Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Hanna
The dark closed over me like cold water.
The dark pressed against my skin, my lungs, my thoughts. I fell without falling, soundless and endless, the battlefield ripped away as if it had never existed. The shadows followed until I slipped from their grasp, unspooling, falling away from them.
“Hanna,” the Shadow Weaver called after me. She sounded frantic, and it was the first time I’d heard her use my name. Her fear jolted through me.
“Protect them,” I called with the last breath I had.
“Then let me command your body.”
It was a trap, I knew it was a trap, but I had to be inside with Kaelan, and Thorne and Dare were out there, and the shadows could turn the war.
“If you will save them, it’s yours.”
I landed on my knees on something that felt like ice and stone and memory all at once.
The ground shuddered beneath me, not from impact, but from pain—his pain—layered so thick it made my teeth ache.
For a long second, I hung there helplessly, unable to even draw in a breath.
Then I drew in a ragged gasp of a breath, and when I exhaled, it was on his name. “Kaelan.”
My voice echoed wrong. Fractured. As if the dark didn’t want to carry it.
I stood. The darkness around me seemed absolute at first. “Kaelan?”
His name echoed, echoed, echoed.
I took a step forward, and the darkness rippled underfoot. The flash of light in the distance surprised me, and I threw my hand up to shield myself. The child’s scream that followed—that came from the same direction as the flash—echoed over and over again too.
My heart hammered desperately in my chest.
But I moved forward anyway.
The next flash was on gold, on a crown so heavy it bowed the head of the small boy who wore it.
He raised his head, defiant, his icy-blue eyes glittering.
He met my gaze for a heartbeat. Three dogs followed at his heels, almost as tall as he was, and I could feel what he felt when he was with them. That he wasn’t alone.
Then he was gone.
I turned toward the next flash. A door stood half-open, revealing lavish rooms beyond. Blood streaked white stone, and a bootprint marked in blood was on his threshold. Somewhere, a child sobbed.
For the last time. I knew that somehow, when Edric’s men killed his dogs, it was the last time Kaelan ever wept.
I flinched as the memories brushed past me, each one sharp enough to cut. Edric’s presence wasn’t here—not directly—but his work was everywhere. Scars layered over scars, fear carved so deeply into Kaelan’s mind that it had become the architecture of the place.
This was what the crown had sealed him inside.
A prison made of what he’d survived.
Shouldn’t the things we survive be our pride? How cruel that it becomes our prison.
“Kaelan,” I called again, louder now.
The dark shifted.
I saw him then. Not whole, not standing, but crouched low, his back bowed beneath an invisible weight. His breath came shallow and fast, fogging the air in front of him. He never showed any wounds, but here in his mind, there was no hiding from them. Here, he was broken.
“Kaelan.” I was afraid he’d turn away from me, that he wouldn’t let me see him like this. My voice came out a whisper. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t hear me or if he didn’t want me now, not like this. So my voice was loud, certain, as I called, “I love you, Kae.”
The world shifted around us as I laid my hand on his shoulder.
In front of us, I saw young Kaelan, his face determined and freckled with blood beneath his dark hair. Thorne stood panting beside him, a practice sword in his hand.
“Which of you is the superior cousin?” Edric seemed far taller than I remembered, looming over them with a condescending smile across his lips. “Which of you is the one who will eat tonight with my warriors and which of you will sleep in the stables worthy of nothing more than the goats receive?”
Kaelan wiped his arm across his mouth, and the movement drew my attention to the wound in his shoulder, to the way his other arm hung uselessly. Broken.
He turned to Thorne with his eyes cold. “Don’t play with me. Give me your best. What little it is.”
He sounded so scornful, so cold, and Edric’s lips twisted into a cruel smile.
But Edric wasn’t capable of seeing the compassion that lit in Thorne’s gaze as he stared back at Kaelan.
The darkness twisted around us, and my fingers sank more deeply into Kaelan’s shoulder, trying to keep him there. I didn’t want to lose him.
I wanted to know how that story ended, but maybe it didn’t matter. I knew how Kaelan and Thorne’s story ended. Thorne saw through all Kaelan’s shields to the good man beneath, and he had kept that version of Kaelan alive all these years.
The memory slid sideways into another.
Dare.
“You need a healer, don’t you?” Dare’s lips twisted into a smirk as he touched Kaelan’s bleeding arm. “Aren’t you lucky you have me?”
“Do I even want you?” Kaelan pushed his hand away. He was growing broad-shouldered and lean, but his face was still boyish.
Then the image shifted to Dare, laughing, infuriating, impossible, standing shoulder to shoulder with Kaelan as they faced a monster.
I felt the relief of it echo through Kaelan’s mind, the way Dare saw him, not the crown, not the weapon.
“You weren’t alone in here,” I said softly. “Even cut off from all of us. You always know us. You know what we feel for you.”
His head lifted just enough for me to see his eyes, glacial blue, fractured by doubt and old terror. Slowly, he seemed to understand my words.
The fear in his eyes faded.
The dark shifted around us again, opening up to a memory of a rooftop. This image was so bright, so full of sunshine splitting open the dark, that I raised my other hand to shade my eyes. But I still clung to Kaelan’s shoulder, afraid I’d lose him.
Kaelan flashed a grin, far too handsome and charming. His gaze was only for the girl at his side as they held hands. I saw myself through his eyes—strawberry-blond hair catching the wind, a cocky smile on my face to match his.
We fell together. Falling, we were lost to the darkness. But not really.
Not when we were together.
I knelt in front of him and took his face in my hands, grounding myself in the solid truth of him, seeking his gaze. Those icy blue eyes met mine, filled with a world of pain. With endless oceans of it.
“You survived everything he did to you,” I told him fiercely. “And we see you. How fierce and strong and good you are.”
Something in him broke open.
He surged forward, pulling me into him, his mouth crashing against mine in a kiss that was all heat and desperation and fury held too long. It wasn’t gentle. Teeth clashed. Breath tangled. I tasted frost and salt and him.
I kissed him back just as hard.
The darkness recoiled.
For one perfect heartbeat, it was just us, triumphant. His hands gripping my cloak, my fingers buried in his hair, the world narrowing to the fact that we were here, together, unbroken.
Then the sudden clap of hands together.
Slow. Mocking.
The sound cut through the dark like a blade.
“Well,” Edric’s voice drawled, smooth as ever. “Isn’t that touching.”
The world shuddered.
Kaelan went rigid beneath my hands.
The crown was gone. The door was open.
And Edric had followed me in.
But I knew now what Kaelan needed to destroy our greatest monster.