“He nearly died.” My voice comes out exactly as I intend it. Ice. Level. Empty of everything that would be inconvenient right now. “Siren. He walked off the path.”
Orion, on the rocks, doesn’t look at Ash.
He looks at his wrist. The debt mark beside the almost-bond. Two marks now. One for the life he owes me. One for the woman he almost died reaching for.
He’s very still in the way large men go still when they’re deciding not to be what they feel.
I don’t blame him for following the siren.
I would have followed it, too. The siren would have worn her face. Would have moved like her, that specific forward-weight, always half a second from deciding something. I would have walked off the path the same way.
That’s the part I’m not thinking about.
“Kieran.” Her voice.
“Ten minutes.” I don’t turn around. “We leave in ten.”
I stand at the tree line with my back to all of it. My shadows spread thin through the dark ahead, hunting threats that haven’t arrived yet. Frost forms at my feet without my permission. Snowflakes drift from my fingers onto the forest floor.
Six months ago that would have been ice. Sharp. Controlled. The kind of cold that keeps things at a distance.
Now I’m snowing on moss.
She did that.
I’m not thinking about her.
The bond pulses at my wrist. Steady. Warm. Twenty feet behind me the gold one blazes and I can feel the difference between them the way you feel the difference between a candle and a fire. Both real. Both there. Both twenty feet behind me in the water.
Behind me the group assembles in the sounds I’m not turning around to see, Ash climbing out of the water, Finnianfollowing, Orion’s breathing steadying on the rocks, Kestra’s voice low, Tiana answering. The sounds of people who have been apart for a month finding each other in a glowing grotto in a death forest while I count shadows at the tree line.
I constructed the image in one second. I’ve had ten minutes to take it apart.
It stays constructed.
Some things you can’t unknow. You just decide what to do with them.
I’ve decided.
We’re together now. All of us. The thing we’ve been fighting toward for a month. The broken group, assembled, standing in the same impossible place at the same impossible time, every wound still open and every bond still pulling and the forest breathing around us patient and ancient and entirely unsurprised.
The bond pulses. Warm. Present. Twenty feet away.
I look into the dark and count my shadows.
Everything else will have to wait.
25
Ash
“Don’t rush.”Finnian pulls me closer as Kieran and Orion head back toward the others, their voices fading through the thick trees. “I want to hold onto this moment just a little longer.”
So I stay.
My head finds the hollow between his shoulder and throat like it already knows the way there, and the waterfall keeps working at the dirt on my skin, washing it away just as fast as the forest puts it back.
The tighter he holds me the more my shoulders drop. Not a decision, just gravity doing its thing.
