55. Syneca
Syneca
When everything else is taken from you, the thing you chose on purpose is the one you’ll never regret. That is both the wound and the gift, and they cannot be parted.
There was a very dark and potentially sadistic part of me that hoped if I died, I came back to the Underworld.
They claimed it was dangerous, but it felt no worse than the world we’d escaped, where witches turned on their own kind, dragons were taken, the government in every land was corrupt and the people beneath it were just trying to survive long enough to matter.
At least in the Underworld the danger announced itself.
At least the monsters down here had the decency to look like what they were. Mostly.
Even with the whole group safe and sound, and most of us tucked into Silas’s manor, I didn’t bother wishing we could stay like this.
If thoughts triggered Celeste’s bargain, convincing it that I’d changed my mind about hunting Lyric, they’d find me on the floor.
So, I let the yearning for solace and peace stay deep in my heart.
Because I could never have the things I wanted.
And those decisions had never been mine to make.
As I wandered the sentient home, feeling the heartbeat of the walls, feeling oddly safe within them, I plucked Eda Mire’s book from my pocket.
It was becoming a habit. Watching the sketched drawings of myself from different angles as I flipped the pages, searching for clues among the vague backgrounds.
It never led me anywhere, but today something changed.
The reflections had faded, still there, but vaguely.
As if the magic in the Underworld dampened whatever power the book held.
I sighed and tucked it away. The Underworld was not its home, it seemed.
The little music box’s haunted song carried me down the east corridor into a small sitting room with a window that faced the gardens and a chaise below it, built for comfort.
It sat on the table beside the window where it always had, silver and small and so very quiet, even though I always heard it in the manor, no matter where I walked, no matter how far away I strolled. Tonight, I finally picked it up.
I opened the lid.
A dragon, small and stunning, spun on its axis as the melody climbed.
I watched it for a moment, the tiny perfect detail of the wings, the way it caught the light on each rotation, turning and turning in its small silver world.
My thumb moved over the base without thinking, feeling along the edge of it, and found the uneven texture of letters pressed into the silver.
I turned it over.
My impossible boy was engraved in small careful letters into the base.
“I wondered if you could hear the music.” His voice wrapped around me and I spun, nearly dropping the damn thing in surprise.
Silas stood framed in the doorway, freshly showered, droplets glistening in his dark hair that curled at the edges, the black shirt clinging to his torso.
Simple slacks hugged his hips. The most casual I’d seen him since we’d left this world behind.
The sight of him twisted something deep inside me, a longing that never seemed to dull no matter how hard he pushed, and I stepped back.
As I stared at him, memories flooded back, how he had shifted, how power rippled through the king’s chamber, compelling every soul present to bow before him.
It was a power so intoxicating, so magnetic, that it left me breathless, caught between admiration and an undeniable desire that surged like wildfire within me.
And we’d gone the entire evening without a single soul mentioning it.
“Of course I can.”
He walked casually forward, plucking the music box from my hand and setting it carefully back on the table. “I wondered, because it’s spelled to only play for me. But since we’re—”
“The bond. Yeah,” I said, cutting him off because that was the last thing I wanted to talk about.
“I need you to tell me something. And be honest. What was that power?” I asked. “In the king’s chamber.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Something no demon has business controlling.”
“But you control it.”
He didn’t answer that directly, which was its own kind of answer.
“Did Dez and Ramiel know you had it?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Only Dez.”
I watched his face carefully. “And does Dez know why you have such a vested interest in finding Lyric? Other than my life debt, does he know why you've kept several things shaped like dragons around your manor? And why you left this world behind to find him the first time? And why you were so affected by the Keeper calling you the Abandoned after she said the dragon doesn’t matter? Does he know that part?”
I could see him deciding, working through whatever calculation he ran every time I got too close to something he’d been keeping. Then he nodded. Once.
I narrowed my eyes. “And am I currently serving that life debt,” I said slowly, “to the woman who raised you, Silas? Is that why you saved her and why you hide her?”
The room went very still.
Silas looked at me for a long moment. Then his eyes moved to the music box on the table, to the dragon turning on its spindle, and he softened immediately.
When he spoke, his voice was quieter than usual.
“I was young when I first came to this manor. Young enough I don’t remember much before it, before them, nothing worth remembering anyway.
” His eyes moved to the music box. “I came around a corner one evening and stopped because I didn’t want to interrupt them.
She was at the piano and he was leaning in the doorway, watching her play.
” He paused. “She made a mistake in the melody and laughed at herself, and he crossed the room and sat beside her on the bench and played the correct note once with one finger, very serious, like he was correcting something important. And she looked at him like he’d hung every star she’d ever wished on.
Like he was the most ridiculous and perfect thing in existence.
” He was quiet for a moment. “I’d never seen anyone looked at like that before and I’ve never seen it since. ”
His eyes came back to mine. “There are very few people alive that know about them raising me. One true thing, Ith Noem. The biggest one I’ve got.” He didn't smirk. There was no game in it now.
I didn’t move, though I wanted to. I held my ground, foolish as it was. “Hypothetically speaking, what do you think Lyric would have done if someone told him he wasn’t allowed to love Celeste?”
He drew a slow breath. “Dez told you.”
“Answer the question.”
“He would have defied every law written about what a Guardian was supposed to be. Every rule. Every boundary set between his kind and hers.” His voice was very quiet. “And he would have done it with a trail of blood, if that’s what it took.”
“Then what’s the difference? Between him and you.”
“If I let myself have you,” he said quietly, “and I lose you, there’s no version of me that recovers from it.”
I stared at him. “So that’s it? You spend all this time telling me what I should do, who I should want, where I should stand, because you’re scared?”
His jaw tightened. “Stop.”
But I stepped closer anyway. “No. Because Lyric would’ve burned worlds for Celeste and you’re standing here acting like wanting me is some terrible thing you need to survive.”
His breath caught. “You want to know the problem?”
I swallowed.
He took one step closer, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him now.
“The problem is I know exactly what your laugh sounds like when you’re trying to hide it.
I know you bite the inside of your cheek when you’re angry.
” Another step. “I know you pull your sleeves over your hands to hide your fire when you’re upset. ”
My heart had started beating somewhere in my throat.
His gaze moved over my face slowly, deliberately.
“I know a hundred things I shouldn’t.”
Silence.
His eyes dropped to my mouth. “But I don’t know the warmth of your skin beneath my fingertips.
I don’t know how your breath quickens when desire ignites in your chest. I don’t know the way your body can move against mine, or how your laughter would sound tangled in soft sheets.
I don’t know the taste of your lips, whether they’re sweet like honey or intoxicating like wine.
I don’t know if you sigh when you’re lost in pleasure.
I don’t know how your heartbeat would race when we’re wrapped up in each other, or how your body would respond to my touch, urging me closer.
I don’t know the way you’d call my name when the world fades away. I know so little.”
His eyes lifted back to mine. “Fuck it.”
He kissed me like he was already ruined for anything else.
There was nothing gentle about it. He grabbed my face in both hands, fingers threading into my hair, and his mouth crashed into mine with a kind of desperate certainty that burned through the world and left nothing standing.
Heat rippled through me. My knees weakened. There was only his mouth, his hands, the taste of whiskey and something wild. His lips moved over mine like he was starving and I was the only thing that could fix it.
The world dropped away, taking the air, the walls, my name. Every memory. Every regret. All of it vanished when his teeth grazed my lower lip and he groaned, low and raw, like he’d been waiting centuries for this.
I kissed him back, reckless and hungry, fingers fisting in his shirt to pull him closer, until there was no space between us, not even enough for a breath.
His hands slid down, fire and promise, dragging me up against him so hard I could feel the line of his body, the frantic, pounding rhythm of his heart.
My back hit the wall. I barely noticed. He kissed me like he’d never stop.
And I let him, because for the first time in my life, I wanted to be ruined. I wanted him to burn me to ash and build something new from what was left.
My mouth was still on his when I realized I’d never survive another kiss like this.
I pulled back first.
Looked at him once, at the lamplight catching the line of his jaw and the way he was looking at me like we’d just broken something fundamental in him.
“Goodnight, Silas,” I said. And I walked out before either of us could regret it.
Calder whisked us back to Brathen house before the sun had fully committed to the day. We collected what we needed, which wasn’t much, and Dez opened the book and took us to Aventh Gate in the time it took to draw a breath.
Lucy’s city. Lucy’s mountains. The Sorrow Mountains rose ahead of us, white and vast. Calder, Dez and Ramiel walked.
Silas shifted and Pip and I went up with him, staying low enough to keep the guys in sight.
The cold was the kind that found every gap in everything, and I pulled my fire through a spell and pushed it outward around the group, not burning, just warming, a steady invisible heat that moved with us through the pass.
Pip pressed into my side where the warmth collected. “That’s nice actually.”
She tucked herself tighter as the pass narrowed, the peaks closing in on both sides, the wind picking up off the rock faces with cruelty. Below us Calder was saying something to Ramiel that made Dez laugh, the sound carrying up to us thin and brief before the wind took it.
The sun was dropping fast behind the peaks when the roar hit us, so vast it stopped everything mid-breath. Silas banked hard without a word, angling toward it, and I looked for the source and found it almost immediately.
Purple scales.
Massive and furious, throwing fire at the fog wall in great sustained bursts, the flames hitting the white and dying, hitting it again, dying again. The roar that came between each attempt was furious and wild.
My stomach dropped, and my heart lurched into my throat in the same second. Because Riot was here, but Lucy wasn’t and something was very wrong.
“Land.” My voice came out wrecked. “Silas, land right now. That’s Riot, that’s Riot. Land!”
He was already descending.
I didn’t wait for him to fully stop before I was on my feet, stumbling forward on the mountain path, waving both arms above my head because I had no other way to reach him, nothing but my own voice thrown into the cold dark air. “Riot!”
He stilled mid-roar, the fire dying in his throat, and for one second he just looked at us from across the mountain dark.
Then he shifted. He hit his knees before he fully finished the change, human form barely settled around him, and he stayed there on the stone with his head bowed and his hands pressed flat to the ground like he needed to feel something solid beneath him.
“Riot?” I dropped in front of him. “Riot, look at me.”
He looked up and his face was devastating. Brows twisted with anguish so heavy I could nearly feel it pulsing off of him. “She’s in there. They took her and I can’t get through and I can’t reach her and I don’t know how much time… I think she’s dying.”