It has kept me powerful.
It has kept me utterly, devastatingly alone.
My right hand curls into a fist against the glass. The amber veins in my forearm flare orange—not gold, not the soft warmth she brings out in me, but the dangerous warning color of a gargoyle on the edge of total calcification.
She lied to me.
That is the fact I cannot escape.
The collection agency contacted her. Offered to erase fifty-seven thousand dollars in debt in exchange for vault blueprints. And she said nothing. She sat across from me in that massage suite, her hands on my body, her voice soft and teasing, and she kept that secret locked away.
My paranoia was right.
Eight centuries of survival instinct screaming at me to protect myself, to assume the worst, to never let anyone close enough to hurt me—and it wasright.
Except.
Except she rejected them.
Kael's forensic analysis was clear. The collection agency made contact. Tamsin told them to fuck off. She threatened physical violence. She protected my security infrastructure at the cost of her own financial stability.
And then she kept it secret because she was ashamed.
Because she thought I would see her as a liability.
Because she was terrified I would think she was using me.
I close my eyes.
The mate-bond pulses beneath my awareness like a second heartbeat—faint now, strained, but still there. I can feel her. Somewhere across the city, sitting in that drafty apartment with the broken radiator and the cracked linoleum, she is crying.
I know this because the bond tells me.
I know this because I can feel the echo of her grief like a knife twisting in my chest.
And I put it there.
I chose paranoia over trust.
I chose isolation over connection.
I chose eight hundred years of survival strategy over three weeks of the only real happiness I have ever known.
The stone creeps higher. Past my elbow now. My entire left arm is dead weight, useless and cold.
I should let it happen.
I should calcify completely. Become the monument I was always meant to be. Stand here at this window for the next century, watching the city move below me, untouchable and alone and safe.
Safe.
The word tastes like ash.
I have been safe for eight hundred years.
And I have been miserable for every single one of them.
Tamsin is not safe.
