without bothering anyone.
Twenty minutes. That was all. Through the pass, retrieve the imp, come back. Nothing would happen. Nothing had happened the entire afternoon—the Scourge beyond the Teeth had been beautiful and still and populated by nothing more dangerous than ash-flowers.
The pass was narrow and dim and I moved through it fast, my boots sure on the melted stone. The black glass plain opened on the other side, mirror-bright, the red sky reflected beneath my feet. The hot springs steamed between their obsidian pillars. And there, curled in the same patch of ash-flowers where I'd last seen him, was Soot—asleep, his remaining ear flat against his small skull, his clawed hands tucked under his chin.
I picked him up. He made a drowsy trill and burrowed against my chest, and I turned and walked back through the pass with a sleeping imp cradled in my arms and a faint, irrational smugness sitting in my chest like a coin I'd found on the sidewalk.
Twenty minutes. Nothing happened. See? Fine.
The smugness died the moment I cleared the Teeth.
He was standing at the gate.
Not pacing. Not scanning the horizon. Standing. The absolute, geological stillness of something that had been in this exact position for exactly as long as I'd been gone—rooted, immovable, every line of his massive body oriented toward the pass with a focus so total that the stone beneath his feet had cracked in a web of fine lines radiating outward from where he stood.
His veins were glowing. Not the idle pulse—the full blaze. Gold light traced every vein in his arms, his throat, the column of his neck, bright enough to cast shadows on the dark stone behind him. His eyes burned. The slit pupils were narrow, contracted, the irises molten rings of furious gold.
But the bond—
"You crossed the Teeth alone." His voice was quiet. Terribly quiet. The silence-before-the-eruption quiet I'd learned to read in the first minutes of knowing him, except the eruption wasn't coming. He was holding it. The way he held everything—structurally, deliberately, at enormous cost.
Soot stirred in my arms. I held him tighter.
"I remember the term," I said. Preemptive. Because I could see where this was going. "I know what I agreed to. I just—he was out there alone, and I didn't want to—"
"Don't apologize."
The words landed between us. Not sharp—precise. A scalpel, not a hammer.
"You broke a rule you signed in blood. There is a consequence. That is how this works." He took one step toward me. The cracked stone beneath his feet groaned. "Not because I am angry. I am not angry."
The ember-veins flared. The contradiction between his words and his body's light show must have registered on my face, because something in his jaw shifted—loosened, deliberately, the way you'd unclench a fist you'd been holding too long.
"I am afraid." He said it the way he said everything that cost him—flat, direct, stripped of every defense. The contract required him to name it. He named it. "You walked beyond my protection. For twenty minutes I felt you through the bond, outside the Teeth, alone, and I could not reach you in time if something—"
He stopped. His hands were fists at his sides. Not threatening. Holding.
"The consequence is not punishment from anger. It is discipline." Each word placed with care. "Discipline is structure. It is a boundary made physical so that you feel it in your body and remember it. It will hurt." He held my gaze. Unflinching. "Then it will be over. Then I hold you."
My heart was a trapped thing, hammering against the cage of my ribs. Soot squirmed in my arms, and I set him down gently on the warm stone, and he scampered away toward the fortress with the infallible survival instincts of a creature who knew when to leave a room.
"After," he said, and his voice changed. Dropped into the register that cost him everything—the one that softened the hard consonants and slowed the clipped cadence into something that moved through me like warm water through cold pipes. "There is a place you can go. A place inside yourself where you don't have to be strong. Where you don't have to be fine."
The word fine landed like a stone dropped into still water.
"Where you can be small. And I keep the world out."
Small. The word was a key turning in a lock I hadn't known existed—a lock I'd installed myself, years ago, over a door I'd bricked shut so thoroughly I'd forgotten there was a room behind it. A room where a girl lived who didn't have to manage anyone's emotions. Who didn't have to scan for danger. Who didn't have to smile. Who could just—
