Part III—Lie

Part III The Lie Is Born

The air in the apartment still carried the faint chill of whatever had passed through the city.

Tharien felt it like an echo under his skin—a wrongness that didn’t belong to this room, this moment, this breath shared between him and Nori. The warmth behind his sternum had thinned, stretched too tight, as if some distant wound had tugged on the invisible thread between them.

He forced his focus back to her.

Nori was still close, still within the small circle of lamplight, her hands resting against his chest where she had anchored him only minutes before. Her thumbs traced slow, grounding patterns, but the steadiness he’d found there was slipping through his fingers. The bond that had felt like gravity moments ago now carried a faint tremor, subtle but unmistakable.

“Something changed,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. Nori had always been able to feel the weather inside him before he named it himself. Her gaze searched his face, her mouth parting as if she were bracing for a truth she didn’t want to hear.

Tharien swallowed. The echo of the ritual chamber he had never seen pressed in on his thoughts: the cold rush, the hollow silence, the way something in the world had learned to breathe where love had been cut away. The knowledge settled into him with brutal clarity.

If bonds can be cut, then bonds can get you killed.

The logic formed clean and sharp, sliding into place alongside every other rule he’d ever used to survive. He looked at Nori through that lens and felt a spike of fear he hadn’t expected.

She wasn’t fragile in the ways the world defined fragility. She was resilient, fierce in her quiet way, fire wrapped in flesh. But the bond between them made her vulnerable to him—to the things he carried, to the violence he kept leashed by will alone. Her presence steadied him, yes. It also made her the nearest thing to the blast radius of whatever he was becoming.

He shifted back a fraction of an inch.

It was barely anything. The kind of movement most people wouldn’t notice. But Nori felt it immediately. Her hands stilled against his chest, her breath catching as if the air between them had thickened.

“Don’t,” she said softly.

The word wasn’t accusation. It was a plea.

Tharien forced his shoulders to relax, forced a small, controlled smile onto his mouth. “I’m just… tired,” he said. “Long day.”

Another lie. Small. Practiced.

Nori’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but in hurt recognition. She leaned forward, trying to close the distance he’d opened. Tharien let her come close enough that their foreheads brushed, but he didn’t let himself sink into the grounding warmth this time. He held himself a breath away from fully giving in.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said quietly. “You know that.”

Her fingers tightened in his shirt. “You’re not,” she whispered. “You never do.”

He almost believed her. Almost.

But the echo under his skin flared again, a memory of cold that wasn’t his and yet felt intimately connected to the bond he shared with her. The invisible thread between them tightened, a sharp pressure blooming behind his sternum. The warmth there throbbed, then pulled thin, as if responding to the distance he was already creating in his head.

“I just need space,” he said. “To keep things… under control.”

The bond reacted violently to the word control. Pain lanced through his chest, sudden and precise, stealing his breath. Nori gasped with him, her hands flying back to his chest as if to brace him.

“Tharien—”

“I’m fine,” he said too quickly, though the lie scraped on its way out. He drew a shallow breath, careful not to lean into her support. Careful not to let the bond do what it wanted to do and pull him back into the safety of her presence.

Distance is mercy, a voice whispered inside him.

Distance is how you keep her safe.

The thought settled into him like a creed.

The ache behind his sternum sharpened, the bond stretching taut between them, humming with a warning he didn’t yet know how to hear properly. Nori searched his face, fear flickering in her eyes as she felt the first hairline fracture form in the space he was carving out.

He held her gaze and forced himself not to close the distance he’d created.

The lie was born in him before he ever spoke it.