Chapter 39
XXXIX.
brYNN
Her chambers felt smaller than usual, the walls pressing in. Brynn paced from the windows to the wardrobe, her mind churning with Seraphina's words.
She'd claimed exhaustion to escape Dante's questions, but sleep was impossible. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Seraphina's knowing smile, heard that sympathetic voice: You're not the first mortal to catch his attention. You're just the latest.
Just the latest.
The words burned through her like acid, eating away at every moment she'd thought was meaningful. Every glance. Every time his shadows had reached for her, and she'd felt chosen.
Hells, she was an idiot.
She'd seen him lose control when he was worried about her.
Watched his expression tighten when she was in danger.
Felt his shadows wrap around her wrists during training, gentle despite everything he was, adjusting her grip with touches that lingered longer than necessary.
She'd replayed those touches at night. Pressed her fingers to her wrists where his shadows had been and let herself imagine.
Now she wondered how many women had done the same thing. Treasured the same almost-touches. Mistaken his loneliness for something meant specifically for them.
She rubbed at her wrists, like she could scrub away her own stupidity.
She read people for a living. She'd survived by never being fooled. And she'd fallen for the oldest trick in existence: a powerful man making her feel like she mattered.
For the first time since her parents' deaths, since she'd learned that everyone could be bought or manipulated or simply taken away, she'd stopped calculating exit strategies. She'd actually let herself think she'd found somewhere she belonged.
And the woman before her had probably thought the same thing. And that woman was probably dead.
The laugh that escaped her was ugly and broken.
She needed answers. If Dante wouldn't volunteer them, she'd demand them.
The study was empty, maps spread across his desk like he'd left in a hurry. The receiving rooms deserted. She thought back to their conversations, the way he'd spoken about preferring solitude, retreating from court demands.
The gardens.
She'd glimpsed them from her windows. Beauty growing in perpetual twilight, places where death magic created instead of destroyed. If he had anywhere truly his own, it would be there.
Brynn grabbed a cloak and headed for the door.
The main corridors still held traces of court life: shadow-guards stationed at intersections, the low murmur of servants behind closed doors, cold fire flickering in iron sconces.
But as she moved deeper into the western wing, those signs fell away.
The sounds of the palace dimmed until she could hear her own breathing.
The architecture changed. Grand halls built for intimidation gave way to narrower passageways where the stonework was finer, more deliberate.
Carved details she'd never seen in the public spaces: vines twisting through the dark stone, petals unfurling along archways.
Not decoration for visitors. Personal. Shaped for himself over centuries of solitude.
The ward-stones hummed differently here. Lower, steadier. Like the palace breathing in its sleep.
She passed through a gallery where tall windows overlooked the inner grounds.
Aurora light rippled across the sky outside, casting shifting colors over the stone floor.
Purple bleeding into silver, then deepening to close to blue.
She'd grown accustomed to the realm's eternal twilight, but here, without the court's cold fires and obsidian mirrors competing for attention, the light was almost gentle.
A strange word for anything in the Forsaken Court.
Every step felt like crossing a line. Like walking toward answers that might shatter whatever fragile hope she was still clinging to.
Good. She needed it shattered.
At the far end of the corridor, a partially concealed archway opened onto something wilder. Not the manicured grounds she'd seen from her chambers. A place that had been allowed to grow.
The door opened with barely a whisper.
She stopped on the threshold.
Black roses climbed the walls in tangled profusion, thorns catching the aurora light like dark glass.
Jasmine hung heavy in the still air, its sweetness threading through something earthier underneath: wet stone, cold soil, the green smell of things growing where they shouldn't be able to.
A fountain at the center spilled water over tiered basins of dark stone, so quiet she could hear individual drops striking the surface of the pool below.
Midnight peonies bloomed in clusters along the pathways, their petals so deeply purple they looked black until the light shifted and revealed their true color.
Dark-leafed trees grew along the far wall, their branches reaching both upward and downward, roots and canopy mirroring each other.
Between them, pale flowers she couldn't name glowed faintly, scattered through the darker foliage like fallen stars.
Nothing here flinched or withered. Everything existed alongside a presence that destroyed most living things.
He'd built this. The man who wouldn't let anyone within arm's reach had spent centuries coaxing life from a realm defined by its absence.
The thought hit harder than she expected, and she shoved it aside. She hadn't come here to be moved. She'd come here for answers.
And there, on a worn stone bench near the fountain, sat Dante.
Her breath caught before she could stop it, and she hated herself for the reaction.
He looked different here. The rigid control he wore like armor had softened, his shoulders less tense, his posture almost open. Aurora light caught the sharp planes of his face, silvering his dark hair. Without the court distance, without the careful restraint, he looked younger.
More like someone capable of breaking her heart.
Her eyes traced the line of his throat above the dark collar of his shirt. The elegant sprawl of his fingers against his thigh. The slow rise and fall of his chest.
She still wanted him. Even now. Even standing here with Seraphina's poison working through her blood, something in her refused to catch up with what her mind already knew.
The anger was easier. She grabbed hold of it.
He looked up at her, surprise flickering across his features before his expression went carefully blank. That neutral distance he wore with everyone else.
The distance he hadn't kept with her in weeks.
Its return fed her anger. Of course. Of course he was retreating into the Reaper now.
"I've been looking for you." Her voice came out brittle. "She said I wasn't the first mortal to catch your attention."
He went still on the bench.
"She told me to ask about the tribute you became attached to. About what happened when she started asking the wrong questions." The tribute you became attached to. Not her. Someone before her. Someone who'd probably stood in this garden and looked at him the way she was looking at him now.
She caught the tightening around his eyes. A flicker that might have been pain before the blankness settled back.
"You don't want to know."
His voice scraped over her skin. That low, rough tone that made her stomach clench even when she was furious with him.
"Yes, I do." She stepped closer against every instinct telling her to protect herself. "I need to know."
She needed to know if she was real. If any of it was real. Or if she was just the latest version of a pattern he'd been repeating for centuries.
His jaw tightened. His fingers curled against his thigh.
The space between them held its breath.
Brynn wrapped herself in anger because the alternative was falling apart, and she waited.