Max
Ifelt the pull, unmistakable as ever, before I saw him.
Aelindor wore Virgo silver today, the winged maiden sigil in gold over his left breast. The heat and clamor of the Emberhold seemed to bank itself as he entered.
Tall, powerful, silver hair catching the forge-fire like spun light.
Eyes that impossible blue. Beautiful in a way that had nothing human in it—features carved from ice marble, the points of his ears just visible.
Beauty like that should have been easy to look at.
It never was. It stole my breath every time.
And today something had eased in him. He looked lighter, as if, for once, the weight he carried had set itself down somewhere out of sight.
Every blacksmith bowed. I came to attention and saluted. My heart pounded behind my ribs.
I hadn’t had a moment alone with him since the clearing, and that had ended almost before it began, when Lady Vaelith walked out of the trees. I still didn’t know whether her timing had been an accident.
If I let myself count her a rival, she’d count me one right back.
But there was no contest, was there?
I wasn’t in the heirs’ league and I knew it. Their attention still made me feel like I’d stepped onto a platform two rungs above where I belonged, waiting for someone to notice and send me back down.
Maybe it all came down to being an asset. The alchemist with the sentient metal and a dormant sabotage program buried in half the continent’s infrastructure. They didn’t need to romance me to secure my cooperation. Getting Missy back was motivation enough to put me on any battlefield they named.
Aelindor nodded to the room, then his blue gaze settled on me alone.
“Did you get what you came for?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Six armguards, stockpiled in my backpack.
In the skate shoes I stood taller than him.
I had to dip my chin to meet his eyes, which had been happening all week with everyone, but this was Aelindor, the highest-ranking officer in the fortress.
You did not look down at an heir. It was too late to adjust my stance without looking like a fool, so I held still and hoped he didn’t notice.
“It’s getting harder to track you,” he said, mildly amused.
“Sorry, sir. I thought Frost told you.”
“I gave him the day off.” A shadow moved through the blue of his eyes. “Personal reasons.”
He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t press. I knew my place, even though I cared about Frost. One of the six armguards was reserved for him.
Fae were the most private of the species, their personal lives treated like classified information shared on a strict need-to-know basis.
Shifters were the opposite. Rage, joy, grief, all of it unfiltered on their faces.
Vampires hoarded information; knowledge was currency.
Drakken’s people ran like human military—professional, compartmentalized, everything through its chain of command.
The Fae prince carried his sorrows the way he carried everything else.
Perfectly. And alone.
“Walk with me.” Aelindor’s voice softened. “I have a few minutes.”
“Let me change first, sir. It’ll only take a second.”
I was grateful, in that moment, for the training shoes in my backpack.
I skated to the bench along the wall, sat down, and switched out the blades for my regular shoes, putting the skate shoes back in the backpack. I stood up at my normal height, an inch or two shorter than Aelindor. “Ready.”
We walked out together. Behind us, I heard Hessa say something quiet to her crew, and the hammers didn’t resume until we were past the door.
Outside, the light was different, the forge’s orange glow replaced by the gray afternoon, cooler air against my face.
The soldiers’ eyes tracked us from the perimeter, the careful non-stare of people who weren’t going to look directly at the Fae heir but couldn’t help watching the edge of the scene.
He led me south along the treeline.
The path ran between old oaks whose roots had lifted the stone paving in places. Where the trees thinned, the lake came into view, wide and natural, silver in the afternoon light. Through the trees to the east, the geometry of Drakken’s army camp was visible.
This whole corner belonged to the House of Leo. It made no difference. The heirs moved freely through each other’s territory, soldiers standing for any heir the same way they stood for their own. That was the Zodiac Covenant.
Aelindor’s security detail trailed at a distance, just within sight, close enough to matter, far enough to pretend otherwise. I’d nearly stopped noticing them.
“Is there anything you require, sir?”
He stopped. Turned and looked at me with his full attention.
“Why the sudden distance, Max?”
“You sought me out,” I said. “You must need something.”
“I sought you out because I miss you. I want to spend time with you whenever I can. That’s all.”
My heart skipped. I told myself firmly that this was not possible, that I was misreading it, that—
“But what about your girlfriend?” I asked.
He blinked. “Girlfriend?”
“Lady Vaelith.”
A faint smile ghosted the corner of his mouth.
“You think Lady Vaelith is my lover?”
“Isn’t she?” I heard the defensiveness in my own voice and couldn’t take it back.
“Why would you think that?”
“She’s stunning,” I said. “She appears at your side and whispers in your ear, and you listen to her like nothing else in the room exists. She looks at you like—” I stopped. “She’s stunning,” I said again, because the rest of it was too much to say out loud.
“So are you.”
I blinked at him.
“She has everything I’m lacking,” I said. “History with you. Your world, your language, your kind of beauty.” I looked at the path. “I was a mine rat, a slave.”
“You aren’t lacking, Max.” His voice was quiet and precise. “And you’re no longer a slave. You’re one of a kind. There is no comparison to make.”
I kept looking at the path.
“You don’t need to feel insecure,” he said. “If I’ve made you feel small at any point, I’m sorry. I haven’t let anyone close in a very long time, long enough that I’ve lost the habit of showing my feelings properly. I don’t always know how to make someone feel—”
“You make me feel,” I said. The words came out before I’d cleared them. “You don’t need to put any effort into it. Anything you give me is enough.”
The back of his knuckles brushed my cheek, and that was all it took. The current moved through me, straight inward, pooling low, settling in my molten core. I leaned into it, just barely, and felt him go very still.
Then he dropped his hand, and the loss of contact was almost obscene.
“Lady Vaelith is my spymaster. She reports directly to me. She’s been embedded in the Pallid Court, close to the White Witch’s inner circle, and she came back when the intelligence became critical.”
I stared at him. “But Nikolai runs intelligence.”
“Nikolai heads the network, yes. He has Caspian’s trackers under his command on certain operations, and we coordinate all channels centrally.
But Lady Vaelith’s position is unique. No one else has the access she does, the proximity to the Witch herself.
We work in parallel lines.” He paused, and something settled in his voice, the weight of years of this.
“It’s by design. If one channel is compromised, the others stay dark.
The Witch’s mages have taken down several of our networks over the last few decades.
We learned not to put everything through a single line. ”
I felt the loss in him, the gravity of what it cost to run intelligence in a decades-long war, to watch networks go dark and know what that meant for the people inside them. I kept my hands clasped behind my back. If I reached for him now, I wouldn’t stop at his arm.
“She dropped her glamour at one point,” I said. “She must wear a different face in the Pallid Court. I could see the residue of it.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You can see that?”
“Yes. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t doubt your loyalty for a moment.” His expression shifted to the recalibration of a man updating something he’d estimated. “Not even the other heirs can detect Lady Vaelith’s glamour. It’s ancient Fae magic. She’s spent centuries perfecting it.” He paused. “She’s one of the eagles.”
That was how she’d come back so fast—no overland route through the Scorched Wastes, no checkpoint at the Crimson Ridge border where the Pallid Court’s watchtowers covered every approach.
The Scorched Wastes and the mutant swarms that ran them were an effective barrier between the Covenant and the White Witch’s territory; Crimson Ridge itself was impossible to breach without significant cost. Seven raids over the years, Drakken’s seven, none of them successful.
But an eagle shifter flying high enough didn’t need to breach anything.
The battles between the kingdoms happened mostly in New Mexico, the triangular zone where the Pallid Court, the Zodiac Covenant, and the Haven all pressed against the same border, but the sky was different.
“Like Captain Holt,” I said. “But Holt’s a pureblood shifter.”
“Lady Vaelith is half-Fae.”
It explained the glamour: Fae magic in her blood, shifter blood giving her the form.
Frost had told me there’d been five eagle shifters originally. Two killed by the White Witch’s mages. Three remaining. Lady Vaelith was one of them.
“She only came back when it was critical,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The Foolsilver intel?”
He regarded me, measuring how much to give. “That was part of it. The larger intelligence was this: every kingdom with a functioning spy network is now looking for the lost heir, who’s recently surfaced.”
My pulse hit like a war drum. My whole chest went tight.
“It’s connected to the old prophecy,” Aelindor said, still watching me. “We won’t get into that today.”
I didn’t want to get into it today. I didn’t want to get into it any day.
The feeling it produced was a particular dread, the kind that comes from standing at the edge of something with no bottom, knowing that whatever lived down there would overturn everything I’d built my understanding of myself on.
“Lady Vaelith might not be your lover,” I said, circling back because the prophecy was a cliff I wasn’t ready to step toward. “But I saw the way she looked at you.”
He was quiet for a moment, which told me more than his answer would have.
“We had a history,” he said finally. “A very long time ago, after I lost everything. Evermere. My people. The life I had before the Rupture. She was there during the worst of it, and we comforted each other. I ended it before she was positioned in the Pallid Court. It was kinder, I thought, to end it cleanly.”
“She still loves you.” I held his gaze. “I don’t need Fae senses to read that.”
“I hate hurting her.” A quiet exhale. The weight of it settled between us. “But I can’t return what she feels.”
We’d stopped at the lake’s edge where the path ran out and the water began. The afternoon light moved across the surface, offering a calm that didn’t reach me. Something large and complicated was pressing against my ribs from the inside, looking for a way out.
Aelindor reached up and tucked the white streak of my hair behind my ear.
“You never need to feel jealous,” he said. “There’s no one else, Max. Only you.” A pause, his blue eyes holding mine. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”
My heart slammed so hard it beat in my throat. The words moved through me like something physical. Part of me had been braced for them. Afraid of them.
Wanting them.
“Are you—” My voice came out wrong. I cleared it and tried again. “Are you sure, Aelindor?”
It was the first time I’d said his name to his face. It sat differently in the air than sir.
And he kissed me.
Not the collision in the jeep—that had been me, unplanned, over before it landed.
This was him. His hand moved from my hair to cup my jaw, tilting my face up an inch.
His mouth was warm in a way his hands never were.
The kiss started slow, then became something else the moment I stopped thinking and kissed him back.
His other hand found the small of my back and pressed there, not pulling, just anchoring, and the current that always ran between us stopped being subtle.
He kissed like a man who had spent centuries learning patience and had just decided he was done with it. Every nerve in me lit. I threaded my fingers into his hair, and he made a low growl that I was going to be thinking about for a long time.
When he broke it, we were both breathing hard.
I already knew it would burn into my bloodstream. Whether I ever kissed him again, whether any future version of this existed, I’d carry this moment. If it was all I got, I’d take it. Forehead pressed to mine, security detail thirty feet away pretending not to exist, he was mine.
The lust that came up behind the kiss was its own problem. Sharp, present, and not something either of us could do a damn thing about. He had a war to run. He’d said he had minutes, and those minutes were gone.
He stepped back. Straightened his coat.
“Wait.” I caught his arm before he could turn.
I pulled one of the six armguards from my pack, sized for him, still warm from the making. “Give me your hand. I need to bleed you.”
He smiled and offered it without hesitation. “Do whatever you need to do.”
Just like that. Trusting me completely.
I pressed his palm flat, drew a small blade across my index finger, and let a drop fall onto the armguard’s surface. Then I pressed his fingertip to the metal beside mine, our blood soaking into the Coldiron together.
The metal recognized us both. I felt the exact moment it accepted the bond.
I wrapped the armguard around his forearm and fastened it. He looked at it, then at me.
“You’ll need to feed it,” I said. “Pain works best. Your pain, or the memory of it. The worse the pain, the stronger the seal.”
Something moved across his face, old and deep, the surface of a loss so vast it had become landscape. Evermere burning. His people scattered. A beloved world reduced to ash and memory. The long hunt for a prophecy that refused to arrive, year after year after year.
His pain, mine! Coldiron announced and then settled against his arm with a bright, satisfied hum.