I caught a glimpse before it shut—a bed tucked under windows, a desk stacked high. A life lived in quiet and isolation.
“You’re breathing like a bull,” Callum noted, snatching a hammer and tossing it into the air. He caught it with ease, like neither its weight nor the room’s tension would dare touch him. “Cut it out before your eyes go black and we’ve got bigger problems.” His throat cleared, like I was making him as uncomfortable as I felt. “You’re not going to prey on anyone in this room, and that’s a fact.”
He was right, but that dark pulse...it remembered what I had tried to forget.
“I just…” My voice thinned, shame curling around my chest. “I get anxious seeing him.”
Every time I looked at Wells, it was like staring straight at my guilt.
Behind me someone whispered, “I don’t want you to feel that way around me.” Wells had emerged from thin air, like he’d stepped from the damn forge itself.
I spun so fast I nearly tripped over my own legs, hand flying to my chest. “Fates curse me, how long were you standing there?”
He stepped closer, something unseen clutched in his hands. “It was my fault, what happened. Everyone knows it.”
“It wasn’t—” I shook my head in dispute, the words cracking, choking me. Before I could finish, an object shimmered in his palms.
“This is for you,” he said, the firelight catching across the sweat on his face as he motioned behind me. “From Callum. Made by me.” Callum nodded, smug as sin. “I had very specific instructions.” Wells glared at him. “And a deadline. But I got it done early if you wish to brag about it, and me.”
There it was, the smile that tried its damned hardest to outshine what lay hidden, fracturing when he forced it too big.
I reached forward, then paused. “May I?”
He nodded and the fabric rippled away the moment my fingers grazed it. And in its place, a dagger. No—artwork.
The hilt was carved from white marble, smooth as ivory and cool as midnight, where a single amaranth stone nested in the pommel, catching the forge’s glow like captured flame.
My fingers drifted up the blade, breath stalling when I caught the engraving.Au Savaro.Our savior.
My chest tightened and I blinked hard, trying to disguise it.
Callum came to my side, admiring the dagger he’d envisioned. “During a mission for the king, we had to recover in a cave. Obviously, I got antsy.” He traced the blade like it was sacred.
“You, antsy?” A dry laugh slipped past my lips. “Unheard of.”
He chuckled, shaking his head, his thumb sweeping over the engraving.“I found this stone lodged in the wall and it felt too beautiful to leave behind. I wasn’t sure what to do with it at first, but then you lost your dagger.”
He said it so modestly. Like I had simply misplaced a weapon, and he had simply pocketed some stone.
Simple. But gods, it was so much fucking more.
I turned the blade in my palm. Perfect balance. Perfect weight.
As if it had been born just for me.
“There’s just one more thing—” Wells began.
But I didn’t hear him, I only heard the blade singing against my palm, my skin. In a single movement I spun, loosing the dagger from my grip as the blade whistled through the air before embedding itself clean between two swords hanging inches apart on the wall. The clang rang out like music.
I glanced back to Callum, who was rubbing his forehead, trying, and failing, to suppress a grin.
Wells only stared, mouth parted, throat working around a swallow. “I was going to say,” his fingers raked through his hair, nails catching at the back of his neck as he let out a breath, “it’s on the heavier side. Because the blade is made of nix metal.”
The word sank into me like poison.
Nix.
Mined from dimensional rifts and crafted with blood rarer than gold. A weapon that didn’t just null magic, it drained it. Drainedyou. Until all that was left was an empty body and a soul wrung dry.
