Chapter 43 I Don’t Know Who I Am #2
“Yes.” He exhales. “It’s a Founding Family secret, buried long before our time. They rewrote the records, silenced the witnesses, erased entire histories from every region except Vairen. And even they’ve learned not to speak of it.”
Every answer sharpens the edge of betrayal, and I curl my fingers into my palms to stay tethered, nails carving crescents into flesh that’s gone numb.
“I need to ask.” Rowe’s voice is softer now, like he’s afraid of pushing too hard. “I know it hurts, but what happened at that checkpoint?” His jaw tightens. “For a moment, I thought . . . I thought Kane was Dom. The glamour threw me.”
The truth unravels before I manage to stop it, and my voice breaks apart under the weight of it, each piece falling from my lips in jagged, uneven fragments. By the time the last word slips free, tears stream unchecked down my face, and the sobs that follow shake me until I can no longer speak.
“None of this was mine. Not the choices. Not the relationships. Not the path. They built me.” I press shaking hands against my face, trying to keep myself together, but the pain seeps through anyway.
“Even Dom. Him. He wasn’t real. Nothing was.
” A sharp, guttural sound tears from my throat.
“He was assigned to me, trained for me. I thought we chose each other, and it was a contract.” Panic claws its way up, raw and relentless.
“And now I don’t know if he’s alive. Don’t know if Kian punished him, if he . . .” I can’t say it.
Rowe shifts in my peripheral vision, hands half-raised, uncertain whether touching me will help or make things worse. “Aria . . .” My name sounds like it’s breaking him. “Tell me what you need. How can I help?”
But the walls collapse faster than I can rebuild them, my heartbeat surging until the pounding drowns out everything else. Numbness spreads through my fingers, my skin tingling as the room contracts around me.
“Please. I can’t. Everything is—”
“Tell me what you need. Anything. Just . . .” Rowe’s hands tremble at his sides. “Dammit.” Suddenly he’s there, pulling me into his arms.
I should resist. I’ve spent years reinforcing the wall between us. But I can’t. Not when everything else is collapsing around me.
“Breathe,” he murmurs, pressing my trembling hand to his chest. “With me, Aria. Just like before.”
The familiarity crashes into me—the rooftop, our hidden place, that night after training when I could barely speak, curled in on myself beneath the stars.
He had done this then as well, guiding my hand to his chest, and teaching me to steady my breath to his, back when he was the only thing that made the world stop spinning.
“Stay with me.” The words ghost against my hair. “Just breathe with me. Please, Aria.” That last part comes out raw and desperate, as if he’s the one drowning.
Astrafel stirs. Not gently. Not with patience. He answers my fear with fury, his rage fusing with mine. Magic bursts through me unchecked. There’s no ruby. Power simply erupts from my skin like a storm breaking, and the room reacts. Papers scatter. Bundles of herbs cascade from their drying racks.
Rowe’s breath hitches, but he doesn’t let go.
“I’m broken,” I choke out, fisting his shirt. “But Dom . . . he was different. He understood the darkness inside me, and never tried to fix me or change me. He just . . .” My voice breaks. “He loved me for who I was.”
But Astrafel’s presence coils tighter, suffused with heat, and a wretched undercurrent of outrage at my denial.
Through our bond he drags up memories I’d buried, reframing every moment I mistook as proof I belonged in darkness.
The thrill I once felt when I hurt something too far gone to save was never mine—it was his grief, his judgment, his sorrow for the world, and what had been done to it.
And in that clarity, I see how badly I misread it, wearing his pain as though it were my own identity.
“No.” The word burns as it escapes. “You had no right.”
“Aria?” Rowe’s voice cuts through the haze, but I’m trembling so hard my limbs won’t respond as another wave rises, and Astrafel floods my senses with truths I never wanted: Dom’s hands on mine after violence, his praise for the hunger he swore we shared, when the magic beneath my skin had never cried out in hunger, but in agony.
My pain had been romanticized, my trauma recast as strength, and I believed him. I built a life on that belief.
“I thought I was broken,” I rasp. “Thought he loved the damage. That what we had was real because we survived it together.”
But I see it now. What we shared was built on ruin.
“Stop it,” I sob. “You can’t just make me stop loving him.” My voice cracks on the last word. “You can’t take this from me. I don’t care if it was arranged or cursed or cruel. I can’t erase what I feel.”
“Hey. Focus.” Rowe’s arms tighten, voice steadier than mine. “Stay with me. You’re safe here.”
Astrafel’s presence pulses with something beyond rage now—grief, perhaps, or bitter understanding. He offers one final echo: Dom praising my “darkness” after a particularly brutal training session, while beneath my skin, my magic had been screaming in anguish.
It was a mirror maze; a bond built of shared wounds. And Dom loved the sharpest edges of me. The parts that bled when pressed. He mistook my damage for devotion and I let him. I believed that surviving side by side meant we belonged together.
“Please,” I whisper. “Please, I can’t—I don’t know who I am without him.”
But it was never safety, softness or choice. It was need. It was fear mistaken for gravity.
It was love, but it asked me to shrink and sharpen. To bleed for him, even when I didn’t want to.
Rowe rocks me slowly. His words are quiet, barely more than breath. His heartbeat is the only thing steady in the wreckage.
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“You’re Aria,” Rowe says without hesitation. “And we’ll figure out the rest.”
Tears soak into his shirt as my body shakes apart, but his arms only tighten, anchoring me as my world crumbles. His fingers tremble as they smooth through my hair, betraying the calm he tries to project.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my temple.
Where Dom would have asked for explanations, would have needed answers I couldn’t give, Rowe just holds me. He doesn’t push or demand.
I cling to him like he’s the last real thing left. Because maybe he is.
Maybe he always was.