What I know. What I felt.

SLOANE

I make it exactly as far as the end of the hallway before my hands start shaking.

I stop there, alone, back against the cold stone wall, and press my palms flat to my thighs like that might do anything at all to stop them. It doesn’t.

My whole body is still running on whatever it took to stand in that room and touch his chest like it was nothing, like two years hadn’t happened, like the sound of his voice asking how does it feel didn’t nearly take my knees out from under me the same way his rejection once did.

I don’t answer that question out loud in the room. I’m not sure I have an honest answer for it even now, alone, where nobody can hear me fail to find one.

By the time I reach the yard, I’ve put myself back together well enough that Del doesn’t immediately ask what’s wrong, though the look she gives me says she’s clocked something regardless.

“Well?” she asks instead, careful, giving me the choice of how much to say.

“He’s sick. Genuinely. Not political theater. Advanced, two years of damage, at least.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll need Nora to look at what I found.”

She doesn’t push, which is its own mercy, though I can see it costs her something not to. Kieran is a few steps away, arms crossed, watching the mill door like he expects Roan to come through it any second, which, knowing him, is exactly why he’s standing there.

He falls into step beside me without a word, close and steady, and I’m grateful for it more than I let on.

There’s something grounding about him standing there, solid and uncomplicated, after twenty minutes spent standing three feet from a man who used to be the entire shape of my future and is now just a stranger with my old ache carved into his ribs.

The car ride back is quiet. I stare out the window at the tree line blurring past and try to organize what I actually know now against what I felt in that room, and the two lists don’t match nearly as well as I’d like.

What I know: the sickness is real, advanced, centered exactly where a broken bond should sit. It’s been building for two years, worsens under stress, worsens specifically around Selene, which tells me something about the nature of a forced bond that I’ll need to think through more carefully once I’m not this close to the source of it.

It is, almost certainly, something only I can slow, and possibly the only thing that can stop it entirely.

What I felt: his hands remembering exactly how it used to feel to be touched by me, before either of us ruined it. The specific, humiliating relief of hearing his voice ask a question I refused to answer, because answering it honestly would have told him more than I am willing to give away.

The particular satisfaction of watching him go completely speechless when I asked what he had to offer, followed by something closer to grief than triumph, because some old, foolish part of me wanted him to have an answer. Wanted, for one absurd half-second, for it to be enough.

It wasn’t enough. It isn’t yet. I don’t know if it ever will be.

“You’re quiet,” Del says, from the front seat, watching me in the mirror.

“I’m thinking.”

“About the alliance.”

“About several things.”

She doesn’t ask which things, and I don’t offer, and we drive the rest of the way back to Ashborn in a silence that isn’t uncomfortable so much as full, full of everything I’m not ready to say out loud yet, not even to her.

By the time we reach the compound, I’ve decided one thing clearly enough to hold onto: I am going to help him, eventually, because letting him die serves nothing I actually want, and because some part of me, smaller than my anger, but not small enough to ignore, still can’t stand the idea of a world without him in it.

I am not going to make it easy.

He asked what he had to offer. I didn’t have an answer ready for him in that room, and I’m not sure I have one now either.

Corvin is waiting in the courtyard when we pull in, and one look at his face tells me the day isn’t finished with me yet.

“We have a problem,” he says, before I’ve even gotten the door open. “The eastern patrol went dark two hours ago. Nobody’s heard from them since.”