Something moves in his chest. Not a laugh. The almost-kind.
“I stopped answering the phone,” I continue. “Then I changed my number. Told myself it was protocol. New assignment, new location. All of it true. None of it the reason.” The soil is gone beneath his arms but I can still feel the ghost of it on my feet. “Pepper said I left because watching all of them get what I wanted reminded me of what I didn’t have. And instead of letting them love me through it, I ran.”
“Was she right?” Orion asks.
“Yes.” The word comes out without resistance. “Completely right. And the worst part is I knew it when I was doing it. I just named it duty. I named it Artemis. I named it anything except what it was.”
The path curves. Jadeve’s hand signals something to the men around us and they shift formation. Two moving ahead, two falling back.
“Sabina forgave me,” I say. “In the dream. She forgave me the way Sabina does things—completely, immediately, like it cost her nothing even though I know it cost her everything.” My chestaches with the specific warmth of it. “Vanessa, too. Vanessa who I was the closest to, who I hurt maybe the most, who looked at me and saidI know youand meant it.”
“But not Pepper.”
“But not Pepper.” I breathe out. “Pepper said she stopped leaving the light on for me a long time ago. And she’s right to. She’s absolutely right to. I set fire to that bridge and walked away and she has every reason in every world to be done with me.”
Orion is quiet for a long moment. The forest fills it with wrong-birdsong and the creak of roots, and somewhere ahead of us, faintly, something that might be music.
I lift my head.
“The thing is,” Orion says, and his voice has changed. Gone careful in a specific way. The way voices go when someone is about to say something true at their own expense. “The thing is I know what it’s like. To not be there when it mattered.”
I wait.
“I had people in the eastern quadrant,” he says. “Scouts. Patrol formation, outer ring. They filed a report three months ago and didn’t make contact after. I read the report. I filed it. Told myself I’d investigate when I had time.” A pause. “I didn’t have time. I was at the Academy. I was learning to count someone’s heartbeats I had no business counting.”
I swear I hear music somewhere off in the distance. Soft, melodic, and almost mesmerizing in a way.
“I never learned their names,” he says. “The scouts in the eastern quadrant. I saw what was left of them in the forest and I realized I never learned their names.”
The music is closer now. And something else—firelight, warm and orange, bleeding through the trees ahead.
“Orion.” I sit up slightly, enough to look at his face. “You were there. You tried. Multiple times, suicide missions according to Kieran?—”
“Kieran’s not wrong.” His jaw tightens. “I threw myself at walls for weeks. Bled everywhere. Accomplished nothing. And while I was doing that my people were dying in a forest I was supposed to protect and I was too consumed by my own—” He stops. “By you. Too consumed by you.”
“I’m not saying it was wrong to want to reach you,” he says. “I’m saying I let everything else fall away. The Cauldron. The court. The scouts in the eastern quadrant.” His voice drops. “A guardian who only guards one person isn’t a guardian. He’s just a man in love.”
He doesn’t realize he says it. And no, it’s not that he said he loves me. In an indirect way, a parrot of words I swear I heard him utter before.
Never mind any of that.
The Cauldron.
I nearly gasp at the drop. But I don’t. He didn’t mean to tell me, not really. But he can’t take it back either. It’s mine now.
So, I don’t say anything. I file it where I’m filing everything else he’s handing me right now—the confession, the guilt, the weight of names he never learned. But that word.Cauldron.It sits different. Heavier.
I don’t interrupt. But I heard it.
The firelight is close enough now that it touches the path ahead of us, warm and amber, and I can smell it—woodsmoke and something roasting and underneath it all something green. The particular scent of a place that has been tended with intention for a very long time.
“Pepper will forgive you,” Orion says quietly. “Not because you deserve it. Because she loves you and love doesn’t stop just because you gave it reasons to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” He adjusts his hold on me. “But I know Sabina forgave you. And Vanessa forgave you. And the people who know youkeep choosing you even when you make it difficult.” He says it like he feels like that about me.Have I been difficult? “That says more about you than it does about them.”
I don’t have an answer for that. But reality steals the answers away anyway.
