Lie

KAEL'S POV

"She told me," I say, quietly, almost to myself. "In the cave. Her father promised her to him. I heard it and I still claimed her anyway."

"Then I think you already understand the shape of this better than I expected you to." Lorenzo chooses his next words carefully, like he's still not fully certain of the ground he's standing on. "As far as I can tell, the curse doesn't care about who's right. It cares about precedence. Whoever claimed her first, the magic assumes they still hold it."

"Answer the debt in his own body,” I repeat. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Lorenzo doesn't answer right away, and that silence is its own kind of answer.

"Lorenzo."

"It means the body fails," he says finally. "Slowly, from what little else is written here. There's no cure named in this text. Only the conditions that stop it."

"You're telling me I'm going to die?"

Saying it out loud doesn't make it feel real. If anything it makes the room tilt slightly, the book and the desk and Lorenzo's careful face all going strange and distant for a second, like I'm hearing this happen to someone else.

"I'm telling you what the text says,” Lorenzo says. “I won't pretend to know how quickly it will happen, or whether there's some version of you strong enough to outlast it on sheer stubbornness alone. I don't know that. Nobody alive does."

I sit there a moment longer, waiting for my own chest to confirm or deny it. It doesn't do either. It just keeps aching, steady, patient, the way it has since this morning, giving nothing away about how much time that ache actually has left to run.

"How do I stop it?"

"The claim has to be broken at its source. The original promise is undone, publicly, in a way the old magic recognizes as final." He flips to a passage circled hard enough to tear the paper. "The one who made the promise rescinds it. The one it was made to relinquishes it willingly. Or the bond that violated it proves itself stronger through direct challenge. The old packs called it a rite of precedence."

"Ashford isn't giving her up willingly."

"No," Lorenzo agrees. "I didn't think he would."

I stand before I've fully made up my mind.

"Then I'll find her myself. However long this gives me, I'm not spending it sitting in this house waiting on an answer that might come too late to matter. I'll find her before whatever's happening to me finishes happening."

Lorenzo doesn't try to stop me. He just watches me head for the door, like he already knew this was the only direction I was ever going to choose.

The door opens. Mara stands there, the explanation she's owed me since the border written across her face.

"I need to tell you something," she says. "About why I went out there alone."

"Can it wait?"

"No. Because it's the reason I know where Ashford's holding her."

Every other thought in my head goes quiet.

"I didn't go to the border because I caught a scent," she says. "I went because someone called me. Told me where to find a den Ashford's men have used before, past the old quarry. I thought if I found it myself, I could prove something."

She's lying.

I know it the same way I knew it the night I caught Lyra at the gate, trying to give me a false name. It's not a feeling or a guess. I can smell it, clean and simple. Lies always smell wrong on someone's breath, no matter how steady their voice remains.

I don't say so. Not yet. I need whatever's true in what she's telling me more than I need to catch her in the rest of it right now.

"Who called you?"

"I don't know. Blocked number." She holds my gaze, steady, too steady, exactly like someone who's practiced saying this part. "But I've been there before. I know how to get in without being seen."

I nod, filing the lie away next to everything else I don't have time to deal with yet.

"Then show me," I say.