Nic threw his head back with laughter. “Keep dreaming.”
“You shouldn’t brag,” Hadria scolded gently, tousling Aries’s hair. But even she couldn’t hide her pride.
The fire crackled. For a moment, the laughter softened the heaviness clinging to the edge of the night—but it didn’t burn it away.
Arion’s voice cut clean through the din of laughter and shameless boasting. “What did you have to do in the assessment, Dragonfly?”
Collin blinked, his attention yanked from the fire, His focus wavered—scattered like embers, drawn toward Dragonfly’s shadowed profile.
She rubbed her wrist absently, her expression unreadable and closed. “I had to demonstrate my skill with a sword,” she murmured. “I did... poorly. Captain Kyle said my grandfather’s sword is too heavy for me.”
“You can use one of mine,” Arion offered without hesitation. “If they make you do it again.”
Collin watched her smile at him. It was soft. Familiar. Too familiar.
“I don’t believe I’ll need to,” she replied. “Captain Kyle said I should’ve left the sword at home.”
That smile lingered just long enough to twist the knot already inside Collin’s chest. The sound around him dulled—Aries’s laughter thinning into background noise, Nic’s sarcasm scattering in pieces he couldn’t hold onto.
She and Arion had shared a home, the two of them. For six months in White Wood. Daily routines, shared breakfasts, chores, silences. What could have grown in such small, private spaces? Collin imagined them by the kitchen window, sunlightin her hair, dust motes drifting in the air between them—and the thought made his stomach knot.
He hated himself for the jealousy boiling through his veins. Dragonfly wasn’t his. He had no claim, no place to feel anything at all. And yet there it was—bitterness biting in the pit of his stomach.
And then she looked at him.
The world stilled.
She held his gaze across the campfire, its low flames shivering in the space between them. He couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were firelight—dark, luminous, unreadable—and for a moment, the entire meadow fell away. There was no assessment. No aching muscle. No Arion.
Just her.
He wanted to reach across the fire and close the endless inches that separated them. Wanted to brush that strand of hair from her cheek, rest his forehead against hers, ask—quietly, desperately—what she saw when she looked at him like that.
Instead, he sat frozen, his fingers curled into the grass.
Then Hadria leaned in, said something low. Dragonfly blinked and turned toward her. The spell—if it had ever truly existed—fractured.
She didn’t look back.
Collin exhaled, sharp and silent, as the fire reasserted itself, the chatter flooding back in around him like saltwater over a wound.
Hadria tugged her up gently, and Dragonfly followed, her silhouette slipping out of the circle without fanfare. No one else seemed to notice. No one except him.
Nic’s voice swelled again, loud with bravado as he launched into a detailed retelling of the moment he’d fought off two guards at once.
Collin heard it all like background noise.
He stared into the dark, into the path she’d taken, his pulse still beating in time with her silent footsteps.
The platter of goat cheese eventually reached his hands. He took one without thinking—a ball rolled in spices—and bit down absently. The sharpness bloomed across his tongue, jarring him back into his body as if flavor alone could break the spell of his thoughts.
But his gaze never left the shadows beyond the firelight.
The girls had wandered only a few yards away, but in the thick gloom of night, they might as well have slipped into another world. To anyone else they’d be invisible—shapes folded into the whispers of darkness—but Collin could track Dragonfly’s every movement with unrelenting precision. His eyes had followed her so long they’d stopped needing light.
She stood caught in a narrow beam of moonlight, pale and spectral. The breeze teased at her skirt and caught in her hair, which gleamed silver where the moon struck it just right. He watched the movement of her hands, her weight shift from foot to foot. Even from here, she was vivid. Even from here, she was too far away.
He imagined being a moth—light, quiet, unnoticed—resting on her shoulder. Close enough to hear her voice, to feel the warmth of her skin rise through her clothes. But the thought shattered as a real moth brushed his arm. He swatted it reflexively, the tenderness of the image dissipating with the flick of his fingers and the pop of wings against his skin.
