Xenia scoffed and laid into him. “Two lifetimes, huh? And what do you have to show for it? No mate, no children, no home outside of that barracks room you share with Tristan? You may haveexistedfor two centuries, Cael, but don’t pretend you’ve beenliving.”
Hurt scurried across his face.
Fuck.
She’d been too harsh. She only wanted him to agree that they were in thistogether. That they’d escape together or not at all. She didn’t mean to hit a nerve. And based on the hardened look he now wore, she hadn’t just hit it—she’d severed it.
“Do whatever you want.” He turned his back to her and snapped out his wings.
“Cael.” Her guilt-laden sigh bounced off the new barrier between them.
And Xenia questioned who was the true asshole in this cell.
* * *
Cael recognizedhe was acting childish. Putting a wall of flesh between himself and Xenia just because she’d bruised his tender feelings.
But he couldn’t help it.
Was there a part of him that was flattered—and cautiously hopeful—that she refused to abandon him? Of course.
But it was buried beneath layers and layers of calcified hurt. Disagreements, slights, and full-blown rifts he’d refused to confront over the years, and instead had woven into an impenetrable skin that not even his closest friends and family could pierce.
And certainly not her.
Not when she, more so than anyone lately, had the power to pulverize his fragile insides.
High Gods, she’d made one slightly judgmental comment—a comment evenhecouldn’t disagree with—and he’d recoiled like a turtle into its shell.
He’d pushed people away his whole life. And though he desperately didn’t want to do it to her too, he didn’t know how to change it. How to be less…thorny.
Only someone with extraordinarily high confidence, like Tristan, could weather the assault of Cael’s barbs. Could wait around for Cael to emerge from the slump of his broody episodes.
Cael’s harshness was the sharpest weapon in his arsenal.
He pulled his knees against his chest, folded his arms atop them, then hissed in pain when he tried to lay down his head. He rolled his sleeve back and winced as he noticed Xenia’s most recent bite had begun to bleed again. The dose of healing suppressant must’ve undone the mending his body had performed on the wound.
He expelled a bitter laugh. It was almost too poetic—Xenia’s teeth tearing him apart.
He wiped away the blood, then tugged down his sleeve, closed his eyes, and fell into a shallow sleep.
* * *
“Stand down,in the name of his Imperial Majesty!”
A choked giggle burst from the freckle-faced boy, and the wooden sword he brandished shook with his laughter.
“Byron!” Cael whined, heat crawling up his neck as he spread his fledgling wings. “I’m supposed to be scary.”
Byron collapsed in hysterics, rolling through the dewy grass behind Stoneridge, the Zephyrus family lodge. The sprawl of thick, sturdy logs accented by stone and glass dominated a windswept hill overlooking Diachre, capital of Cael’s father’s territory.
In the valley below, modernization was sweeping through what had once been a modest hunting village. Skeletal structures speared through the skyline, half-formed towers of glass and metal funded by an influx of capital that had flooded the territory during the war. Typhon Mountain—with its terrible, fire-breathing monster beneath—crested the eastern edge of Brachos, and its namesake steel had been a boon to both the territory’s and Cael’s family’s wealth.
Arran Zephyrus may have spent his first three centuries as a warrior, but the continental conflict had transformed him into a shrewd businessman. He forged his wartime earnings into a new industry, replacing hunting and fishing with weapons manufacturing, taking full advantage of the technological and scientific advancements traveling up the Dordenne from Delos.
Not that Cael understood much of industry at ten years old, but he’d gleaned what he could from overheard conversations between his father and his business partners.
Cael lifted his raven-head helmet, a replica of the one he’d seen the Vasilikans—the Emperor’s personal guards—wearing on the Imperial couple’s last visit to Stoneridge. Mother had helped him make it out of papier-mache earlier this week, trying to coax him out of the mood he’d fallen into.
