Chapter 19 #2
I touched one spine gently. It felt… familiar, somehow. Like something from my dad’s attic, recalling memories I’d never actually lived.
I dragged my fingers along the shelves and drew a deep breath, letting the room’s stillness settle my nerves. He lived here alone, surrounded by the past. It made the consultant mask feel even thinner.
Eventually, I made my way downstairs. Duskfall Manor felt suspended in time—no humming appliances, no street noise, just the faint, distant rumble of waves hitting the rocks far below.
I found the kitchen and put the kettle on. The tiles were icy under my feet, the light dim and golden. When the water boiled, I poured myself a mug of tea and wrapped both hands around it until the warmth sank into my fingers.
Back upstairs, I slipped into Riven’s room again. He was still asleep—hair a dark spill on the pillow, arm slung over his torso, chest rising evenly now. The grey pallor had faded, leaving just the shadow of exhaustion.
I sank back into the armchair, pulled the blanket from its back, and wrapped myself up. The tea helped. The quiet helped more.
At some point, the adrenaline finally bled out, and I fell asleep.
The soft chime of a grandfather clock woke me. I blinked blearily towards the doorway, the morning light grey and soft.
Eight o’clock. Monday.
I sat up, a jolt of professional panic hitting me before the stiffness in my neck caught up. I should be at my desk. I dug my phone out of my pocket. Two missed calls from the desk sergeant.
I ignored them and typed a quick, standard message to Marcus Hale: Following active leads regarding the cargo theft in Sector 4. Field inquiry today. Will update.
It was thin, but it bought us twenty-four hours. I hit send, silenced the device so Hale couldn’t ring back to shout at me, and dropped it onto the carpet.
Riven hadn’t moved. He was on his back, breathing slow and steady, one hand resting near the bandaged side. The wound was closed—thanks to me—but the blood remained, dried in dark, rusty streaks across his pale skin.
I winced at the sight. I should have cleaned it last night, but we had both been running on fumes.
I stood, stretching the stiffness from my spine, and quietly slipped into the bathroom. I dampened a towel with warm water, wringing it out until it was soft and steaming.
Back in his room, I hesitated, then settled on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped slightly under my weight.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
Carefully, I began to wash away the dried blood. His skin warmed under the cloth, the heat of him radiating upward. He didn’t stir, except for a faint, reflex twitch in his fingers as the towel grazed the lean muscle of his ribs.
My gaze drifted upward.
The tattoo across his chest and shoulder was stunning. Dark swirls and lines wound around his ribs, curling across his collarbone, sweeping down his left arm almost to his wrist. It was intricate and fierce and utterly him—controlled chaos inked into skin.
Beautiful.
My fingers hovered near the edge of the design without touching. But something drew me lower. Just over his heart, partially obscured by the ink, was a mark that didn’t belong to a needle.
A faint glimmer caught my eye—barely there, a soft vibration under the skin like a guttering flame. I leaned closer.
A scar lay buried beneath the heavy ink of the tattoo. But underneath the damaged tissue, something else moved—a series of fractured, geometric lines etched in faint, luminous gold. The shapes were chaotic, like shards of a broken crown or a star that had been shattered and put back together wrong.
I reached out, my fingertips trembling as they brushed the skin just above the mark.
The contact struck with the force of a revelation.
A profound resonance flared through my palm and sank into my marrow, bypassing my nerves entirely to strike at the core of my magic.
The golden lines began to wake up, a pearlescent gold bleeding through the bruised violet of his aura.
It felt alive—a quiet, ancient thrum that vibrated against my fingertips, matching a tempo I hadn’t realised my own blood was beating to.
It was the missing half of a conversation I had been having my entire life.
“What are you?” I whispered before I could stop myself.
That was when his hand shot up.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist—firm, instinctive, startling—and he yanked me forward. I lost my balance and fell across his chest, my palm landing right over that radiant, glowing scar.
His eyes snapped open.
And gods—his eyes. Not their usual icy blue. They were dark, almost black, threaded with thin veins of silver that flared faintly as his magic stirred beneath my hand. They were the most arresting eyes I’d ever seen, full of a depth that made my head swim.
We froze like that. My body braced over his, his hand gripping my wrist, the heat of his skin searing through my palm. We stared at each other in a terrifying symmetry.
His stare travelled over my face, lingering on my eyes, my lips. My own gaze dropped—traitorously—to his mouth.
Heat flooded my cheeks.
“I.. I was just—“ My voice broke embarrassingly. “Cleaning. You. The blood.”
His grip softened but didn’t release me. His breath warmed the space between us.
“Selene,” he murmured, his voice rough from sleep, from pain, from something I couldn’t put a name to. “You shouldn’t—“
I pulled away too fast, nearly stumbling off the bed in my haste to put distance between us.
“I’ll just—uh—I’ll get more water. For the towel.”
Brilliant, Rowan. Truly inspiring.
I slipped out before he could say anything else, shutting the door with a soft click. I leaned back against the hallway wall, bracing both hands on the plaster.
My heart was trying to escape my chest. I could still feel the warmth of his skin, the vibration beneath my fingers, the golden shimmer of that jagged shape—and his eyes. Gods, his eyes.
I stayed in the corridor for a beat too long, counting the hairline cracks in the plaster until my heart stopped hammering against my ribs.
I wasn’t a child, and I certainly wasn’t going to skulk out here while he dealt with a wound that should have been mine.
I was meant to be the one with the badge, but the metal felt like a lead weight against my hip.
He had taken a blade to the gut because of me, but the cuffs stayed in my pocket for a strictly tactical reason. He was my only key to the gleaming heights of Highspire. Handing him over to the station now would be professional sabotage.
The thought was a bucket of ice water, dousing the lingering heat in my cheeks. I took a slow, deliberate breath, held it until it hurt, and shoved the door open. I’d expected the oppressive grey of the city to have followed me in, but the space was entirely submerged in a strange, blinding light.
The storm had broken, shattering into a sky of piercing, unnatural blue. Sunlight poured through the uncurtained window, harsh and exposing. It caught on dust motes, turned the dark wood of the floorboards to gold, and landed squarely on the bed.
The sunlight felt wrong—like an exposing spotlight.
Riven remained where I left him, but the air in the room had changed. It was sharper. Charged.
He had propped himself up against the headboard, the sheet pooling at his waist. His chest was bare, and in the unforgiving light, the ink of his tattoo looked stark. The angry red slash from last night was gone, replaced by a thin, pale line of new skin that looked weeks old, not hours.
He was watching me. His gaze was clear now, the silver-threaded darkness of his irises gone, leaving his blue eyes unblinking against the brightness of the room.
He looked pale, exhausted, but the lethargy of sleep was gone.
In its place was a coil of tension so tight I could feel it vibrating across the gap between us.
“Are you—“ I started, stepping into the glare.
“What were you doing there?”
His voice was rough, a low rasp that scraped against the silence. The words landed as an accusation.
I stopped at the foot of the bed, crossing my arms. “Let’s just get you cleaned up properly, shall we?”
He cut straight through the deflection. “The mill,” he said, his voice tight. “How did you find it? That sector is off the grid. It doesn’t exist on any municipal map.”
“Orin Brandt down in tech got a ping on the monitors. A disturbance.” I kept my voice level, though the memory of that place—the metallic taste of the air, the suffocating wrongness of the dead zone—made my stomach turn. “I thought it was just another black-market drop. Routine.”
“Routine,” he repeated, the word flat and cold. “You walked into a dead zone alone, Selene. You have no idea what you were standing in.”
I withheld the rest. I swallowed the truth about how I really found the place—not through Orin, but via Jack Preston.
Jack had rung me at dawn, his voice jittery with paranoia.
He had spotted two Umbrakynn the night before—Highspire guards by the look of their uniforms—discussing an ongoing operation at the mill.
Being Umbrakynn himself, Jack sensed the rot in them immediately; they felt wrong, chemically altered, moving with the same erratic aggression as the fighter at the Pit.
It was the link I needed—proof connecting the stolen magic to a location.
I went alone because, despite the pull of my magic, my mind clung to its old suspicions.
I kept Riven at a distance until the danger left me no choice.
I tried to message him only when the dead zone began to suffocate me, and by then, my phone had already glitched into static.
Riven caught the omission, but he let it slide. He turned his gaze to the window, his jaw set. The sunlight looked too bright, too cheerful for the grim weight settling in the room. His hand clenched on the duvet.