Now I’m sitting against a tree that hasn’t tried to kill me yet, watching the dead watch me, and wondering if one of these skulls used to have dark hair and a crooked smile.
Cyrilla.
The name rises unbidden, and I don’t push it down this time. There’s no point. I’ve been thinking about her since I crossed the boundary into Briargrave, and pretending otherwise hasn’t made the thoughts stop.
I push myself to my feet and walk among the dead. The Briarbound stare as I pass, their hollow eye sockets tracking my movement with attention that shouldn’t be possible. Tharos said some of them are still aware. Still conscious inside their prisons of wood and bone.
I wonder which ones remember being human.
“Cyrilla.” I say her name out loud, testing how it feels in this place. The forest swallows the sound, but I keep talking anyway. “If you’re in here somewhere... if you can hear me...”
What? What would I even say? I’m sorry I wasn’t there? I’m sorry I let you take that contract alone? I’m sorry we’d been drifting apart for months and I was too much of a coward to admit it?
The truth is, Cyrilla and I were falling apart before Briargrave killed her. The intensity that had drawn us close in that cave had faded into comfort, then routine, then obligation. We still worked well as partners. We still cared about each other. But the fire was gone, and neither of us knew how to talk about it.
She took the Briargrave contract without telling me. I found out from a handler at the Consortium’s eastern outpost, three days after she’d already entered the forest. In and out in three days, the handler said she’d told him. Simple tracking job.
I waited at the edge of Briargrave for two weeks. Watched the treeline every morning and every night, waiting for her to emerge with that crooked smile and some ridiculous story about getting lost in the briars. She never did.
Part of me was grieving. Part of me was furious. And part of me—the part I’ve never admitted to anyone, not even myself—was relieved.
The thought makes me sick, but I can’t deny it. Cyrilla’s death freed me from a relationship that had become a cage. I mourned her, truly and deeply, but I also packed my bags and moved on within a month. Took contracts in distant territories. Built a new life that didn’t include her ghost.
And then I took the Blackroot contract, and here I am. Walking among the bones of people the forest consumed, looking for the woman I loved and abandoned in equal measure.
“You’re not here.” I stop in front of a skeleton that’s been absorbed into a massive root system, its spine curved in a waythat suggests it died fighting. “Tharos said you died within days. The forest took you quickly. You’re not one of these poor bastards trapped in wood and awareness.”
The skeleton doesn’t respond. Of course it doesn’t. But somehow, saying the words out loud makes them feel true.
Cyrilla is dead. Really dead. Not trapped, not suffering, not calling my name from inside some nightmare of bark and root. Just... gone. The grief I’ve been carrying for five years finally has somewhere to land.
I sink to my knees in the carpet of bones and let myself feel it.
FIFTEEN
XELA
Tharos finds me there twenty minutes later.
I hear him before I see him—the subtle shift of the forest as it makes way for its warden, the soft crunch of ancient bones beneath his feet. By the time he enters the clearing, I’ve reassembled myself into something functional. My eyes are dry. My expression is controlled. Whatever he might have seen if he’d arrived earlier is locked away where it belongs.
“The Consortium is regrouping.” He moves through the clearing with the fluid grace I’ve come to associate with him, stepping over bodies and around roots with an ease that speaks of long familiarity. “More hunters now, with reinforcements coming from the western approach.”
“More?” I stand, brushing bone dust from my leather armor. “The scouts we killed numbered less than a dozen. That means backup has already arrived.”
“The Consortium doesn’t do anything halfway.” He stops a few feet away, his massive frame blocking the filtered light that struggles through the canopy. “They’ve been planning this for years. Did you really think they’d stake everything on one hunting party?”
“I was hoping they’d be stupid.” I check my blades, more to occupy my hands than any real need. “How long until they reach the Heartgrove?”
“At their current pace? Hours. Maybe less if they push.” His gaze sweeps the clearing, pausing briefly on the skeleton I’d been kneeling before. If he noticed anything unusual about my posture when he arrived, he doesn’t mention it. “The siege engine is the problem. The Binding Breaker’s runes are specifically designed to tear apart the magic holding the King in check. If they get close enough to activate it fully...”
“The King breaks free.”
“Yes.”
“I’d seen enough of their files before I took this contract to know what they were really after. They built that weapon specifically for your binding. The Binding Breaker—they’d been designing it for years.”
Something shifts in his expression—not surprise exactly, but recognition. “So they told you what they were really here for.”
