17. The Wound She Left #2
Shame twisted in Surin's gut, hot and vicious.
He should have tried harder to stop this months ago.
Should have seen the obsession taking root and ripped it out before it could poison everything and should have found a way to send the Canariae away the moment Malec brought her back from the portal, before Malec ever had the chance to truly fixate.
But he hadn't. He thought his son strong enough to manage it. Thought distance and discipline would temper the bond.
He'd been wrong.
"When did you last eat?" Surin asked, his voice cutting through the oppressive silence.
Malec didn't look up. "Yesterday. Or the day before."
"That's not good enough."
"I do not care." Malec's fingers pressed another pin into the map with mechanical precision. "Food is a distraction. Sleep is a distraction. Everything is a distraction until my Allora is back where she belongs."
Surian made a small, wounded sound.
Surin studied his son's profile—the way his jaw worked constantly, and his eyes never stopped moving across the maps even when he spoke. This was what the Canariae's refusal had cost. His brilliant son reduced to this hollow, obsessive shell.
"This bond," Surin said carefully. "This Vash'telor. It's destroying you."
"Yes." The simple acknowledgment was somehow worse than denial would have been.
"And you won't sever it."
"I can't." Malec's hand stilled on the map. "Even if I wanted to. The bond doesn't work that way. It's woven into everything I am now and I wouldn't want it gone even if I did have a choice."
Rage bloomed in Surin's chest. Not at Malec. Never at Malec.
At her.
At the Canariae female who had looked at everything his son offered and decided it wasn't enough. Who had taken Malec's devotion and twisted it into a weapon that was slowly killing him.
"She did this to you," Surin said quietly.
Malec's expression didn't change. "No. I did this to myself. She just refused to save me from it."
"She should have accepted the bond."
"She didn't want it."
"That's irrelevant." The words came out sharper than Surin intended. "You bound yourself to her. The honorable response would have been acceptance."
Malec’s lips curved in a thin, humorless smile. “And if someone bound you to them without your consent, Father, would you have accepted it out of honor?”
The question struck like a blade between the ribs.
Surin's jaw squared, old wounds tearing open. Memories he'd buried decades ago clawing their way to the surface. "That's different."
"How?"
"Because you are Awyan and she is Canariae. The bond elevates her, gives her status, protection, a future she could never achieve otherwise. Refusing it isn't just foolish, it's ungrateful."
Surian inhaled suddenly. "Father?—"
"No." Surin turned to her, his voice cold and final. "You will not defend her choices here. Look at what they've cost."
He gestured at Malec, at the tent, at the maps covered in obsessive notations. "This is what her freedom was worth. Your brother's life, his sanity, his future all sacrificed so she could run back to a world that doesn't even want her!"
"You don't know that," Surian whispered.
"I know she was given every comfort and offered a bond that would have made her untouchable in this realm, and I know she threw it away!"
Malec's voice cut through the rising tension, quiet but carrying an edge that silenced them both. "She valued her freedom, Father." He didn't look up from the map. "I understand that. She arrived here frightened, desperate to go home. I know what my claim cost her."
Surian's breath caught. For the first time all evening, Malec sounded almost like himself. Rational. Aware.
But then his fingers pressed another pin into the map with deliberate precision.
"Understanding why she ran doesn't change what I need," he continued, his voice dropping lower.
"The bond exists. It chose us. That's not a fact either of us can undo, and no amount of fighting on her part will change that.
She belongs with me. Her reasons for running, her fear, her desire for freedom—none of it alters that fact. "
He finally looked up, meeting Surian's horrified gaze directly.
"The Vash'telor doesn't lie. It doesn't make mistakes. If it bound us, then we were meant to be bound. Her resistance is just... her not understanding yet."
“Malec,” Surian whispered, a crack forming in her voice. “Do you hear yourself?”
His expression didn’t change. “I hear myself perfectly. I know she’s suffering and that bringing her back will hurt her at first.” A brief flare crossed his eyes.
Doubt, perhaps. Or pain. It vanished as quickly as it appeared.
“But the bond will settle eventually. She’ll understand, find peace, and then stop fighting. ”
"And if she doesn't?" Surian's voice was barely audible.
"She will." The certainty in his voice was absolute. "Because the alternative is that fate itself made an error. And I don't believe that."
Surin watched this exchange undetected, cataloging every word, every micro-expression. His son wasn't ignorant. He understood exactly what he was doing to her. He simply believed the bond justified it.
"You've lost your mind, boy." Surin's voice was low, cutting, carrying more weight than a shout.
He stepped closer, his presence filling the space like iron.
Ice blue eyes lingered not on the maps, but on his son.
"You speak like a crazed Awyan who has already dug his own grave and is waiting for her to lie in it with him. "
Malec's eyes flicked to his father, colder than the brazier flame.
"You would rather tear down kingdoms than face the truth that she does not want you."
A hush fell heavier than snow.
Malec's jaw clenched. "Want is irrelevant to destiny, Father. The bond chose us. That truth supersedes her fear."
Surin folded his hands behind his back, as though weighing the calculus of war itself. In his mind, the choice was obvious: watch his son unravel until nothing was left, or act before Malec's obsession devoured not only himself but the entire realm.
The brazier's glow caught in Surin's frost bitten eyes as he spoke again, his voice cutting the air like a blade. "And if she never loves you?"
The question fell into the tent like an executioner's axe.
Malec's face didn't move. His hand stayed poised above the map, fingers twitching once against the parchment.
"Then she'll hate me beside her," he said, steady as frost. "But she'll be beside me. Where the bond says she belongs."
Surian's voice broke then, just slightly. "You're talking about a cage."
"And you think she's not already in one?" Malec snapped, head lifting, pale tan eyes glinting like fractured glass. "This world caged her the moment she arrived. At least in my cage, she's protected, valued, bound to someone who would burn this entire realm to keep her safe."
"You made her survival your excuse," Surian whispered. Her arms were tight around herself now, as though bracing against the weight of those words. "You made her strength a justification for your control."
Malec turned back to the map, dismissive, fingers tracing the red thread again. "You always took her side."
"I didn't take her side," Surian said, her voice steel beneath the ache. "I just never stopped seeing her as an equal, with her own will and right to choose."
"And I've never stopped seeing her as my Vash'telor," Malec countered quietly. "Which supersedes her right to choose away from me."
The silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the faint crackle of the brazier and the distant snap of canvas in the wind.
"She was the only thing in my life that ever made sense." Malec's voice was low, flat, but not empty. "And now I'm expected to live like I can breathe without her?"
He looked up at Surian then, and a coldness deeper than fury lived behind his eyes. It almost resembled understanding, twisted into justification.
“When you’ve held a rarity like that,” he whispered, “you don’t forget it. You can’t. You spend the rest of your life trying to get it back, even if it kills you.”
His fingers tightened on the edge of the map. “And I will get her back. The bond demands it. There is no other option for me or for her.”
For just a moment, he met Surian’s gaze and saw the horror in her eyes. Saw the way she looked at him as though he had become a stranger.
A tightness gripped his chest as doubt crept in, a quiet whisper that perhaps he was?—
No.
He returned to the map. The doubt disappeared as quickly as it came, crushed beneath the weight of certainty.
The bond had chosen them. That was the only truth that mattered.
Across the tent, Surin studied his son from behind an unreadable expression, absorbing every detail. Behind that stillness, though, thoughts moved like knives. His heir was slipping further from him and any semblance of reason.
And if Malec could no longer be bent back into shape, Surin was beginning to consider the unthinkable.
Surian was halfway to the mess hall, her cloak tight around her shoulders, when the sound of quick, uneven footfalls broke through the morning hush.
"Surian—!"
She turned. Luko was barreling toward her, breath fogging in the bitter air, hair disheveled, panic written plain across his face.
She frowned. "What is it?—"
"She's here," he gasped, hands gesturing wildly.
Surian blinked. "Luko, breathe. You're talking like a madman."
He leaned close, still struggling for breath. "Kirelle. She's here at the gate, demanding to see Malec. She pushed past the outpost guard and won't say why."
Surian went still.
The color drained from her face like ink spilling from a cracked bottle.
Kirelle.
Here.
At Malec's camp.
Without another word, she spun on her heel, skirts snapping against her boots as she cut across the frozen ground.
"Go inform Malec so he is not blindsided," she called back.
Luko nodded, darting toward the command tent while she strode the opposite way, heart hammering.