Chapter 38
CHAPTER
Sabine
Sabine paced the perimeter of the Vault, her boots scuffing a nervous path along the uneven stone.
The unblinking radiance of Azrian’s focus as he methodically bound each knuckle with dark linen wraps was hypnotic.
The cloth looped and tightened, looped and tightened, never once shifting in rhythm, never breaking his composure.
And he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Threads, why was he not wearing a shirt?
Of course, she’d speculated about what he looked like beneath his layers of diplomatic severity. Most notably, her first night in this very house. But this was no speculation. It was a deliberate, unapologetic display.
His torso was a catalog of contradictions: lithe but muscular, elegant but corded with the kind of strength only earned through cycles of discipline and deprivation.
Each muscle was defined in a way that made Sabine’s mind seize up and skip, every time she tried to make sense of the sum of him.
There was an artistry to the arrangement of his scars.
The jagged, curling one atop his left pectoral; a dashed line along his ribs.
And then—she swallowed—the starburst just above his navel.
She could not stop cataloguing them, as if each mark might, if deciphered, unlock the riddle of the man himself.
She forced herself to look away. To the training dummies in various stages of ruin—some scorched, some splintered at the joints, one with its burlap head entirely severed and sitting at its own feet like a sadistic afterthought.
To the shelves carrying handwraps, spare uniforms, a battered first-aid kit, and a row of knives with edges so dull they’d more likely bruise than cut.
But her gaze kept flitting back, each time finding a new detail: the way his hands flexed as he finished the wrappings, the absolute lack of self-consciousness in his bearing.
Azrian was not showing off. He simply existed, entirely himself, with the same matter-of-fact ruthlessness he brought to every other aspect of his life.
And Sabine hated how much it made her ache for him.
“Ready when you are,” he said, voice flat as a blade.
Sabine squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and forced her traitorous gaze away from his body.
The Vault was a hollow, echo-prone chamber carved out of the rock beneath Azrian’s home— their home, rather— where the air was cold and scented faintly with rust, old blood, and the alkaline tang of unburned chalk.
“I’m not sure that’s true.” Her arms goose-fleshed in the short sleeves of a training blouse. “You’re stalling.”
“I was giving you time to reconsider.”
“There’s nothing to reconsider.” Perhaps too sharp. She chose not to correct her tone.
From him, a single exhale, which almost became a laugh. “If you insist.”
She had not really insisted. If given the option, she would have locked herself in his— their , threads’ sake—library and read until her eyes bled. But their affinities were too unstable for safety.
Sabine could deal with that fact; she’d never woven before, and if she could never do it at all, she imagined she’d survive. But Azrian? His affinity was his entire value to the Empire. If he could not control it as he once did, then they’d both become targets.
And that was something neither of them could afford.
She approached the practice ring, a rough circle of white chalk overlaid on the floor. Azrian joined her, hands now at his sides.
“On three?”
“One.”
They both closed their eyes, as instructed by the Registry. Supposed to help focus.
“Two.”
“Three.”
At the exact count, both summoned the thinnest thread of power.
For Sabine, it was like taking a breath after holding it too long: the gold and white shimmer of Creation affinity rising from her chest, catching at her fingertips, curling out in slow, sinuous waves.
Azrian’s Destruction was blacker than shadow and sharper than a blade’s edge, but streaked with ash.
For a few heartbeats, the currents danced in parallel, distinct but not touching. Then, as had been the case before, Sabine’s affinity leapt for Azrian’s. She felt the tug, the desperate ache of her own magic longing for its twin.
Azrian responded with caution, feeding in just enough of his own to keep the two streams from tearing apart the ring.
For a moment, it seemed they might achieve the balance they sought.
But then her affinity surged, bright and panicked. She tried to dial back. “Azrian—”
It was always the same. The harder she tried to suppress the magic, the more it bunched and twisted, until the two forces blurred together into something wild and dangerous. Sabine’s knees buckled. Azrian reached for her.
And that changed the pressure.
Sabine felt her mind, her very self, yanked along the line of their connection, as if she’d stepped through a glass and into another reality.
She was in the Registry’s Binding Chamber, the same one where Caelen and Virelle executed their blood vow.
Except she was not there in her own body.
The angle was too tall. In front of her stood a girl with blue-black hair and moss-green eyes, cheekbones hollowed and features more faerie-like than human.
Sabine didn’t know how she could be this certain that she was gazing into Evara’s face. She simply knew.
Hands, large and sure—Azrian’s, Sabine came to realize—entered her field of view. A Registry clerk sliced his palm with a knife. Not his own, she noted with a sick twist of satisfaction. He bled into the chalice. Evara did the same.
Instead of glowing, the blood in the chalice blackened. Magic surged, but it was uneven, with no proper counterbalance.
Then, somehow, she was in their home. In the room she now called her own. Except in the bed she now slept in was Evara’s body.
She was not dead. Not yet, at least. But she was ghastly pale, and thin to the point that Sabine might have counted every bone, if she’d wished to dwell on it.
Once again in Azrian’s body, Sabine knelt by Evara’s pillow. She—or he —brushed the sticky and thinning hair from her face. Evara did not react; she barely even stirred.
Sabine did not know where she ended and where Azrian began. She could feel his panic, the certainty that he had failed, that he was killing her, and the bitter shame that followed.
One word repeated in his mind like a hollowed confession: murderer, murderer, murderer.
Azrian staggered back, breaking the connection. For a heartbeat, the world was nothing but white noise. She gasped, her body shaking with aftershock.
His face was drawn, haunted, his knuckles white against the wrapped palm.
“What did you see?”
Sabine blinked hard, willing herself to focus. “You.”
His jaw clenched. “Which part?”
She swallowed, unsure whether the shaking in her limbs was from the magic or the memory. “Evara. The day of your blood vow.” She paused. “And what followed.”
“I see.” He pressed both hands to his knees, bracing himself, then rose to his full height.
Sabine waited for him to say more. He did not.
She hated the quiver in her voice. “The way it felt… You blame yourself for all of it, don’t you?”
He let out a brittle laugh. “Shouldn’t I?”
She thought of what it would mean to carry that much guilt. “No, you shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t choose it. None of us do. The Gilt… the Empire… they set the game, they decide who survives, who is sacrificed. We’re just… pawns to them.”
He watched her, silent and steady.
For a few long heartbeats, the only sound was their breathing. His, a rasp, hers, a staccato. Sabine braced herself against the lingering vertigo. The vision-memory clung to her like the aftermath of a fever, hot and loathsome at once.
“You’re not the villain here. Maybe you did what you did to survive, but so do I. So does everyone.”
He looked at her as if he wanted to disagree, but couldn’t muster the energy. Instead, he exhaled. The light from the wall orbs painted the side of his face in blue, making the lines of exhaustion stand out like new scars.
She let the silence grow, hoping it might hatch a gentler mood. But all it bred was more silence. Finally, she said, “We’re all disfigured by our own fears and mistakes. It’s a feature of the Empire to damage its people enough that they cannot walk away without crutches.”
“What of you?” His words were between plea and scalpel, an attempt to peel back her skin entirely. “What crutches has the Empire left you with, besides this union that might as well end us both?”
“My parents died of the Fade.”
Azrian’s eyes widened. “You never…”
“In truth, I assume everyone in the Gilt simply knows. It caused quite the scandal. At the time, we didn’t have a name for the disease or the Children to blame. The Registry put it very plainly: if their magic had sickened, they must’ve done something to warrant it.”
She hugged her arms to her chest, squeezing her elbows until her bones ached.
“I failed my sister. I was meant to protect her, to see to her happiness, whatever the cost. I promised on their deathbeds I would care for her. And look at me now, unwilling to bend again to fit her wishes, because despite it all, I’d rather be here with you , suffering whatever curse it is that ails us, than feign contentment among the people who once called my parents heathens. However foolish that makes me.”
For a moment, Azrian said nothing. “It does make you foolish,” he said, finally, but the words had no force behind them. “It makes both of us fools.”
He scrubbed his hand over his mouth, as if to erase the vulnerability.
“Should we try again?” Sabine said.
Azrian raised a brow. “You wish to relive that?”
“No. But we can’t keep running from it, either.” She swallowed. “Before we bonded, Lady Delarine taught me about weaving. She said that when we weave together, we have to bend to the will of our affinities. Let them blend.”