Chapter 41 #2
I shift further back on the bed, pulling my legs up to sit cross-legged, and grab the folded blanket, laying it over my lap like armor. Caz moves to the hearth again and sits in the chair beside it, back straight, eyes on the fire. The silence isn’t brittle anymore. Just heavy.
I don’t know how long we sit like this. The fire crackles softly in the hearth.
I stare at the floor like it might offer an escape hatch.
It doesn’t. Caziel hasn’t moved. Still seated across from me, still watching without judgment, like he has all the time in the world.
I hate how badly I want him to say something first.
Instead, I speak. Slowly. “It’s hard to explain.”
His voice is low, careful. “The trial?”
I nod. “It was… a lot.” Not untrue. Just not the whole of it. “I knew it wasn’t real,” I add. “I figured it out pretty fast. I just—sometimes even when you know a lie, it still gets in your head. Still feels like it holds some truth.”
A shadow crosses his expression, but he waits. Listening.
“It used you,” I whisper, the words dragging out of me. “That’s what is messing me up. I know you’re not whatever that was, but it felt real. And now every time I look at you—”
I stop there, too humiliated to finish the sentence. His brow furrows slightly, concern softening the edge of his jaw.
“Kay.”
I shake my head. “I’m not saying it well. I know you’re real. This is real. But the part of my brain that went through that trial hasn’t caught up yet. It’s like trying to breathe underwater. I keep gasping, expecting the air to be poison.”
“What did I do, sal?” His shoulders tense. “How do I fix your trust?”
I shake my head again, sharper this time. “Don’t ask me that.”
A pause. “Okay.”
Just that. No pressure. No pushing. It almost makes me cry.
“I keep thinking about how fast I fell for it,” I admit, my voice cracking.
“How easy it was to believe you came running. That you’d heard me scream and just showed up.
Like you always do.” He’s very still now.
The quiet kind of still that says he’s holding something back.
I think he’s trying not to interrupt, like I won’t get the rest out of he even breathes.
I fold my arms tighter across my chest. “And I hate that it makes me second-guess everything. Because I want to trust you. But that… thing didn’t stop when I—and it looked like you. Sounded like you.”
Caziel exhales, barely audible, shoulders falling like they carry the weight of the world. He stands, moving toward the bed as if being closer will make this any easier.
“I don’t blame you,” I rush to say. “I know it wasn’t you. But now every time you look at me like that, part of me wonders if I made it all up. If you even want me like that. If I just—”
“Stop.” His voice is quiet but absolute. “Right there. Stop.”
The word hits like a slap and I flinch. He’s not loud, but his tone burns—low and harsh, with an edge I’ve never heard from him before. Caziel takes a step back like he needs distance. Like I’m the threat. My chest twists.
“I shouldn’t have told you. I know it wasn’t…. I’m sorry.” His brow furrows at my hushed confession. “I didn’t mean to bring you into it,” I rush on, heat crawling up my neck. “I didn’t even realize…. It’s not your fault. I didn’t mean to drag you into the trial with my…with my own damn fantasies.”
He exhales through his nose, sharp. “Kay—”
“I know it was messed up.” I laugh, brittle. “You pulled away from me the other night because I crossed a line. And now I’m telling you I dreamed about you—used you, basically—and I just…. It’s fine.” A blow out a harsh breath, ruffling the stringy hair that’s fallen into my face.
“Stop.”
He says it again, but this time softer. Not angry, wrecked.
He reaches for me, one hand spanning the space between us before he pulls is back to his side, looking down at his fingers like they don’t belong to him.
His eyes burn like coals, black rimmed with flame, the glamor abandoning him.
When he speaks again, his voice is low, almost pleading.
“You did not drag me into anything. That was not your doing.”
“But it was,” I say quietly. “It was my want that called you into it, wasn’t it? That made the trial use your face? You didn’t ask for that. You pulled away, and then I dragged you back in anyway.”
“I do not care that it used me,” he growls, and now he is angry, but not at me. “I care that it hurt you. I care that it made you doubt yourself. Doubt me.”
I swallow, throat tight.
“I know you’re angry.” I mean the words to placate, but the tension grows.
“I am not,” His voice shudders down my spine.
“I am devastated.” The words echo between us, his jaw clenching.
“Because it was me, in a way. Because I can see how real it was for you. I cannot stomach the thought that Viridian, the Rite, used my face, my voice, to harm you, because the thought of causing you pain makes me want to plunge a blade through my own heart. Never pain, Sal, not for you.”
“But you pulled back.” My voice cracks and I pray he doesn’t notice. “The other night, with the thread. I… and you…” I shake my head as if it can dislodge the memory of the rejection. I try to look away, but he steps forward, pinning me in place with his presence.
“You think I pulled back because I do not want to kiss you?” he asks, quiet now, intense.
“It’s probably just limerence.” I give him another out.
“That’s what they call those war-time romances, right?
High stakes? Adrenaline? All leading to confusion and passionate affairs?
You’re the only person who made me feel—it doesn’t matter.
It’ll fade with time, and I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have kept my mouth shut. I—”
“Kay,” his hands come forward as if he planned to wrap them around my wrists but thought better of it.
“I pulled away because I had not yet dropped my glamor. All Daemari wear them, for us that is nothing new, but you still have not seen me. All of me, my true likeness, and you deserve to choose with your eyes open.”
I stare at him and for the first time, I see how tightly he is holding himself together. Like he’s afraid of tipping me, himself, this whole damn situation over the edge into free fall.
“Glamor” I laugh but it’s not funny. “I don’t need some perfect version of you Caziel.
I’m not such a delicate flower that I can’t handle a little weird.
I fell into your damn world through an elevator, made you fetch my cat, and now I’m surviving all your realms one at a time.
I don’t care about your outer shell. That’s not what this is about. ”
“The glamor” Caz tells me, his smile is sad, young.
“Is the first magic Daemari learn to wield. It is like putting on clothing, dressing our nakedness. Our parents do it for us at first and when we first spark, we learn how. An unflavored Daemari is considered weak, incapable of drawing from the Flame.”
A snort leaves my nose, a honk of sound I desperately wish I could claw back down, but I can’t help it. Everything I know about the Asmodeus has been taught to me against my will, and I still can’t see him glamouring a little baby Caziel.
Caz’s smile is soft. “My mother taught me. Her name was etched into the record stones during my tenth year.”
“So not about tricking the poor lost human into complacency.” I did not think it was possible to be more embarrassed. But I am. Wow. I even made basic Crimson traditions all about me. “I’m sorry.”
“I look human, Kay, but I am not.” Caz’s voice seems to echo, not just in his room but in my head. “You might not like what you see.”
What a first-class idiot.
“Show me.”
He hesitates, eyes searching mine even as his edges dip and blur and shift.
“You’re sure?”
I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life.
He exhales, slow and deliberate, and I feel the ripple in the air before I see the shift.
The glamor peels away like smoke. And suddenly he’s not just Caziel the Ember Heir or the warrior or the stoic Daemari.
He’s something older. Wilder. More honest. Red-gold skin flushing deep crimson along his cheek bones.
Jet-black eyes that shimmer with something deep and ancient, no pupils or iris, just endless shimmering black.
Curved horns, elegant and powerful, rising from his temples, nestled among thick, waves of fiery hair.
A tail flicks behind him, balanced and coiled, like a prowling big cat.
His mouth is the same, his lips a tinge darker but parted now, white fangs glinting faintly.
And gods help me, my breath catches. Because he is beautiful.
“There you are,” I say, voice shaking. “Is this what you were afraid of?”
He shifts slightly, enough for the collar of his shirt to slip down.
Deep red lines cut across his chest, a line tracing up the front of his throat as the markings spread across his face.
The stark lines cut up his throat and band across his strong, straight nose.
The embermark looks like molten gold forged into runes, not the curling vines of my own mark, but the clean, stark tattoo I’ve seen on other hands, wrists.
Never like this. I step forward placing a hand on his chest. He is beautiful. Fierce. Alien. And I want to touch him.
“May I?”
His answer is a soft tilt of his head. I reach for him, fingers brushing across the glowing lines, and he shivers. His skin is warm—hot, really—but not burning. More like sun-warmed stone. The mark pulses beneath my touch.
“Your embermark?” I whisper and he dips his chin in a nod.
“It marked me when I came of age.” His voice drops. “No one else has touched it. Not like this.”
The weight of that lodges somewhere in my chest. My hand stills. “Caziel…”
He catches my wrist before I can pull away, threading our fingers together. “You are not hurting me, Kay.”
I believe him. Still, my voice comes out quieter. “I just… want to do this right.”
“You are.” The sincerity in his tone makes me ache. “Kay,” his voice is a strangled plea as my hands travel up the column of his throat.
“Please don’t pull away. Not this time,” I say, and press up on my tip toes, trying to get closer. “Please.”