They lay like that, facing the doorway where night stared back. The sounds of the forest sorted themselves into a language she could nearly read: water far off, a small animal making glossed-over noise two clearings away, a leaf caught and freed again. Beneath it, the more intimate speech of the man next to her—the long draw of breath, the slower let. His heart beat steady as a drum under her spine. Without thinking, she matched her breathing to his, and when she drifted, she could feel the pull of sleep tug them both along the same current.
She half-woke once to the sensation of fingers—his—finding her hand under the pelt, not to tether but to reassure. She did not link their fingers. She let their palms share heat without bind. It felt like trust's first, small, deliberate thing.
"Do you always keep watch while others sleep?" she asked into the not-quite-dark, voice slurred by almost-dream.
"When the forest is new to their bones," he said. "When I am less new to it."
"Is it new to you?" she ventured, knowing it could be both true and false.
"No," he said after a long breath. "And still I listen."
She smiled into the fur and, for the first time since the dungeon, could feel the smile without tasting bitterness.
She slept then—not the exhausted collapse of a hunted body, but a slipping away into something that could take its time. In her dream, roots lifted like fingers and braided gently into her hair, thorn-trees turned their points outward, and the dark came not as a flood but as a great animal that curled around the camp and kept its teeth for anything that did not belong.
When she woke, moments or hours later, he was still beside her—awake, eyes open to the dark, listening as though the night spoke only to him.
His profile caught the faint ember-glow: the hard line of his jaw, the shadowed cut of his mouth, the long lashes that didn’t belong on a man built for war. A faint sheen traced his chest where the pelt had slipped, muscles shifting with each slow breath. The runes beneath his skin glimmered like faint coals, alive under his grey skin.
She wanted to touch—to lay her hand over his sternum and feel that impossible steadiness, to know what a heartbeat like his felt like under her palm. Instead, she only watched, her own pulse matching his, her breath learning his rhythm.
The small space seemed filled by him: his scent of smoke and iron, the warmth of his body, the quiet power that made the dark seem tame. She was aware of every inch that separated them, and of every inch that didn’t.
She closed her eyes before he could catch her looking, but the image of him stayed behind her lids, vivid and close. The awareness of him—his heat, his stillness—pulled her back under, into sleep that felt like falling through the sound of his breathing.
For the first time since Maidan, she dreamed without fear.
And somewhere beyond the ring of thorns, something old and patient listened back.
Chapter
Fifty
The light had turned against him.
Dawn arrived as pale silver light trickled through the canopy, pooling over the forest floor. It was not the sun of the plains—a clean, open thing—but a diffused, ghostly shimmer that crept in through gaps in the leaves. Even that thin illumination made his skin crawl. Every time it touched him, the black veins beneath the surface stirred: alive and hungry.
He rose before the others, moving quietly to the edge of the clearing. His body ached with the wrongness of it—light on flesh that no longer belonged entirely to flesh. The air felt thick, charged. Beneath his ribs, a pulse that wasn't quite his own answered the dawn with a low, hungry beat.
He flexed his hands. Dark tendrils oozed between his fingers, slow but persistent. Their hunger never ceased.
He curled his fists until claws pricked skin and drew blood. The sting steadied him, dimming his hunger to a waiting tremor.
Azfar's voice whispered out of memory:The shadow doesn't drink the light, Rakhal. It drinks what the light touches.
And the light was everywhere now—sinking into bark, gleaming off the thin stream nearby, touching the sleeping forms in the camp.
Touching her.
He looked toward Eliza, still asleep on the pelt. Her braid was loose, dark hair glinting faintly where the light found it. The curve of her neck showed pale against the shadows. Her breathing was soft, even. A pulse throbbed at her throat, visible in the delicate hollow just above her collarbone.
His body reacted before thought could intervene—a tightening low in his gut, a rush of heat that mingled with the ache behind his teeth. The shadows shivered eagerly, tasting her warmth.
He turned away hard, digging his claws into the dirt until the urge dulled. The smell of loam and blood grounded him.
Pain is a leash.
He forced himself to breathe. To count. To remember the sound of her voice cutting through the dungeon's echoes.
