CHAPTER NINE #3
"Two months," he said finally, quiet, devastated. "I spent two months surviving on nothing but the idea of coming back to you."
"I know. Kade, I know, and I am so sorry—"
"I'm not finished." His voice cracked, and he dragged a hand down his face, some old, exhausted control fraying at the edges.
"I'm not going to pretend this doesn't gut me, Briar.
It does. But I also spent two months forbidden from telling you a single thing, while my father used my absence to test exactly how much this house could survive without me, and I have no right to demand you spend that same two months as untouched and certain as if I'd simply been down the hall the entire time.
" He met her eyes, raw and honest despite the visible pain in it.
"I don't know how to feel about this yet.
I need you to give me that honestly, instead of pretending I can simply forgive it in the same breath I hear it. "
"That's fair," Briar said, throat tight. "Take whatever time you need. I'm not going anywhere."
Torin found out Kade had returned before the day was through, and it was Wren, gently and apologetically, who warned Briar he was already storming toward the training yard where Kade had gone to report to his father.
By the time Briar reached them, the two men were already squared off, old fury from the Hollow Court reignited tenfold.
"You come back after two months of silence," Torin snarled, storm-static crackling bright and dangerous along both forearms, "and she just falls back into your arms like nothing happened? Like I didn't spend two months holding her together while you couldn't even send a single letter?"
"I didn't have a choice in the silence," Kade said, low and controlled despite the fire visibly gathering along his own jaw. "You, apparently, had every choice in what you did with it."
"Don't you dare make this about me taking advantage of her.
" Torin's voice shook with real fury now, old grief finally boiling over completely.
"I have loved her since we were children, Ashgrove.
I didn't manipulate a single moment of what happened between us.
She came to me. She chose it, same as she's apparently choosing you again now that you're standing in front of her instead of some absent idea of you she could grieve. "
"That's enough," Briar said, sharp, stepping between them before either fire or storm could fully ignite. "Both of you. I won't stand here and be fought over like a prize again, not after everything the last time cost all three of us."
Torin's gaze cut to her, raw and furious and, underneath it, devastatingly hurt. "Tell me honestly, Briar. Right now, in front of both of us. Who do you love?"
She didn't hesitate, though it cost her everything not to look away from the pain already written plainly across his face.
"Kade. I have loved Kade since the old chamber.
What happened with you was real, Torin, and it mattered, and I will never pretend it didn't. But it was grief, and exhaustion, and the fear that he might never come back.
It was never going to change who I actually love. "
Something in Torin seemed to break then, quiet and total, all the fury draining out of him and leaving something hollowed-out and exhausted in its place.
"Then I'm done," he said, voice flat, stripped of everything but old, worn grief.
"I have spent years hoping the timing might finally be right, that if I was just patient enough, good enough, present enough — you'd choose me properly, not as a moment of weakness while you grieved someone else.
I can't keep doing that to myself, Briar. I won't."
"Torin—"
"I'm leaving for Stormreach. Tonight." He looked between her and Kade one final time, something final and unbearably tired in his expression.
"I meant every word I ever told you. That's exactly why I can't stay and watch you choose him again, knowing now precisely what I actually was to you in the end. "
He turned and walked away before she could find any words that might have helped, and Briar stood in the wreckage of the training yard beside Kade, watching him go, grief for an old, genuine friendship tangling with everything else she was already carrying.
Torin did not leave quietly.
Briar learned the full shape of it two days later, from Wren, who arrived at her door with red-rimmed eyes and the particular, sick guilt of someone who had just realized, far too late, exactly what she'd stumbled into.
"I need to tell you something," Wren said, voice shaking, "and I need you to know I did not understand what I was doing until it was already done."
"Wren, what happened?"
"Torin." Wren's voice cracked. "The night before he left.
He found me in the kitchens, and he was charming, and funny, and I had no idea — Briar, I swear to you I had no idea about everything between the two of you, he never once mentioned it, and I —" She pressed a trembling hand over her mouth.
"We slept together. I thought it was just — I thought it was fun, I thought he actually wanted me, and it wasn't until this morning that one of the guards mentioned, in passing, that he'd spent years in love with you, and I realized exactly what I must have actually been to him last night. "
Briar felt something cold and furious settle low in her stomach — not at Wren, whose horror was etched plainly and genuinely across every line of her face, but at Torin, whose parting act, it seemed, had been calculated with a precision that made her sick.
"He used you," Briar said quietly, "to hurt me on his way out the door."
"I didn't know." Wren's voice broke entirely. "Briar, I would never — if I had known, I would never have—"
"I know." Briar crossed the room and pulled her friend into a fierce, steadying embrace, feeling Wren's shoulders shake with the particular grief of someone who'd been made an unknowing weapon in someone else's heartbreak.
"This isn't your fault, Wren. None of it.
I'm not angry at you. I could never be angry at you for this. "
"Then who are you angry at?"
"Him," Briar said, low and certain, staring out the window toward the direction Torin's storm-wings had carried him hours earlier, already halfway back to the Stormreach cliffs.
"Only him. For loving me enough to stay two months, and still finding a way to leave something this ugly behind him on his way out. "
Wren cried quietly against her shoulder, and Briar held her, feeling the fragile, hard-won peace of the last few months collapse into something far more complicated than she'd ever expected it to become — Kade home but wounded, Torin gone but not finished, and Wren caught, entirely without warning, in the wreckage of a history she'd never even known existed until it was already breaking around her.