34. Chapter 34
AMARIA
Sleep wouldn't come.
I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling of living wood, replaying the day like it might change if I watched it long enough. His hands in my hair. The quiet intimacy of the braid. The way he'd started to say something—I'd seen him brace for it like it might hurt—but Maxx interrupted.
I had a mother, Maxx. Before I was a soldier.
The way his voice had gone soft when he said it. The way Maxx had looked away.
And before that. The fever. His hand on my forehead, cool against the burning. The hours he must have sat there, because when I woke, his fingers were still tangled with mine.
Hurts less when you're close.
Had I said that out loud? The memory was hazy, fever-edged. But the way he'd looked at me this morning—like I'd offered him something he didn't think he was allowed to keep.
I scrubbed my hands over my face.
This was dangerous. This softening. This wanting.
Every instinct I had screamed that trust was a blade other people held to your throat.
Brannick had taught me that. The rebellion had reinforced it.
You didn't let people in. You didn't reach for comfort.
You survived, alone, because alone was the only thing that couldn't betray you.
But the circuit between us had held today. His hand on my back as I liquefied stone. His energy amplifying mine without taking, without demanding. We'd moved like one creature, one weapon, one—
I threw off my blankets before I could finish the thought.
The wall between our rooms was thin. I could hear him breathing on the other side—slow, even, already asleep. The tether hummed between us, soft and purring. And tempting.
Don't.
I was already standing.
Don't do this.
I was already at the door.
You'll regret it.
I was already in the hallway, my bare feet silent on the cool stone, my hand already reaching for his door.
His room was dark.
Moonlight filtered through the leaf-windows, casting dapples of silver across the floor. Eryndor lay on his back, one arm thrown above his head, the other resting on his chest.
I let myself look.
The scar seeping across his taut muscled chest—the one I'd touched the night of the spring. The hollow of his throat where his pulse beat slow and steady. Hands that had killed dozens resting open on his chest like they'd forgotten how to make fists.
He was devastating like this, with nothing standing watch inside him, no discipline between his truth and the world.
I wanted to trace the stubble on his jaw with the softness of my lips. Press my mouth to the place where his neck met his shoulder. Find out if his skin tasted like it smelled—steel and woodsmoke and the electric charge before thunder.
I wanted.
That was the terrifying part. Not the tether. Not the bond. Just the desire building in my core. Simple and sharp and entirely my own.
I stood in the doorway, heart pounding.
What are you doing?
I didn't have an answer. I only knew that I was tired of fighting this. Tired of the walls and the distance and the constant, exhausting war against something that might not be an enemy at all.
He'd driven a blade into his own chest. His own chest. To shatter the Oath-stone rather than be used against me.
That should have been enough. That should have told me everything I needed to know.
But I was stubborn and stupid and so goddamn afraid of hoping—
He'd opened his veins in the dead zone. Tried to bleed out in the ash so I'd have enough strength to reach the border. I'd had to burn his wound closed while he begged me to let him die.
And after all that. After nearly killing himself twice. He'd held my hand through a fever. Braided my hair like it mattered. Started to tell me something true and looked terrified I'd run when I heard it.
What more did I need? A signed declaration? A blood oath?
How much proof did I require before I stopped treating him like he was Brannick waiting to happen?
I crossed the room. Knelt beside his bed. My hand hovered over his—the one resting on his chest, rising and falling with each breath.
I could still walk away. Pretend I'd never come.
My fingers found his skin anyway.
The tether didn't flare.
It opened.
A door I hadn't known existed swung wide, and I fell through—
Him.
Cold metal in small hands. A coronet, golden, too heavy for a child's grip. The weight of it pulling at thin wrists.
A voice. Hushed. Tender. The tone reserved for bedside whispers and lullabies.
"Eryndor."
The King's voice. The King saying his name like it meant something. Like it belonged to him.
A hand on a shoulder. Heavy. Possessive. The royal signet ring catching the light—that ring, the one stamped onto a thousand wanted posters, the one that sealed execution orders for everyone I'd ever loved.
"You are my son. You will do your duty." The King.
Everything inside me flashed glacier cold. But, my hand was still warm from touching him.
That was the cruelest part. The wanting hadn't caught up yet.
My fingers still tingled where they'd touched his chest. My lips still ached toward the hollow of his throat—that spot, right there, where I'd imagined pressing my mouth.
The jaw I'd wanted to trace was the King's jaw.
The blood pumping under that warm skin was the blood that signed the orders.
And my body still wanted him. Still humming.
Still soft. Still kneeling beside his bed like a girl arriving instead of a girl who should be running.
I looked at his hands. Open on his chest. Peaceful.
Those hands had braided my hair this morning. Those same hands had once been small enough to hold a golden coronet. A boy prince, in a palace, learning his father's name for power while my brother screamed mine from the back of a soldier's horse.
Stop wanting him.
But the warmth was still there. Pooling low in my stomach.
Still reaching for him even now, even with the King's voice ringing in my skull, because desire is the stupidest, most animal thing—it doesn't care about truth.
It doesn't update. It just wants, dumb and blind and hungry, and I could feel it pulling at me, pulling me back toward his skin, toward the warmth still fading from my palm, toward the lie that had almost been beautiful enough to live inside forever.
I let myself feel it. One last second. The full weight of what I'd walked in here wanting.
Then I put it down like a wounded thing and broke its neck.
Kill false hope before it kills you.
I ripped my hand back.
The connection shattered. I was on my knees in the dark room, gasping, my palm burning like I'd pressed it to hot iron.
Eryndor slept on. Peaceful. Unaware.
The prince.
The word echoed through my skull, picking up speed, picking up horror.
The lost prince. The hidden heir.
I stared at his face. The cheekbones. The jaw. The way he held himself even in sleep. I'd thought it was military discipline. Crown training.
It was breeding. It was blood.
The blade in his chest. The veins in the dead zone. The braids. The fever. The almost-confession he'd choked on—
What had he been about to say? I'm the prince who's been hunting you since the beginning?
"You are my son. You will do your duty."
The grief hit next. A wave of it, black and drowning, for the hope I'd let myself feel. For the softness I'd allowed. For the fool I'd been, reaching for comfort in the dark, trusting the one person I should never have trusted.
Then the grief burned away.
What replaced it was far more dangerous.
Kill false hope before it kills you.
I rose to my feet. My hair rose around me with the Fury, lifting in a dark halo. My fangs shot out.
I ripped him off the bed and drove him into the wall.
The frame went with him from the force of the backdraft. Wood cracked. Splinters flew through the air. I tossed him on to the floor hard enough that the breath left him in a sharp, useless sound.
I didn’t slow.
My fist closed on the crown of his head, gripping his hair. I dragged him toward the hallway. His bare feet scraped, heels catching, knocking against stone. The sound echoed down the corridor.
A boy's heels dragging through mud. Soldiers' fists in his hair. My brother's mouth shaping my name while I sank below the waterline.
He reached for me. I twisted, torquing his wrist until the joint popped. He made a sound then. Short. Startled.
“Amaria—”
I yanked again.
His back struck the doorframe. The impact knocked his head against the jamb. Blood streaked the stone where his skull clipped it.
My father's blood on different stone. Same color. Same silence after.
His eyes stayed on me—wide now, tracking every movement.
I didn’t look away.
I dragged him into the hall and threw him.
His body skidded across the stone and slammed into the far wall.
He stayed there.
In the dawn when stars could speak—
The lullaby surfaced without permission, my mother's voice braiding through the violence like it had been waiting in the walls this whole time. Her arms shaking. The river. The choosing.
His father's ring had signed the order. His father's soldiers had made her choose.
And the Shadow-marked. The children in the Veil mines—babies ripped from their mothers and sent underground because the Mark they were born with made them property.
I'd pulled a six-year-old out of a shaft in Greymere.
She weighed nothing. Her hands were raw to the bone and she flinched when I touched her because every hand she'd ever known had been a fist. His father's seal on the deed of ownership.
His father's law that made her a tool instead of a child.
"WAKE UP!" I screamed.
Doors slammed open.
Maxx first, dagger in hand, shirtless and wild-eyed. Serenya behind him, wrapping herself in a blanket. Dreadscale last, silent and massive, and already weighing what came next.
Maxx had positioned himself half in front of Serenya. Dreadscale stood on her other side, close enough that his shadow covered her entirely. Neither of them looked at each other. Neither of them needed to.