“What?” Kade’s head snaps around. “No.” For once she’s got nothing to say, and that never happens.
I turn my head against Aaron’s, just enough to watch them.
“Look. It’s a given I don’t fucking like you, Ellie. That’s no secret to anybody in this room.” Kade exhales hard. Ellie lifts her head, and the look she gives her is flat and cold. Kade holds itand softens the rest anyway. “But the last thing I want is for you to suffer in here alone.”
“I don’t belong in Wintermoon.” Ellie shakes her head slow and looks down at the bodies. “The Glen is my home. I made my peace with that a long time ago. These are my people.”
Aaron shifts me on his hip and opens his mouth. “Ellie, you don’t have to?—“
Ellie drops to her knees in front of him.
“My King,” she murmurs.
“No.” Aaron flinches. “No, get up. Don’t do that?—“
“Ellie.” Kade’s already moving, crouching to grip her arm. “You know we don’t do that here.”
“This isn’t Wintermoon, Kade.” Ellie lifts her face. She pulls her arm free and rises on her own. The cloak stays clutched against her, her head down. “I request permission to be your loyal aid. Your guide. Your whatever you’ll have me be.” She pauses. “Until you come back to take your throne.”
“It is not my—“ Aaron starts, and stops, because she finally looks up.
Her eyes are full, the wet standing on her lashes. The first tear breaks and runs down her cheek. She just stands there in the wreck of her realm, her dead friend’s cloak clutched to her. She lets it come. Her grief hits me thick and raw. My lion shrinks back from it.
I press my mouth to the side of his head.
“Aaron.” I drop my voice. “She’s hurting. Bad.” My tail squeezes his thigh. “She loved that woman. It’s pouring out of her.”
He turns his head to me, then looks back at Ellie. “Okay. I’ll come back. I swear it to you.” His arm tightens around me.
Ellie’s head drops again. “My King.”
It tightens something in his face, hearing it, but he doesn’t fight her on it this time.
“I’ll come back too.” Kade says it rough, looking at the bodies and not at Ellie. “Don’t get used to my face. But I’ll come.” Ellie’s head comes up. She stares at Kade like she’s misheard her.
Aaron lifts his free hand and drags it down through the air beside us. The portal tears open where his fingers pass, its edges curling in slow ribbons of blue and gold. Through the gap I can see it. Wintermoon. The night Market, the stalls shuttered and dark, the road wet and shining under the lamps, the whole crooked sweep of home laid out on the other side.
The shift hits me through the gap, ahead of the crossing. The Glen’s air has pressed on me since we walked in, thick and dead, heavy in my lungs. Now a thread of the other side slips through, clean and cold. Rain and lamp oil and the green of the woods past the Market wall.
Aaron carries me through, and the dead weight lifts the moment we cross. The air moves again, cold and damp and alive. I drag it in greedy, deep as it’ll go. Kade comes through right behind us. The portal snaps shut at her back and takes the last of the Glen with it.
We’re standing in front of the cottage.
I unhook myself from Aaron and set my feet down because I need to feel Wintermoon under them. The ground is solid and cold. I curl my toes against it, my whole body going loose with how good it is to be home. Aaron doesn’t let me get far. His arm slides around my waist and pulls me into his side. The power still rolls off him, more of it than I have words for, a low steady hum that wasn’t there.
I look up at the cottage. It used to claw at me to stand this close. Tiana’s chains crossed it sill to roof, his magic burning through the white, the whole thing humming wrong. Now it’s just a cottage. Small and low and dark, the door plain wood, the windows black and empty. The chains are gone. It sits quiet between a shuttered fruit stall and a rack of dead lanterns, anodd little house wedged into a Market where no house ought to be.
Aaron stares back at the cottage. “Everything I just did in there. And I basically failed.”
“I tried to warn you about that place.” Kade twists at the tear in her sleeve, working the frayed edge between two fingers.
Aaron lets go of me and rounds on her. “You did warn me. You and Uncle Amir and my mother and Damon, you all decided the same thing about those people in there. Throw them away. Wall them off and let them rot.” His voice climbs. “You’re no better than they are. At least they had a reason. Dark magic had a grip on them. What’s your excuse? You just didn’t want to do the work.”
Kade’s chin comes up. “Hey. Don’t you dare lay that shit on me. Don’t you guilt-trip me.” She steps into him, a finger to her own chest. “You want to talk about the work? I have been doing the work for a thousand years. I’m the one who showed up. Every pride, pack, clan. Every coven that spat in my face the moment I crossed their line, I went back anyway.” Her voice breaks. “I showed up every single time. And I did most of it alone.”
Aaron’s anger falters. He looks off down the empty road.
“We did our best with what we had. But you have to get something, Aaron.” Her shoulders drop. “When you take a thing like this on, leadership, you have to be willing to make sacrifices for the people.”
