IT LINGERED ON ME STILL.
The blood. The ache. The significance of what I’d lost.
Then Callum’s voice dragged me back, pulling me into the stone cottage. He paced the floor, heavy-footed and restless.“You’re upset with me?”
My stare stayed fixed on the window, its spherical frame carved like an unblinking eye into the world. The Indra Mountain usually crowned its center, but tonight they blended into the dark, hidden by night’s privacy. Another hour, maybe, before that veil lifted.
My fingers unclasped, falling to the table, the wood cool beneath my palms.“You think?”
I was grateful this place still belonged to us and was still untouched. A secret stitched between blood and rebellion. I couldn’t imagine it staying that way if the dragons discovered it.
Callum exhaled, hands clasped behind his back as he prowled.
His pacing was driving me mad. Back and forth. Back and forth. Every step echoed another memory.
Obrann stomping across the platform. Ronan closing in on Rook. On me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Putting ourselves with the dragons as allies is dangerous, V. I know that. They’re unpredictable and arrogant—”
“You’re just listing reasons why I should have been at that meeting. Why you should have told me from the start—”
He raised a finger. Just one. And the sheer audacity of it shocked me into silence.
“And I wasn’t sure if they would burn you to dust the second they learned who you were.”
There it was, the second crack in my heart as the words landed.
Callum had never used who I was against me. Not when it would’ve been easy. Not even when I’d made a life out of hiding it.
I’d worn the mask so well, they’d trusted me to guard the most important being in Luamis. Callum had watched Gemma train me. Watched me melt into shadow. Watched me become the kind of invisible that only survives by precision.
How could he think I would slip?
I tried to gather myself from the blow. But the truth curdled in my gut. Was this it, the beginning of Callum losing his everlasting trust in me?
The chair groaned as I straightened, lifting my chin, refusing to let him see the fracture. “Tell me, is it better or worse that their prince obliterated a part of me without hesitation, while his dragon comrade burned half our village?”
My thumb dragged across my wrist, over the scar the bracelet had left. The burn had healed, but its memory hadn’t.
The Viper hadn’t surged since the bracelet was gone. It didn’t need permission. It never had. What vanished with that stone wasn’t control.
It was restraint.
The snake had been a buffer between my anger and what lived beneath it—a thin, brutal filter that kept the curse from drinking too deep.
Without it, I didn’t feel the Viper stronger…I felt myself weaker.
He caught the despair glinting at the corners of my eyes, sweeping to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“That was not meant to happen,”he promised. “I don’t know how he learned who you were. I swear it.”
For someone so terrified of the dragons knowing my truth, he didn’t seem half as shaken as he should have been.
His head bowed, shaking slowly back and forth.“I don’t know why they burned half the village but, no one was harmed.”
I scoffed, rolling his sympathy from my shoulder.“No one was harmed? They just lost the only homes they had. Homes they could barely afford to begin with. Now they’re forced to sleep on the streets. But yes,” the fireplace at my back crackled, flames snapping against its patchwork of mismatched stone, the sound making me flinch, “thank the gods at least no one is aiding a scratch as well.”
