Chapter 42 Harper
HARPER
Liam lies sprawled beneath the autumn canopy, the shifting light painting his face in warm golds and fading ambers.
I sit at his feet with my back against his ankles, letting the weight of the last few days settle into the grass beside me.
He flips lazily through a book, the pages whispering with each slow turn, while the branches above us rattle in their own restless language.
“Seb went to visit Anne, right?” he asks, not looking up from the text.
“Yes.” I pull my knees closer, feeling an ache pulse through my ribs.
“She’s been feeling worse. I offered to go with him after breakfast, but he said she wanted only him.
I think he’s scared for me to see her like this.
” I stare at the brittle leaves drifting toward the earth, each one spiraling down like a quiet warning.
“It breaks my heart that she thinks she needs to hide anything from me.”
Liam shuts the book halfway, thumb holding his place. “That poor girl. Harper… I know Father touched her with his magic. I felt it when I saw her. It clings to skin for years. No one walks out of Shadeborne walls untouched.”
A tightness coils inside my chest, sharp and familiar. There’s nothing I can say that doesn’t feel useless, so I let the silence stretch until it thins.
Finally, I ask, “Where did Theo disappear to? You didn’t pack that bag for both of us, and I know you too well to believe that was premeditated generosity.”
He smirks faintly. “He has tests today. Apparently we still attend school.” The amusement in his voice lasts only a breath before fading.
Then something dark sways into my line of sight. Liam dangles Ares’s sketchbook by its spine, letting it sway like a pendulum before me. My stomach drops as if someone has cut out the ground beneath me. I lunge upright and snatch it from him, hugging the leather cover tight.
“When did you get that?” I gasp, my voice embarrassingly thin.
“After I got my things from the infirmary.” He casts me a sideways glance. “You tried to hide it from Sebastian. I’m shocked he didn’t notice.”
Heat prickles along my neck. My fingers trace the cover, the shallow grooves in the leather worn smooth from use. “I only took it because he hid it first,” I whisper. “I… I don’t know what I thought I’d find.”
“You know it’s Ares’s,” Liam says gently.
“Yes.” I swallow. “You told me last night… didn’t you?”
He snorts softly. "I thought I had dreamed it because of the morphine.” He steals the sketchbook from my hands again, flipping through it with slow, deliberate care. When he lands on the drawing of him and Theo, something softens behind his tired eyes.
I watch him, feeling the tension build in the air between us. Something is coming. Something old and heavy.
“What haven’t you told me?” I finally ask. “About him. About Ares.”
His fingers pause on the page. He exhales through his nose, closes the book, and gently places it in my lap. Then he picks up a fallen leaf and stands, as if the story requires movement or distance.
“When we were children,” he begins, “there was a servant boy in the manor. Young. Quiet. Starved half to death most of the time.” He crushes the leaf absentmindedly between his fingers. “His father worked for ours. They treated him like a mutt you keep around only because it listens well enough.”
Old memories scratch at the back of my skull, blurred outlines, fragments without color.
“Whenever you noticed him,” Liam continues, “Father would slap you. Tell you that curiosity made you weak. Tell you that Shadeborne heirs don’t look at servants, let alone speak to them.”
My breath hitches. I don’t remember. Not fully. But something echoes, fear, maybe.
“One night,” he says, “Mother put you to bed early. I stayed up practicing spells. Too ambitiously. I tried something far beyond what I should have.” He laughs bitterly. “It rebounded. Hit me hard. I couldn’t scream. Couldn’t get up. Just lay there on the floor, unable to breathe.”
The forest quiets as if holding its own breath.
“I remember a figure in the doorway,” Liam murmurs. “Barely a silhouette. And then… nothing. I must’ve passed out.”
The sketchbook grows heavier in my lap.
“When I woke,” he says, “Ares was kneeling beside me. Older than us. Maybe eight. His hands were shaking. He kept whispering that I would be alright. He must’ve found me, must’ve tried to help.
But when Father and Ares’s father found us together…
” He shakes his head slowly. “They beat him. Both of them. Thought he hurt me when he’d done the opposite. ”
Something in my chest fractures, not with a crack, but with a slow, unbearable split.
“He saved my life,” Liam says softly. “Once before the forest. Before the Wendigo. Before any of this. And he paid for it.”
My fingers curl around the sketchbook until my knuckles ache. The forest blurs in my periphery.
Ares saved Liam’s life as a child.
And they punished him for it.
And I...I didn’t remember him at all.
The realization sits inside me like a stone sinking deeper and deeper.
Liam kneels beside me, wrapping an arm gently around my shoulders.
“That’s how I know him,” he finishes. “And maybe… maybe why he felt the need to save me again.”
I stare down at the leather book in my lap, the initials A.P. faintly etched into the corner like a whisper from a past I forgot existed.
I don’t speak.
I can’t.
“They beat him,” I whisper, the words scraping out of me as if pulled through thorns. “They beat him for saving you?”
I try to imagine it, Ares small enough to be overlooked in a hallway, hungry enough to be nearly invisible, and still brave enough to pick my broken brother up off the floor.
I’ve seen the aftermath of my father’s punishments.
I’ve worn it on my own back. But whatever he gave me was calculated, deliberate, his twisted idea of shaping me.
Punishment dealt to an outsider? To a servant child accused of harming his heir?
Liam must hear the spiraling in my breath, because he lets out a long exhale and crouches to pull a stray pine needle from the grass.
“The world has been cruel to anyone unlucky enough to fall near our name,” he murmurs. “Crueler still to the ones who didn’t ask for it.”
I slip the sketchbook into my bag, burying it beneath a few folded papers and a half-empty ink vial, as though hiding it will somehow still the questions rattling around inside my ribcage. My fingers linger on the leather before I force myself to let go.
“Do you trust him?” I ask. The words come out tight. Fragile.
Liam slings his bag over his shoulder and places his hands on his hips, considering the tree line before answering.
“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” he says finally. “You’ll follow whatever your heart decides to do.” A faint smile tugs at his mouth, not teasing, just… knowing. Too knowing.
He inhales deeply, eyes traveling toward the edge of Vireldan’s silhouette. For a moment he closes his eyes as if picturing Theo waiting for him, counting the seconds.
“I told him I’d only be gone an hour,” Liam says, rubbing the back of his neck. The gesture is tired, but there’s something lighter in it now, like he’s rediscovering the gravity of being wanted by someone.
“Go,” I tell him, pulling my knees to my chest and letting my back rest against the rough bark. “I’m gonna stay a little while.”
“You know how to find me.” He leans down and presses a kiss to the top of my head, lingering long enough for warmth to settle somewhere deep inside my chest.
“I always do.”
He straightens, gives me one last look, the kind that tries to memorize a person in a single glance, and then turns toward the path.
His figure slips between the trees, shrinking, dissolving into the dimming light until he’s nothing more than a shifting speck of shadow moving farther and farther away.
Only when he disappears completely do I finally release the breath I’ve been holding, letting my head fall back against the oak. The chill seeps into my skull, down my spine, rooting me in place while the world around me refuses to stop spinning.
A sharp jolt snakes through my body, dragging me out of sleep so abruptly that my breath catches in my throat.
My eyes snap open and meet his, Ares, crouched above me, shadowed by the soft orange glow of a sun beginning its slow descent.
The light haloing him is gentler than midday, diffused enough to make him look almost unreal, like the forest sculpted him from dusk itself.
I push myself upright, rubbing the remnants of sleep from my eyes as I take in my surroundings.
I’m still beneath the same tree where Liam left me. I must have drifted off.
Ares remains still, hands buried in the pockets of his black trousers, his coat draped around him like armor.
Not a scrap of skin visible. Every inch of him shielded, contained.
Controlled. Except the eyes, those refuse to obey any boundary, sweeping over me as if cataloguing every weak point, every shiver, every shift of breath.
He kneels so we’re closer, enough that I feel the heat radiating through all that damn fabric. “Why are you sleeping out here?” he asks, tilting his head, a stray curl falling across his brow. He doesn’t push it away. He just watches me, waiting, as if daring me to lie.
“I lost track of time,” I mutter, reaching for my bag. My fingers brush leather, his sketchbook, and my pulse stutters. Every question I’ve been holding since last night presses against my tongue, but this isn’t the moment. Not yet.
“My dad… how bad was it?” The words scrape out before I can stop them, weighted heavily by the fact he’s wrapped head-to-toe in clothes he didn’t need last time I saw him.
Ares snorts. “Your dad was peachy. Think he wants to get a pint with me next week.” The sarcasm is sharp enough to glitter, but behind it sits something frayed, something brittle.
He studies me again, more slowly this time. “Why are you alone out here?”
“Liam had something with Theo, and Sebastian is visiting his sister.” I shift, trying to stand fully, but pain cuts through my side like a rusty blade.
I hiss under my breath, clutching the spot as my frustration spikes.
My head tips back against the trunk, the bark digging into my skull as I curse myself for ignoring the wound.
“You still haven’t gotten that treated?” he asks, and the low simmer of irritation in his voice tells me exactly how little patience he has left for my bad decisions. I shake my head anyway, stubborn as ever.
He leans in, eyes narrowing. “Let me see how bad it’s gotten.”
“I’m fine.” I step around him, but he moves quicker, blocking my path with a silent, fluid shift of his body. His hands never leave his pockets, yet somehow he still manages to cage me in with just his presence. His height forces my chin up; his closeness scrapes heat along my nerve endings.
“If it gets infected,” he says, voice dropping into something that crawls down my spine, “you’ll be stuck in the infirmary for days when you could be training. I won’t hurt you. Just lift your shirt enough so I can see it.”
There’s no threat in his tone. Not really. It’s worse, concern he refuses to name, irritation he can’t hide, and something darker threaded between the words. Something that tightens my stomach.
His gaze locks onto mine, unwavering, unblinking. It steals the breath from my lungs more effectively than pain ever could.
And the worst, most dangerous, part?
I want to obey.
He waits without moving, watching me with that carved-in-stone stillness he wears like armor.
His expression gives nothing away, but the faint furrow between his brows tells me he’s concentrating, on me, on the wound, on the choice I’m about to make.
The silence stretches, taut as a pulled thread.
I bite the inside of my cheek, glance anywhere but at him, and then lift the hem of my sweater.
The fabric drags upward, exposing the bruises and the angry, darkened edges of the gash I’ve been pretending doesn’t exist. The oversized knit had hidden the toll, but there’s no disguising how lean I’ve gotten, how hollow the last week has carved me.
Before I can talk myself out of this, I hear a soft crunch of leaves.
He steps closer. His scent reaches me in slow waves, sandalwood first, then clean cotton, and something warmer underneath, something expensive and subtle and fleeting like lavender pressed between book pages. It steals a breath from me.
His fingers come next.
He touches the skin around the wound, not the center, just the edges, his restraint somehow more intimate than if he'd grabbed my waist outright. The moment his fingertips meet me, a shiver skates violently up my spine, goosebumps racing across my arms as if my body has been waiting for something it didn’t know how to name.
He traces upward, the path dangerously close to where Theo had touched earlier, but Ares’s touch is different, gentler, slower, as if he’s mapping the damage rather than assessing it.
And then he pulls away.
So fast it feels like loss.
The absence of his hands leaves heat trapped under my skin. I drop my sweater back down, swallowing the embarrassment clawing at my throat as I force myself to meet his eyes again.
He’s already retreated a few steps, jaw clenched hard enough to fracture stone.
His hands disappear into his pockets. A leaf drifts down in front of him; he snatches it midair without even glancing at it, rolling the stem between his fingers just like Liam had earlier.
But unlike my brother, Ares doesn’t look away from me once.
His gaze stays on me, sharp, unreadable, unsettlingly focused.
“How bad is it?” My voice feels thinner than I want it to.
His silence drags just long enough to make my skin prickle.
“It’s not infected,” he finally says, though his tone makes it clear it’s closer than I realize. “But it’s close.”
Before I can argue, he steps forward, grabs my bag, and slings it over his own shoulder with a practiced ease that shouldn’t make my pulse jump the way it does.
The motion shifts the flap, exposing the corner of the sketchbook.
I freeze, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or he hides it well.
His hand presses the flap down without comment.
“In terms of your training,” he adds, turning his back to me, “I’m not going to waste time teaching someone who’s nearly starved.”
There’s no cruelty in his voice, just blunt truth wrapped in annoyance and something else I can’t decipher.
He starts walking toward Anavris, coat sweeping behind him, shoulders rigid with purpose.
“Let’s go find you something to eat.”
He doesn’t look back to see if I’m following.
He doesn’t need to.