The moment Solomon took my hand, the noise stopped.
It wasn’t the crowd or the music but the noise inside my head.
The constant, low-grade hypervigilance that had lived in my skull since Hudson. The scanning of exits, the tracking of strangers, the bracing for a hand that grabbed too hard. Solomon’s silence swallowed all of it.
We swayed. His hand was enormous on my lower back, warm and steady, and I let myself lean into the solid wall of his chest without checking whether anyone was watching.
“You’re a good dancer, big guy.”
The tips of his ears went pink. “You sound surprised.”
“A little. You move through most rooms trying to be invisible. This is...” I tilted my head, studying him. “Different.”
“You asked me to dance.”
He was talking more than his usual three-word answers. The observation made me greedy for more.
“Can I ask you about it?” My fingers drifted up from his shoulder toward his jaw and hovered near the scar. “You don’t have to answer.”
His body tensed. A fractional shift, barely perceptible, but I’d learned to read him in the spaces between words.
“You can ask.”
My fingertip traced the air beside the scar, not quite touching. The line ran from his temple until his jaw, jagged and pale against his brown skin. I’d wondered about it since the first night.
“Why didn’t it heal?”
Solomon’s jaw worked. His gaze drifted over my head, into the middle distance, and for a moment I thought he’d retreat into silence. Then his eyes came back to mine and he spoke with careful precision.
“A witch,” he said. “Centuries ago. She crossed the Veil into Veyndral. No one had breached our borders in generations, and she did it alone. Curious, we think. Drawn by the kingdom she’d heard stories about and wanted to see for herself.”
“What happened?”
“Lucian had just taken the throne. I was newly appointed as his second.” His thumb traced an absent circle on my back. “She was discovered near the palace grounds. She lashed out with a cursed blade. I stepped between her and Lucian.”
The image formed in my mind. A younger Solomon, new to the role. Throwing himself in front of his king.
“The blade caught my face. Temple to jaw.” His voice was flat, clinical. “Cursed steel doesn’t heal. Whatever magic she’d woven into the metal, it scarred permanently. Left a mark that our regeneration couldn’t touch.”
My chest ached. “What happened to her?”
“Lucian beheaded her and sent the head to her coven as a lesson. But the damage was done.” He paused. “The council used the breach to justify sealing the borders tighter, reinforcing the Veil. If one outsider could get through, others could follow. After that, Veyndral closed itself off even further.”
“And you got a scar you couldn’t erase.”
“I got a reminder.” His eyes dropped to mine. “My first duty as his second, and I almost failed. The blade was meant for Lucian’s throat. If I’d been a half-second slower...”
He didn’t finish, didn’t need to.
“So you swore you’d never fail again,” I said quietly.
The surprise on his face was brief and raw. As if he hadn’t expected me to understand the weight beneath the story. As if the five centuries of relentless vigilance, the sleepless nightsstanding guard, the reputation as the most dangerous enforcer in Veyndral, all of it traced back to a single scar and the half-second that haunted him.
“Yes,” he said.
I touched it. My fingertip landed on the raised skin at his temple and traced the full length of the scar, slow, down across his cheekbone, along his jaw. He went perfectly still beneath my hand. His breath stopped and his fingers curled against my back, pressing into the fabric of the dress.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I know you don’t think so. But it is.”
