Chapter 27

Kade

The walk back to his own quarters took longer than it should have, Kade's feet finding every possible reason to slow down along the way — a torch that needed straightening, a guard he stopped to exchange a few unnecessary words with, anything that delayed the moment he'd have to walk through his own door and become, again, a husband instead of whatever he'd just spent the last hour being in Wren's quarters instead.

He didn't have a name for what that had been. Not quite reconciliation. Not quite anything as clean as forgiveness. Just two people who'd once meant everything to each other, sitting across a desk, discovering that five years hadn't managed to erase nearly as much as either of them had hoped it would.

Kade found Seraphine awake when he returned to their shared quarters, sitting by the window with a book she didn't appear to actually be reading, and he understood, the moment he saw her face, that she'd been waiting for him rather than simply passing the time.

"How did it go," she asked, setting the book aside, her voice carefully neutral in a way that told him she already suspected the answer.

"We covered the intelligence. Found a pattern in the incursion timing worth bringing to the task force tomorrow." He set his own folio down, aware of how thin that answer sounded even as he offered it, aware that Seraphine had never once, in five years, been fooled by a thin answer from him.

"That's not what I asked."

Kade sat down across from her, the weight of the evening finally catching up with him now that he no longer had reports to hide behind. "It was hard, Seraphine. Harder than I expected, and I expected it to be difficult."

"Did you tell her how you feel."

"No." He rubbed a hand over his face, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "We talked about incursions. About Ashenmoor. About what happened five years ago, some, because I don't think either of us could sit in a room together for thirty minutes without it surfacing eventually. I didn't tell her anything you don't already know."

Seraphine studied him a long moment, something unreadable moving behind her composed expression. "I've known this day was coming for five years, Kade. I want to be honest with you about that. I've had five years to imagine it, to dread it a little, if I'm being fully truthful, and now that it's actually here I find I mostly just feel—" She paused, searching for the word. "Tired. Not angry. Just tired, the way you get tired of holding a position you've known for a long time you were never actually going to win."

"I'm not asking you to hold anything," Kade said quietly. "I don't know what I'm asking, honestly. I married you. That meant something when I did it, and it still means something now, whatever else is also true."

"It meant an alliance held together and a war that didn't happen. That's not nothing, Kade, and I've never once regretted the peace it bought either of our packs." Seraphine's voice stayed steady, but something in her eyes had gone glassy in a way she clearly wasn't going to acknowledge out loud. "But we both know it was never going to be everything a marriage is supposed to be, and I think we've both known that since the wedding itself. I'm not interested in pretending otherwise just because the timing of all this is inconvenient."

"What do you want me to do."

"I want you to be honest with me, whatever happens next. That's all I've ever actually asked of you. Not devotion I was never going to get regardless of what I did or didn't do. Just honesty." She held his gaze, steady despite the glassiness. "If this task force turns into something more than intelligence-sharing — and Kade, I think we both know it might — I want to hear it from you directly, before I hear it from anyone else. That's the only condition I'm asking for."

"You have my word." He meant it, fully, in a way he suspected mattered more to both of them than any vow he'd spoken at the solstice five years ago, formal words that had never once managed to hold the weight they were supposed to carry. "Whatever happens. You'll hear it from me first."

Seraphine nodded, something settling in her shoulders that looked almost like relief, and reached for her book again, the conversation apparently concluded on her end even though Kade suspected they'd both be turning it over privately for considerably longer than the exchange itself had taken.

"For what it's worth," she added, not looking up from the page, "I hope it works out. Whatever it turns into. You've spent five years carrying something I could see but never touch, and I think you deserve to finally put it down, one way or another, even if the way it resolves doesn't leave much room for me in it."

Kade didn't have an answer for that, and Seraphine, apparently satisfied with having said her piece, didn't seem to need one. He sat with her a while longer in comfortable, complicated silence, and thought, not for the first time, that whatever else their marriage had failed to be, it had at least made him a better judge of what real honesty cost a person, and what it was worth regardless of the cost.