I’ve done harder extractions with worse odds and a broken collarbone.
I’ve never done one where my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I press them flat. Count the sentry’s steps. Watch the western patrol disappear around the far tower.
“Now.”
We move.
The gravel is the problem. The gravel is always the problem.
I’ve been in enough night ops to know that gravel has a personal vendetta against stealth missions, and Moros’s courtyard gravel is no different. Every footfall is a negotiation, weight forward, heel last, distribute and release. The way Graves taught me.
Graves. Nope. I do not have the time or the energy to let that man in my head, wherever the fuck he ended up.
The garden is halfway done. Kestra is a ghost behind me, light as water. Tiana’s footsteps are careful, controlled. Finnian?—
Finnian is struggling. I can hear his breath behind me, heaving, and when I look over my shoulder, I almost stumble. That is new.
He’s glowing. A faint amber warmth radiating from his hands where they’re pressed against his sides, like sunlight trying to get out through the cracks.
Tiana runs beside him, her hands hovering over his, stealing the light until it dissipates.
I turn away before he catches me watching him. Focusing on my breath, on the steady bunch and contract of my legs as I hurdle toward the forest.
Twenty meters.
The tree line is close enough now that I can see individual branches against the purple sky. The Dark Forest doesn’t invite entry. It stands there like a wall, like a held breath, like something that’s been waiting for its next meal.
For a moment adrenaline flushes through me, steady, itchy. It looks like we’ll hit it like a wall. It’s that dense, that...
Doesn’t matter. We need the cover.
Fifteen meters.
The eastern sentry completes his rotation. Back facing us. Ten seconds until he turns again.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Finnian stumbles, gasps. Tiana grabs one side of him, me the other.
His hand finds my arm as he goes down, his grip lands right at that spot just above my elbow. The gold bond flares hot against my wrist. Not faint this time. Bright and desperate. Like whatever Amarantha broke in him didn’t touch this part. Like his magic is screaming what his mouth won’t say.
He doesn’t look at me.
Even holding onto me. Even with his legs gone and his magic blazing through Tiana’s suppression like paper. He looks at the tree line. He looks at Tiana. He looks at the gravel.
Not at me.
But his hand doesn’t let go either.
Fae can’t lie. Which means both things are true. He can’t look at meandhe can’t let go of me. And I don’t know which is worse. The truth that he’s pulling away or the truth that he still can’t.
I count the meters.
Then his legs go out from under him and he begins to vibrate.
I hear it before I see it, a low harmonic pulse that rises from the gravel beneath his feet, and then the burst of Seelie gold that blooms across his skin. What the fuck did she do to him?
