06 If I Die, Will You Care?

Seraphina’s POV

I don't know how long I sat in that cell before the door opened again. Time had stopped meaning very much to me. There was dark, and then there was a little less dark when someone brought a torch down the corridor, and that was the only clock I had left.

When the door finally scraped open, I looked up and it was Kael standing in the frame of it, and something in my chest, some foolish, wounded, still-hoping part of me that hadn't yet learned better, lifted.

He'd come. He was going to fix this. He was going to say the words that undid the platform, undid the square, undid the smoke still clinging to my hair, and I would hate myself later for how fast the hope rose in me, how completely I was still built, even after everything, to believe in him the second he stood in front of me.

"Seraphina."

"You came." My voice came out cracked, raw from screaming, barely my own. "Kael, you came, you're going to...”

"I need you to listen carefully." He crouched in front of the cell door, not close enough to touch, close enough that I could see how little he'd slept, how the last two days had carved something out of his face that hadn't been there at the mating fire. " The council has ruled on your standing. Given the treason finding against your household, you cannot remain in Blackridge."

The hope in my chest didn't fall gently. It dropped like something thrown.

"You're exiling me."

"It's not...” He stopped. Started again, quieter. "It's the only outcome I could negotiate that didn't end with you in that square a third time, Seraphina. I fought for this. You don't know how hard I fought for even this much."

"You fought to send me away instead of killing me. Forgive me if I don't know how to thank you properly."

He flinched. Good. I wanted him to flinch.

"An escort will take you past the border by morning. You'll be given supplies. Coin. Enough to start somewhere that isn't here." He said it like a list, like reciting terms made it easier to say them, and maybe it did, for him. "I made certain of that much."

"How generous." I pulled my knees up against my chest, against the cold, against him. "Tell me something, Kael. Since you're so determined to negotiate mercy for me from a distance."

"Anything."

“If I die out there…” My voice remained steady, even though everything else in me had broken. “If I die alone on some road, with no pack, no name and no one who knows to look for me, will you care?”

Kael’s expression cracked.

“Seraphina…”

His gaze moved past me towards the end of the corridor. A council guard stood beside the stairs, watching us. Kael looked at him for a second before returning his attention to me.

“You will have supplies,” he answered. “Coin and enough food to reach the next territory. Darian will make certain you cross the border safely.”

I stared at him. I had asked if he would care about my death, and he had answered with supplies.

“That’s what I thought.”

Kael moved closer to the bars, but when he answered, his lips did not move. ‘It isn’t. Your death would destroy me.’ 

His voice entered my mind through the pack link, low and private. My heart betrayed me with one painful beat.

The guard shifted at the end of the corridor. Kael stepped back immediately, and the emotion disappeared from his face.

“The council agreed to exile because I promised there would be no further connection between you and Blackridge,” he continued aloud in a formal voice.

“If they believe I intend to protect you after you leave, they may withdraw the offer.”

“So that’s your answer? You care, but only when no one can hear you admit it?”

His jaw tightened.

“My answer is that I need you alive, Sera,  even if you hate me for how I kept you that way.”

“You rejected me, watched my family die and locked me in a cell. Don’t stand there and pretend exile makes you my saviour.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”

“Good, because I won’t.” I stood, refusing to finish the conversation on the floor. “I hope one day you understand exactly what you did to me. You can blame the council and the evidence, but you were the one who stood on that platform and chose silence when I asked you to choose me.”

Pain crossed his face, but this time I felt no satisfaction.

“I hope it finds you when you least expect it, Kael. I hope it costs you exactly what it cost me.”

He remained outside the cell for another moment. His hand lifted as though he meant to reach through the bars, but the guard was still watching. Kael let it fall.

“Stay close to Darian,” he instructed. “Whatever happens on that road, do not leave his side.”

Then he walked away.

They came for me before first light. Four guards I didn't recognize, chains instead of rope, and I walked out of that cell with my chin up because it was the only thing I had left that no one had managed to take from me yet. Darian was waiting in the corridor outside.

I hadn't expected him. He looked like he hadn't slept either, and when he saw me in chains something crossed his face that looked, for just a moment, like it cost him something to see.

"Seraphina." He said my name gently, the way you'd speak to someone standing too close to a cliff edge. "For what it's worth, and I understand it isn't worth much right now, I argued against this. All of it. From the beginning."

"Did you." I didn't have the strength left to sound like I believed him or didn't. I simply didn't have anything left to spend on caring either way.

"I did." He held up a sealed set of papers, the exile order, Kael's authority pressed into the wax. "I asked to be the one to see you to the border myself. I thought you deserved that much. Someone who didn't look at you like you were already a stranger."

It was, I remember thinking, the first kind thing anyone in Blackridge had offered me since the fire pits three nights before everything ended. I didn't have room to feel grateful for it. I only had room to keep walking.

"Then let's go," I said. "I'd like to be somewhere that isn't here."

He fell into step beside me as the guards led me out through the gate, and Isolde, quiet since the square, stirred faintly under my ribs for the first time in a day.

‘He's the only one who looked at us like we were still a person,’ she muttered. ‘The standard is apparently underground now, but at least he managed to crawl over it.’

I didn't answer her. I was too busy watching Blackridge's walls fall away behind me, the only home I had ever known, and telling myself I would not look back at it, and looking back at it anyway.