Chapter 38 #2
The way he says it makes my chest ache. I don’t know if it’s the magic, or the quiet, or how tired I still am from the trial—but my brain won’t shut up. My whole body’s tense and warm, but not from fear.
I want to say something to surprise him, ask him for personal details, step closer. Anything to throw him as off-balance as I currently feel. Instead, I shift my weight and murmur, “You really don’t miss much, do you?”
That almost-smile again. “Not when it comes to you.”
And that—that—hits lower than it should.
I glance at his mouth. Only for a second, but when I turn away, I know he noticed.
And I shouldn’t—it’s playing with fire, literally—but I take a deep breath and turn back to meet his gaze head on.
Really look at him, all of him. The glamor’s not stable.
His edges are fraying. There’s a faint shimmer near his temple, like heat rising off pavement, and a deeper glow in the space where his collar shifts.
A pulse of ember-light I hadn’t noticed before.
Caz sees me staring and does not hide it.
He doesn’t speak right away, but he doesn’t step back either.
Instead, he watches me like he’s still cataloging something.
Like I’m a mystery he hasn’t quite solved.
The thread in my hand pulses faintly again—like it’s aware of both of us.
Of this growing thing between us. I’m done ignoring it too.
“You do realize,” he says, voice low and steady, “that none of this was meant for you.”
I lift a brow to hide the swoop in my gut. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
His eyes crinkle slightly at the corners. Not quite a laugh, but close, and the fist around my heart loosens by degrees.
“You were not trained for this. You do not speak our languages. You do not know our laws, or our customs, or our expectations. You do not even know your own lineage.”
“Wow,” I say dryly. “Keep going, I’m almost flattered.”
“Let me finish,” Caz shakes his head, slow, solemn. “And still, you face the Flame and the Rite without fear. You walk into every fire, not knowing the shape of the burn.”
I blink. It’s not a compliment I know how to carry. Not because I don’t want it, but because it feels… too honest. Too large. In direct opposition to the self-doubt marinating in my veins.
I look down at the thread in my hands again.
“I’m scared,” I correct him, “but what is my other option? Give up?” I shake my head. “That’s not really on the table.”
“No,” he agrees. “But most people do not do well with inevitability. Or powerlessness. Or change.”
I shrug one shoulder, keeping my gaze fixed on the green-gold shimmer in my hand. He’s giving me too much credit. It’s not bravery that keeps me going. It’s not strength. It just isn’t solely fear.
“There wasn’t much to miss back home. Not really.
I didn’t have anyone waiting. Just George.
I went to work, I came home. Ate cereal out of the box and fell asleep with my clothes on.
Woke up and did it again. People talk about missing home like it’s this warm, aching thing, but it’s the people who do that.
Relationships. It’s hard to miss things that don’t exist.” I glance back up.
“I’m not strong, but my world wasn’t ‘better.’ Sometimes comfort’s just a cage with pillows.
It’s not until you’re somewhere else that you realize how small it really was. Or how heavy.”
Caziel doesn’t answer at first, but his posture shifts. His arms cross, brows furrowed in thought. His eyes flick to the horizon, like he’s seeing something beyond it.
“I was sent to Cobalt when I was barely older than you are now,” he says, voice distant.
“To help settle a territorial dispute along the border. It should have taken a few weeks.” He swallows, barely audible.
“The assignment lasted six months. We were not permitted leave. It changed everything.” I say nothing.
“You are right,” he says after a pause. “Familiarity can become a trap, but sometimes the thing you miss is neither a place nor a person. It is the version of yourself that still believed they were safe. That they were doing good.”
He’s right. There’s five-year-old me holding my parents’s hands as they swing me between them, laughs loud and echoing in the sunshine.
There’s eight-year-old me standing on a battered stage, hands shaking and cheeks aching as she beamed out into the audience at the couple waving so hard the people sitting next to them were giving them a wide berth.
There’s eleven-year-old me turning the pages of her favorite book, sitting at the kitchen counter as her mom flips pancakes on the stove.
The air stills. I feel the thread warm against my skin again, and for one dizzying moment I’m not sure if it’s reacting to him or me, but it’s too much.
“It doesn’t matter how much it hurts,” I say. “No one can go back. Maybe I’d rather do what I can where I can. Lying down and letting the world pass me by wasn’t exactly working.”
He looks at me for a long time. Not pitying.
Not judging. Just seeing. I should say something.
Make a joke. Break the tension before it tightens.
Instead, I think about the last time someone looked at me like that.
It was a bar. Six months ago. After a long shift, too much tequila, and a fight with my advisor.
His hands were rough, his mouth impatient.
I’d kissed him first, trying to prove something.
That I could still be touched without shattering.
That I could want without drowning. That man never asked if I was okay.
Never looked me in the eye when he said my name—if he even knew it. I’m not sure he did.
This is already nothing like that.
Caziel isn’t even touching me now, but I feel him everywhere. His eyes don’t move. His breath is slow. Measured. Like he’s trying not to startle something between us. And gods help me; I want to shake it up like a bottle of carbonated liquid. Make such a mess that fixing it will seem impossible.
“Is it just me,” I murmur, voice low, “or is it hot in here?”
A flicker of amusement pulls at his mouth. “Crimson is fire, and fire is always hot.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” I roll my eyes, maybe he can’t tell that I’m panting, or that I’ve pressed my knees together to relieve the ache between them.
He takes a step closer. The glow from the thread in my pendant casts long shadows across his throat, up along the edge of his jaw.
His voice is softer now. “I told you once that the flame responds to intent. To desire.”
Something cracks in me. The silence grows thick.
Tense. Hot. Slick. He hasn’t moved again, but I swear we’re even closer than before.
His glamor pulses. The shimmer crawls higher up his cheekbone, flickering like firelight, and for just a second—I see him.
Not the polished, perfect Caziel. But him.
Marked. Horned. Glorious. Skin flushed a dusky red, eyes deep pools of onyx, the sharp white points of razor-sharp canines behind his full lips.
He’s still watching me. Not like I’m broken. Not like I’m a puzzle to be solved. Like I’m real. Like I matter. And for once, I don’t want to think my way out of it. I don’t want to be careful.
I step closer before I can talk myself out of it.
The air between us tightens. His glamor flickers slightly again—the faint shimmer of it like heat haze, but I don’t care.
I look past it, past the illusion. I want to.
I want to see him. My palm burns and I realize I have the pendant clutched in my fist, but I’m not thinking about Viridian anymore.
Not about Rites or threads or Flame magic.
Not about Cobalt, Obsidian, the Rite. Or the crown. Or anything at all.
Just him.
My heart is thudding somewhere behind my ribs, unsteady and loud. I reach up, my fingertips brushing his wrist.
“Caz—” His name lands somewhere between a breath and a question.
He still doesn’t move. Doesn’t stop me. His gaze drops to my mouth. That’s all the permission I need. I lean in. The smell of smoke and something sharper, citrus and copper, wraps around me. I close the space between us, lips just brushing his—
His hand comes up gently. Fingers slide along my jaw, warm and careful. His thumb brushes the corner of my mouth. Once twice. I lean into the touch.
“Kay Ward,” he breathes. Like it hurts to say my name. “Sael.”
The pad of his finger catches on the middle of my bottom lip, tugging gently until my mouth opens.
My heart thunders in my chest, aching against my breastbone.
My eyelids flutter like a Victorian damsel, I can’t physically keep them open as I sway toward him, but it doesn’t matter.
His image is burned into the back of my brain.
Heat shimmers up my torso, unfurling in my limbs, scorching with need. And…
And he turns.
Just barely. Just enough.
His lips miss mine. They graze my cheek instead. A ghost of a touch.
I freeze.
The moment snaps.
“I—” I pull back slightly, pulse thundering in my ears. “Sorry, I thought—”
His hand lingers for one breath more. Then drops. But he doesn’t explain. Doesn’t offer a reason. He steps back; eyes are unreadable again. Controlled. Quiet. Guarded.
“Get some rest, Kay,” he says, voice low. “Tomorrow will be hard.”
And then he is gone. Leaving me standing there with the ghost of his kiss still burning my cheek, my heart halfway to my throat, and the almost-taste of him still lingering on my lips.
The thread still burns in my palm, and I wonder what the hell just happened—and why it feels like something just started that neither of us knows how to finish.
I shouldn’t have done that.
The thought loops in my head, louder than it should, drowning out the quiet scrape of my boots down the corridor as I make my way back to the barracks.
The Rite, these threads, they’re messing with me.
Of course I’m discombobulated. This is a high stress environment.
My crush is a product of adrenaline and at least Caziel had the sense to pull back before I led us both down the path of regret.
And yet my lips still tingle where his breath brushed mine.
And that’s all it was. A brush. A hesitation. A no.
He didn’t even have to say it. Just turned away, silent and sure, like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my life by leaning in, thinking maybe—maybe—he saw me the way I’ve started to see him.
My face burns. I can’t tell if it’s from embarrassment or fury or residual want.
Maybe all three. Of course he pulled back.
He’s not like me. He’s Daemari. He’s lived a thousand moments sharper and stranger than anything I’ve scraped together.
He’s trained in restraint. In politics. In survival.
I’m just a girl who mistook kindness for something more.
A girl who took her own rose-colored feelings and threw them at the nearest person who showed her a hint of attention.
A person still grieving the loss of the woman he loved.
I duck into a shadowed alcove and press my back to the cool stone.
My heart thunders against my ribs, trying to outrun the tendrils of shame curling through my chest. I don’t cry.
I will not let myself do that, but I close my eyes and press my fingers to my lips like that’ll erase what almost was.
Or maybe to savor the last sweet memory.
Too many times, in my past, I’ve made the first move only to be laughed at.
Or worse, pitied. Told I was “too much” or “confused” or “reading into things.”
Maybe I was. Maybe I always am. But gods, it felt real with him. Just for a moment.
I slide down the wall, curl my knees up. George must sense it, because he appears without a sound and presses into my side. Warm, quiet, present.
“I’m an idiot,” I whisper, rubbing his ear. He butts his head up under my chin. “You didn’t have to agree so easily.” I chastise him, but there’s no real heat behind my words.
George just purrs louder.