Chapter Twenty-Six
The heart knows long before the mind
Regret is what gets left behind
Darkness still blankets the world, but Seren knows dawn is approaching; Teddy pulls his boots on. Systematic. Routined. The same way he does every morning before the world wakes. Seren watches him from bed—the way everything he does is practiced, honed into efficiency. Controllable.
They never touch. Which somehow feels more intimate than if they did. Only lie next to one another. Taking comfort from each other’s presence.
Sometimes she feels his eyes boring into her in the dark. Notices the twitch of his fingers like he’s fighting the urge to touch her. Feels the shift of his breath when he finally slips into sleep after lying awake for too long.
Seren feels the lingering warmth of him in bed. The imprint of his form in the blankets. The way the absence of him leaves an ache in her chest.
She raises her arms over her head, forcing herself to rouse after too little sleep, talking into the wee hours of the morning.
Seren told him everything—the exact mechanics of the ocean, the Silent Choir, Lara, The Harrows, the question, The Widow’s Waters, the figures, the way she rewrote the rules.
Teddy listened—intently, reverently. As he always does when it comes to her.
He looked at her in the way only he does. As if he’s looking at a hologram. As if she’ll disappear if he blinks.
“Time for training, Seri,” he says, voice hoarse and sleep-addled.
She pushes herself up to sit, her muscles screaming from yesterday’s exertions, her wounds pulling tight after scabbing over, her fractured bones grinding against one another.
She groans audibly against the pain.
Teddy huffs a light laugh. “You already sound like every soldier I’ve ever trained.”
Seren presses her feet into the floor, striding toward Teddy. She cups his cheek softly, “I don’t want to be like everyone else, Teddy. I want to be the only.”
Her words stun him.
Teddy’s eyes don’t move. They catch on her, holding on her face in surprise at how forthright she is.
He swallows thickly, but doesn’t respond.
Simply drops his gaze back to his boots and finishes tying them.
Like answering her would require dismantling something he’s spent years building to survive.
She knows she’s being direct.
She knows he doesn’t lack words—just the courage to say them.
But Seren is tired of waiting. Of waiting to be chosen. Claimed.
So she’ll push until he chooses either way.
Until she forces the words he holds onto to spill from his lips.
Because at some point, she’ll stop waiting for him to choose her at all.
Because opportunities are living things.
Leave them untouched for too long and they wither.
And Seren is not the sort of woman who waits forever at a closed gate.
Because eventually, waiting becomes its own answer.
Soft morning light peeks over the horizon, sending splinters of gold through the window, illuminating the fresh pile of leathers, boots, and undergarments folded in surgical squares on the chaise. The same way Teddy folds his own—perfectly. Precisely.
Seren’s eyes snap to him. “For me?”
A smirk presses a dimple into his cheek. “Who else?” he answers.
She picks up the leathers, holding them up in the light. They’re not just washed and pressed. They’re new. Exquisite. Finely made, every seam perfectly stitched, every panel delicately fitted.
“They’re incredible,” she breathes.
“If you’re going to train like a warrior, you need to dress like one,” Teddy replies as if it’s nothing, shrugging his shoulders indifferently. He’s watching his army descend on the courtyard from the window, their approach disheveled and disorderly.
She knows it’s more than clothes. More than practicality. Knows it’s an act of tenderness. But she lets him keep his illusion.
“Thank you,” she says, stepping into the leather pants, pulling them over her hips, and fastening the tie under the hem of her tunic.
They slide into place like a second skin. Thick enough to resist a weapon, supple enough to move with her.
She looks at Teddy with heaviness in her eyes. “I won’t wait to be chosen forever, Teddy.”
The words rent the air, layered and complex, slicing through Teddy’s illusion like steel through flesh.
Teddy pretends to keep watching out the window, but he stills unnaturally.
“I know,” he croaks. The admission sounds like it is dragged unwillingly from his throat.
Seren pulls the leather vest over her tunic. “I am not some battle you can strategize your way out of, Teddy. And choosing me does not erase the past.” Then, softer, “I am not trying to replace her.”
Her words hang in the air, part-hurt, part-resolve.
Anguish takes root in his expression. His fists clench like they can anchor him.
She moves to him, gripping his forearm, forcing him to turn to her. To look at her. No—to see her.
“I will not be the mistake you make when you are weak, Therion Ashborne.” The words sound like a reprimand. But underneath the force of them, lies a tender, broken truth.
“I am the truth you choose when you are strong.”
She draws in a fortifying breath.
“I’m worth being brave for. I’m worth the risk of your own unraveling.”
Teddy pulls her in, cradling her to his chest, and threading his hand through the curls of her hair. His lips meet the top of her head, reverent, and undeniable.
Hope fills her chest—
“I need time,” he whispers, and hope shatters like a dropped glass. Evaporates in a heartbeat.
Seren pulls away. Not cruelly. Definitively.
“Then I ask that you do not touch me while you ask me to wait. Do not give me crumbs when what I deserve is a meal,” she snaps, her voice harder now.
Teddy flinches. A rare falter from the General of War. But his eyes narrow into an unavoidable storm—and Seren is trapped there, right in the eye of it
“Hear me when I say this, Seren,” he growls, voice a low, primal claim, “you deserve a fucking feast.”
The words hit her like a hand wrapping around her throat. Possessive. Devastating. Almost enough to make her surrender. A muscle feathers in his set jaw, his body a coiled spring, every muscle pulled taut, as if not moving to her is a battle of its own.
Holy gods.
Her want for him wars with the rejection still stirring in her chest—a crucible of opposing forces. Her voice drops into a whisper. “Then why won’t you choose me?”
The words come out hurt and hollow.
Teddy’s face twists, wrecked and tormented.
“It is not that I won’t choose you, Seren.
It is that I need to find the courage to choose myself.
To let myself be happy. Because right now, I feel like the Stars will take you from me for failing to protect my first love.
” His voice is a tortured croak. A self-deprecating slur.
But Seren’s attention snags on one thing: my first love.
Not present tense. Not apology. Just truth.
Is she his second? Does Teddy love her?
And despite herself—the craving to fall into him, to give him time, to soften in the face of his pain—she lifts her chin, squares her shoulders, and says, “I’m getting hungry, Teddy. A feast is exactly what I need.”
She doesn’t wait for his response, she simply straps a small dagger to her thigh holster, spins for the door, and doesn’t try to stop the smile that breaks free on her face.
Her blood is already humming for motion.
The sun isn’t tentative anymore—it beats down on the army, sharp and fierce, as they organize themselves into lines under Teddy’s instruction.
His voice booms into the clearing, “If you cannot organize yourselves in training, how in the Stars do you expect to remain a strong unit in battle?”
No one answers. But the air fills with clipped complaints, and snappy directions.
“Enough,” Teddy says, his voice barely rising. Not because it’s quiet, but because his voice commands attention.
The army stills.
“War is not about weapons,” he begins, hands clasped behind his back as he strides through the chaotic lines of men and women pretending to be soldiers.
“Not at first. War is about strategy, organization, preparation. You will not rise to the occasion. You will fall to the level of your fear. You will perform at the level of your training.”
Frustrations and grumbles ripple through the ranks.
“Training is about knowing how to defend every attack. How to attack every weakness. So that when battle comes, it is forged into the marrow of you. We must train the hesitation from your minds. The fear from your muscles. The indecision from your hearts.”
Teddy’s eyes shoot to Seren, snagging on her before the words have finished leaving his lips.
The indecision from your hearts.
He snaps his eyes away from her, and she knows he hears the hypocrisy in his words.
“War is won before you ever make it to the battlefield. War is won in preparation—by preparing for all possible outcomes.”
The soldiers nod in agreement, though there’s nothing but fear in their eyes.
General Ashborne stops in front of a round-bellied man that Seren recognizes as the baker from Elarion’s main street. “Or would you rather wait until battle is upon you to develop the necessary skills to avoid having your head relieved from your body?”
The man pales under the scrutiny, his thick swallow audible to everyone in the clearing.
This is Therion Ashborne, Zerynthia’s General of War.
And the sight of him leading, choosing, commanding, sends a sharp pang of jealousy through Seren’s gut.
“You’ve learned defensive skills. How to stay on your feet—a skill every person should possess from the age of four or five,” he commands, and the words send a ripple of shame across the soldiers.
“We’ve never needed it here in Nymeris, General,” a man shouts from the back.
Imbecile.
Seren already knows how this will play out.
General Ashborne stalks toward the man, a strategist closing in on a weakness.
He stands too close, towering over the man, and casting a long shadow across his frame.