Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
The bond between them was incomplete. I could see it in the way they circled each other.
Orbiting, never quite touching. A sentence started and left hanging.
A glance that lasted half a beat too long before one of them looked away.
The others had the luxury of settled bonds, of knowing exactly where they stood with her.
Damon had a thread. A beginning. A promise of something that hadn’t been fulfilled.
I waited for the jealousy.
It was the natural response. The one I’d prepared myself for, the one I’d braced against like a man bracing for a blow.
I’d loved Alyssa. Loved her desperately, hopelessly, with the kind of aching devotion that poets wrote about and wise men avoided.
Seeing her claim mates that hadn’t been me was agony.
Watching her fall for a fifth should have been the final knife.
But the jealousy never came.
I sat at that table and watched Damon’s hand twitch toward Alyssa for the dozenth time, and all I felt was a quiet, unexpected peace. Not numbness or resignation. Something warmer than that. Something that felt, strangely, like relief.
Because the man who was falling for her, the man she was falling for in return, was the same man who had stood in front of a dying god and given up his own cure so that I could breathe again.
He’d chosen my life over his freedom. He’d looked at Maddox’s grief and decided that lifting it was worth more than lifting his own burden.
That man deserved this. He deserved her and every good thing this world had left to offer.
And I was free.
The realisation settled over me with a gentleness that surprised me.
I was free. Not just from the Summer Crown, and not just from the unrequited love that had shaped so much of who I’d been.
Free from the carefully constructed identity of a prince who existed to save an entire realm, not just his court above all else.
And now even that was coming to an end, one way or another.
I didn’t have to be that man anymore. I didn’t have to be any particular kind of man. For the first time in my life, the question wasn’t what was expected of me. It was what I wanted.
And what I wanted surprised me.
I wanted to roam. The thought arrived fully formed, certain, as if it had been waiting inside me for years and only needed the cage to open before it could stretch its wings.
I wanted to leave the courts behind, all of them, and walk the parts of Nymeria that no prince had ever been permitted to explore.
The wild places beyond the mapped borders, the unnamed shores where the land met the Nymerian Sea.
I wanted to stand on the western cliffs and watch the sun sink into that water then find out what lay beyond the horizon.
I wanted to find out who Rhidian was when nobody was watching. When there was no crown to inherit and no role to perform. Just a man and the road ahead of him and the freedom to go wherever it led.
But not yet.
I looked around the table at the people who had fought beside me, mourned me, and brought me back.
Maddox had killed me to save me and would carry that scar no matter how many times I told him it wasn’t his fault.
Alyssa carried the weight of a realm on shoulders that were stronger than she knew.
And Damon had given me this second chance at the cost of his own.
I owed them this fight. Not out of obligation, and not because a dead crown required one final act of service.
I owed them because they had earned it. Because Damon had looked at a dying god and chosen me, a man he didn’t really know, and the least I could do was stand beside him when the time came to face the tyrant who had broken this realm.
After that, the road and the sea and whatever lay beyond them.
But first, Arik.
The discussion wound down as exhaustion crept in.
Tank was the first to suggest rest, because Tank was always the one who noticed when people were running on empty before they noticed it themselves.
Chairs scraped back. Maddox started gathering bowls.
Dean muttered something about checking the perimeter, which everyone knew meant the wolf needed to pace.
Ryder stretched, cracked his back, and immediately went to help Maddox clean up, bumping his shoulder against his brother’s with a familiarity that spoke of years of easy friendship.
I stood and felt the pleasant ache of muscles that were still remembering what it meant to be alive. My body worked. It carried me across rooms and up stone ledges without the magic it used to rely on. Lighter in some ways, heavier in others. A body that was simply, entirely… human?
It was enough.
As the room cleared, I noticed what I’d been noticing all evening.
Damon hadn’t moved. He sat at the table, shadow magic drifting in lazy tendrils around his hands, his eyes tracking Alyssa as she spoke quietly with Tank near the doorway.
There was a hunger in his expression that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with the woman whose bond was pulling at him like a current he couldn’t swim against.
Alyssa said something to Tank. He kissed her forehead, a gesture so tender it made my chest tighten with something that wasn’t jealousy but wasn’t quite indifference either. Then Tank left, and Alyssa stood in the doorway, and for just a moment her gaze found Damon across the room and held.
The air between them hummed.
Alyssa broke the look first. She turned, disappearing down the corridor, and I watched Damon’s hands curl into fists on the table. Wanting. Holding himself back. Still too uncertain, too new to this freedom, to trust that he was allowed to want her.
I crossed to the table and sat down across from him.
He blinked, startled, as if he’d forgotten anyone else was in the room. “Rhidian.”
“Damon.”
We looked at each other. Two men who shouldn’t have had anything in common but who were bound together now by an act of sacrifice that neither of us fully knew how to carry.
“You should go to her,” I said.
His expression shuttered. Careful. Guarded. The instinct of a man who’d spent too long having his own desires used against him. “It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple.” I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table.
“I’ve spent years watching her from a distance, Damon.
Telling myself the timing wasn’t right, that she didn’t need the complication, that what I felt didn’t matter as much as what she needed. And you know where that got me?”
He was quiet. Listening.
“Dead,” I said simply. “With a chest full of regret and a head full of things I never said.” I held his gaze. “Don’t make my mistake. She’s down the corridor, probably convincing herself that she needs to plan strategy instead of doing what every part of her clearly wants to do. Go to her.”
Something shifted in his face. The careful guard cracking. Underneath it, hope. The kind that belongs to a man who has been denied good things for so long that he’d stopped believing they were meant for him.
“I don’t...” He stopped. Swallowed. “The bond between us, it’s barely there. What if she doesn’t want...”
“She wants,” I said. “Trust me. I’ve had years of practice reading that woman’s face, and right now it’s not a war council she’s thinking about.”
The ghost of a smile crossed his face. Tentative. Real.
He stood. The shadow magic settled around him, quieter now, responding to something softer than combat.
“Rhidian.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
I shook my head. “You brought me back from the dead. This doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He held my gaze for one more moment. Then he turned and walked down the corridor, and the shadows trailed behind him like a cloak.
I sat alone at the table in the Fifth Court and breathed.
The silence was comfortable. The kind of silence that doesn’t demand to be filled. I could feel the court around me, faintly, like hearing music from another room. Not my magic. Not anymore. Just the ambient hum of a place that was waking up after a long sleep.
Beyond the walls of this ancient court, Nymeria’s dying world waited. Broken and hurting and trapped under the heel of a man who wanted to burn it all down. There was a battle coming, and the cost of it would be terrible.
But beyond that battle, beyond the smoke and the terrible price of setting things right, there was a horizon.
And for the first time in my life, it belonged to me.