Chapter 33
CHAPTER
Azrian
On the morning of their blood vow, the urge to see Sabine, to assure himself she still existed as more than a silhouette in his dreams, had become nearly physical.
Azrian walked the halls of Braythar House, the air sharpened by lavender water and the hum of restless preparation.
The upper floor came alive with industry.
Servants scurried, their movements honed to invisibility, like ghosts rearranging the world to suit the whims of the living.
He did not wait to be announced. Instead, he moved down the corridor, toward the distant pulse of Sabine’s presence, as subtle and inescapable as his own heartbeat.
The chamber door stood ajar. Within, light fell in bars across a landscape of pale linen and scattered ribbons.
Sabine stood on a low platform, arms lifted as a seamstress adjusted the fall of Keshiran silk over her hips.
Her hair was partially held in place by a diamond-and-pearl hairpin, loose curls escaping around her face.
His pulse tripped. It was the same pin he’d purchased for her at the Bridge Market.
“Have you seen my bracelet? The one with the pearls?” she asked her maid.
The woman fidgeted with her hands. “I’m sorry, my lady. I looked everywhere for it.”
Sabine waved her off as much as she could with the seamstress working the gown around her. “It’s no matter. Liora must have borrowed it.”
He stepped through the door. All motion in the room stilled, save for a single loose thread that spiraled from the hem of Sabine’s dress.
Lady Delarine presided from a wingback chair by the hearth, armored in sapphire silk and a circlet of seed pearls. “Lord Vaelros, you are early. The ceremony is not for another hour.”
“I find myself impatient to see my future wife,” Azrian replied, layering courtesy atop honesty. He bowed, not to the Duchess, but to Sabine, whose eyes flickered to him in the mirror.
The effect of her, in full regalia, was devastating.
Sabine’s gown was white sheerness over pearlescent lace, dusted in brilliant embroideries of stars and shards, tracing her form in unyielding geometry.
It bore no resemblance to the frothy confections favored by most Gilt brides.
He hadn’t known, until the moment he stood before her in her luminous shroud of white, that there could exist a yearning so sharp it hurt to breathe.
She held herself perfectly upright, even as the seamstress fussed with the drape of her sleeve. “Lord Vaelros,” she echoed, no trace of tremor in the syllables. If she was afraid, she wore the fear like a second skin—neither embellishing nor apologizing for it.
Azrian waited for the seamstress to finish her adjustments before crossing to the center of the room. “I shall like a moment alone with my intended, if it pleases Your Grace.”
The room absorbed the request in stunned silence. Sabine’s maid blanched. The seamstress made a noise in her throat, then busied herself with the ribbon tray. Lady Delarine’s fingers tightened on the armrest, whitening the knuckles.
“It indeed does not,” the Duchess said at last. “You know as well as I, boy, that it isn’t proper.”
The Duchess’s term of endearment felt surprisingly close to scorn. A slow smile spread on Azrian’s lips. “Since when do you worry about propriety, Lady Delarine?”
The Duchess did not reply immediately. Instead, she studied him, her gaze a surgeon’s scalpel: seeking the seams, the hidden motives. Then she glanced at Sabine.
Sabine, for her part, said nothing. She stood as though braced against a storm, eyes locked on Azrian’s.
“I require a mere moment to speak with my bride candidly,” Azrian insisted. “We are to be wed within the hour, after all. Nothing I may do now will change that.”
If he hadn’t been so attuned to Sabine, he might’ve missed the brief flash of a frown that crossed her face. Curious. Was it something he said? Did she wish they could change their fate, still? He couldn’t say he looked forward to a blood vow, himself, but the thought of calling Sabine his wife…
He clenched both fists and breathed deeply. She’d been forced into this marriage. Regardless of his wishes, she couldn’t be his. Not like this.
“Five minutes,” Lady Delarine conceded. “No more. And I shall stand outside the door.”
The small victory felt monumental. Azrian nodded, and Lady Delarine rose with the grace of a closing guillotine. She collected the maid and the seamstress with a sweep of her hand. The door clicked behind them, the sound echoing through the high-ceilinged room.
For a moment, Azrian did not move. He studied Sabine as though seeing her for the first time: the rigid set of her jaw, the hands relaxed but ready at her sides, the way the neckline of her gown framed the mark under the collarbone.
“You look splendid,” he said quietly. “And nothing like what the Gilt would expect you to look.”
Sabine’s lips curved, perhaps an acknowledgement of the compliment’s precision. “I believe I have you to thank. This gown cost more than most dowries.”
He approached the dais, careful to keep his hands visible, as if she were a wild thing that might escape him at any sudden move. “Think nothing of it. All the money in the world would be worth seeing you like this.”
Sabine stepped off the platform to face him. “Like what?”
He resisted the urge to tuck a strand of unruly hair behind her ear. “Like yourself.”
“I thought you might end up disappearing through some hidden passage,” she said with that blend of practicality and dry humor that had become as familiar to him as his own heartbeat. “Leave me to face this alone.”
“The thought occurred to me.” He studied her face, noting the tension around her eyes despite her steady tone. “Though to be fair, one cannot really face a blood vow without another to bind themselves to.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “I’m certain the Registry would’ve managed. If I were a gambling woman, I’d bet they have at least three names ready to take your place.”
The image of anyone else standing in his place, taking Sabine as his own bride, turned his blood into scorching lava.
“Azrian.” Sabine’s gentle brush of his hand grounded him back to reality. “I was merely teasing.”
“I know.” He clenched and released his fist. “But Sabine, I would not fault you if—”
“Do not finish that sentence. The Registry may have forced the blood vow, but I chose you in spite of it. I have no intention of revisiting that specific subject.”
He had no right, in their circumstances, to feel this victorious at her words. And yet, he basked in the feeling nevertheless.
Then, he remembered the flicker of doubt he saw just a few minutes ago. “When I told the Duchess nothing could change our fate now, you grimaced. Is there something you wish to tell me?”
Sabine frowned. “It’s uncanny how well you read people.”
Not simply people. You. He didn’t say as much.
She twisted the engagement ring on her finger. “I overheard a conversation last night.”
Azrian crossed his arms and waited. “Of the Duchess? With whom?”
“That’s precisely it, I don’t know. I was...” A pause, color brightening her cheeks. “Well, spying, I guess.”
Despite the gravity, Azrian’s lips twitched with something dangerously close to admiration. This woman, who had survived tragedy and rebuilt herself from necessity, had transformed into something far more formidable than anyone—including herself—had anticipated.
“Careful, Sabine. If you continue to display spying skills so deft, I may have to recruit you into my Shadow forces.”
She made a face, both exasperated and, somehow, endearing. “I’m afraid I’m not built for service to the Empire, my lord.”
The words struck deeper than she could know. No one was built for it. The Empire simply shattered them, then pressed the pieces into their chosen shape. Some died in the breaking. Others learned to live with the scars and the spaces in between. He’d never decided which fate was kinder.
“The Duchess’s conversation. You were saying?”
“They spoke of accelerating plans, they spoke of our match, and potentially taking us… sooner. And then the Duchess said our blood vow was in a few hours, and nothing we could do would change that.”
The word lingered like smoke from a funeral pyre. “Take us how?”
“They didn’t say, and I certainly had no intention of revealing myself to ask them personally.”
Azrian found himself fighting a smirk. Her dry delivery, the arch of her brow, the way she managed to make espionage sound like a social inconvenience—it was so precisely, so infuriatingly her that something inside him eased.
“Do you think the Duchess is working with the killer?”
Sabine pursed her lips, then sighed. “She’s on the Royal Circle of advisors. I’ve never felt in danger with her, but I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that if the Registry is at least aware and allowing the murders, she might be complicit.”
“I guess this does bring me to the purpose of my visit.”
She faced him fully, his own desperation reflected in the careful stillness of her posture. “Go on, then.”
“With everything going on, and all the odds stacked against us, I wished for something that was truly ours in this spectacle.” The words emerged like blood from a wound. “A promise. Only between us, without the Empire in it.”
Azrian reached for her hand, brushing it. He lifted their joined hands and pressed them to his chest, over the galloping thud of his heart.
“Sabine Almarien,” he said, and her name tasted like absolution, “I vow to stand beside you in whatever comes. Not as the Emperor’s Hand, but as your partner in this resistance we have chosen.
As the man who would destroy anyone before allowing them to take you.
” With the adrenaline of new purpose, he bent his head forward until their foreheads nearly touched.
“If you wish to run, tell me, and I will tear down the world until there is nowhere left for them to find you.”
The words emerged more raw than intended, but he could not regret their honesty.
Not when Sabine’s eyes widened with something that looked dangerously like wonder.
He let her see, for a moment, all the desperate, tattered pieces of himself: the boy who had wanted only to belong, the monster the Empire had made from the ruins, and the man she’d unearthed from the rubble of it all.
“Azrian Vaelros,” she replied, her fingers tightening around his with fierceness, “I vow to fight alongside you until we are either free or fallen. To see you as you truly are, not as they have tried to make you.”
It was not the vow of lovers. It was the pact of wolves cornered by a greater predator, of two people who’d lost everything except each other.
The space between them had contracted to nothing.
He could feel her warmth, count her eyelashes, taste the possibility of what might happen if he simply leaned forward and claimed the mouth that had been haunting his dreams for months.
The wanting was a living thing, prowling the edges of his control.
He could taste the moment spiraling toward its own inevitability—the way her gaze flicked to his mouth, the way her body leaned infinitesimally closer, as if there were no force in the world strong enough to keep them apart.
A pulse passed through them, so deep and thorough it felt tectonic.
Azrian’s affinity—usually a darkness at the edge of his vision, a lurking beast—surged forward to meet Sabine’s dormant power.
For one maddening moment, he could have sworn it had found it, embraced it, woven into it.
He had the startling feeling his magic was no longer his alone and yet, all the greater for it.
Though that would have been madness. They were not blood vowed yet; her magic could not be awake.
In the window, the reflection showed them as twin ghosts of black and gold.
Sabine’s fingers brushed over the lapel of his formal jacket.
“You did not wear your pin.”
Of course, his bride would not miss such a detail. He could have claimed to have forgotten it. Instead, he chose truth. “I did not feel like the Emperor should get a front-row seat at this ceremony. No matter what the Registry wishes to make of it, this moment belongs to us.”
A knock sounded at the door. Lady Delarine’s voice, precise and unyielding: “Time’s up.”
Azrian stepped back. He straightened the cuff of his coat, noting with satisfaction that it matched the violet of Sabine’s ring.
“Shall we go provide them with their performance?” Sabine asked, straightening to her full height but unable to quite mask the way her breath still came unsteadily.
“Indeed.” Azrian felt the familiar weight of duty settle around his shoulders like armor that no longer fit quite right. “Though I suspect they will receive rather less compliance than they anticipate.”
Sabine’s smile carried sharp edges now. “I should hate to disappoint their expectations of me.”
When the door opened, Lady Delarine swept in, her gaze flicking from Sabine to Azrian and back. She’d find nothing amiss in her perusal.
Nothing had happened, after all.
Except the air in the room had turned charged, polarized, as if the two of them had bent the laws of physics in five stolen minutes.
Azrian lingered at the threshold, allowing himself one last glance at Sabine before stepping back into the corridor’s uncertain light. He had no idea if they would live through this vow.
But for the first time since this ordeal had begun, he dared to hope.