Soren
Vera’s ring has been in my pocket for an hour, and every minute makes it heavier.
It should not feel heavier. It is a tarnished silver band with an opal set into the center, small enough to disappear inside my fist and old enough to have absorbed every bad decision my grandmother ever dressed up as foresight.
Still, it drags at the fabric of my coat like it knows I have been pretending this is research instead of grief with a sharper edge.
Aven stands on the other side of the mahogany table, eyeing the bookshelves like one of them might lunge.
He is wearing one of my oversized black sweaters, the sleeves hanging past his knuckles, and he looks less like a willing participant than a man who has been tricked into attending a family séance with props.
“If that thing bites me,” he says, nodding toward my pocket, “I’m filing a complaint with whatever supernatural labor board handles cursed jewelry.”
“You’d have to have a job for that, darling.” I take the ring out before my nerve can abandon me completely. “Right now, you’re more like a very expensive, very dramatic houseguest who keeps breaking the spiritual furniture.”
Aven gives me a look that is pure defensive humor, his amber eyes narrowing beneath the messy fall of his dark curls.
He's wearing one of my oversized black sweaters, the sleeves hanging past his knuckles, and he looks slight and bruised-pretty, like a tragic Victorian poem that learned how to drink cheap gin.
It's an aesthetic that makes my skin feel two sizes too small, which is rude of him, frankly, because I'm already having an emotionally complex morning and didn't schedule lust until after lunch.
The shop has settled into a fragile domestic rhythm around us, the kind that feels less like peace and more like everyone has agreed not to touch the cracked glass yet.
"Can we not?" Aven asks, gesturing vaguely at the library, the books, me, the entire cursed architecture of his current existence. "Last time we did this, I ended up seeing the color of my own thoughts and then vomiting on Ira's boots. It wasn't a high point for any of us."
"I cleaned the boots," Ira says, his voice a low rumble that vibrates through the floorboards. "Don't do it again."
"See? Everyone is extremely invested in your digestive health." I push off the table and pull Vera's ring from my pocket.
The books go still in that theatrical, judgmental way only magical objects and elderly church women can manage.
Vera's ring sits in the center of my palm, a heavy tarnished silver band set with an opal that looks like a trapped storm.
It's not just jewelry. It's grief small enough to fit in my hand and heavy enough to ruin the entire room.
Aven eyes it like it's a live grenade. "The ring. Right. Because nothing says gentle lesson like a piece of jewelry that belonged to the woman still haunting half the shop."
"Vera isn't haunting half the shop," I say automatically, then glance toward the shelves when three books shift in clear disagreement. "Fine. She's haunting half the shop, one tea kettle, and possibly my impulse control. That doesn't make this a trap."
"That's exactly what someone would say while holding a trap."
"It's residual energy training." I force my fingers to uncurl around the ring.
My palm feels colder without it. "No voids.
No collapsing into spiritual weather systems. No vomiting on Ira's shoes because apparently he has standards about footwear.
You're just going to touch it and tell me what's left behind.
Think of it as psychic archaeology, but with fewer old men arguing over pottery. "
"I was never very good at history," Aven says, but he reaches out anyway.
His fingers tremble, just a little, the movement so slight I wouldn't notice if I weren't hyper-aware of every centimeter between us. I watch his skin make contact with the silver, and the room doesn't simply go quiet. It drops out of time.
The opal flashes a violent, bruised purple.
Aven's breath catches, and I see the moment the psychometry pulls him under the skin of the present.
His eyes go flat and distant, focused on something that isn't in this room, isn't in this year, isn't for any of us to touch cleanly.
His mouth opens on a soft gasp, and then he starts shaking.
Not the small nervous tremors from before.
This is deeper, full-body, like the memory has teeth in him.
"Aven?" I step closer, my hand hovering near his shoulder. I shouldn't break the connection. I know that. I know the rules because Vera wrote half of them and hid the other half where they could hurt me later. But the look on his face makes my stomach twist. "Aven, talk to me. What do you see?"
"She's... she's right here," he whispers, and his voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well. "Vera. She's younger. Her hair is still red, like yours, but darker. She's hiding something."
I freeze.
This is why I haven't touched that ring in months.
This is why I shoved it in a drawer, then moved it to a box, then moved the box to a warded cabinet, then spent three weeks pretending I didn't know exactly where it was.
I don't want to know what she hid. I don't want to see the calculation behind the love.
But Aven is already deep in the memory, his knuckles white around the silver band.
"She's at this table," Aven continues, his eyes darting through empty air. "She's writing. Her hands are shaking, Soren. She's terrified. She's looking at you. Not you now. You as a child. You're on the floor with wooden blocks." His voice fractures. "She loves you so much it hurts her to breathe."
I swallow, and the lump in my throat feels like glass.
I can picture it perfectly: sun through the high windows, dust in the air, the crooked stack of blocks I insisted was a tower even after it fell twelve times.
I remember being loved like that. Absolute.
Devouring. Like I was the center of her entire universe and she would burn every other star to keep me lit.
I want that memory. I want to crawl inside it and never come out.
"But there's a blade under it," Aven says, and his voice breaks open.
Tears track through the faint dust on his cheeks.
"She's calculating. She's looking at the shelf-life notes.
She knows the bond will hollow you out. She knows you'll refuse it if you find out the cost, so she's burying the truth.
She thinks she's saving you. She thinks she's allowed to choose. "
The air in the library turns freezing.
I feel the betrayal like a physical blow, cold and deep and humiliatingly unsurprising.
My grandmother, the woman who taught me everything, the woman who protected me from the world with one hand and built my cage with the other, had started choosing which truths I could survive before I was old enough to read them for myself.
Aven lets out a sharp, choked sob, and the ring falls from his hand, clattering onto the mahogany table.
The memory spits him out, and he collapses forward, forehead striking the wood as he gasps for air.
He's crying, real jagged sobs that tear through the careful shape of the lesson and leave it useless on the floor.
My first instinct is to reach for the ring.
It's ugly, and I know it's ugly, but grief is selfish.
I want the piece of Vera he touched. I want the younger version of her with shaking hands and red hair and terrible love.
I want to demand answers from an echo because apparently dignity is the first thing to die when your dead grandmother keeps leaving emotional landmines in the furniture.
Then I look at Aven.
He's shaking, shoulders hunched, hands clawing at the edge of the table as he tries to find his way back to his own body. He's hurting because he felt her love for me. He's hurting because he felt what she did with it.
I let the ring sit on the table, a cold silver ghost, and reach for Aven instead.
He comes upright when I pull him, my hands fisting in the soft wool of the sweater. His eyes are red-rimmed and swimming with shared pain, and for a second, the room narrows to the space between his breath and mine.
"Soren," he gasps, already trying to shove himself back into the armor of his mouth. "I'm... I'm fine. Just a little historical whiplash."
"Stop." The word comes out sharp enough to cut.
I back him against the edge of the table, my body pinning his there, because if I don't put my hands somewhere real, I might start screaming at ghosts.
"Stop trying to disappear inside a punchline, Aven.
You just felt her entire life. You don't get to make a joke out of that. "
His breath catches. Good. Let it. Let one thing in this room be honest.
I'm angry, and I'm shaken, and I'm so full of feeling I can barely keep my skin fastened around my bones.
I don't want to be gentle in the easy way.
Gentleness is for people who aren't currently being hollowed out by their own history.
I want something real. I want his pulse under my hands and his breath in my mouth and the living heat of him loud enough to drown out the dead woman who made every room in this shop into a confession.
I kiss him, and it isn't like the bar. There's no soft inquiry here, no careful little question pressed to the corner of his mouth.
It's a demand, not cruel, not careless, but definitely mine.
I press my mouth to his and make him meet me there, tasting the salt of his tears and the electric heat of his magic.
He tastes like peppermint, nerves, and the kind of grief that keeps trying to become sarcasm.
Through the bond, he's loud. So loud. Color and need and panic and warmth all crashing together until the jagged residue in the library starts to lose its teeth.