“How long was I out this time?” My voice comes out rough, unused.
“About eight hours.” She rises, moves to sit beside me. Her shoulder brushes mine, and I feel the contact like a brand. “You’ve been drifting in and out for days. This is the first time you’ve been fully coherent.”
“I remember... pieces.” Flashes of awareness between long stretches of darkness. Her face above mine. Her hands on my scars. Her voice calling me back when I drifted too far. “You stayed.”
“I promised I would.”
“Crowe.” He says it like he’s testing a word he hasn’t earned yet. “That was the name the silver-haired woman spat at you in the ravine. I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.”
“You haven’t. Almost no one has, in years.”
“Should I?”
“Sometimes. When it suits.”
He files it away with the same care he gives everything that’s mine.
“You didn’t have to.”
She makes a sound that might be a laugh, might be something else. “I didn’t have anywhere else to be.”
I reach for her. It’s instinct now—the need to touch her, to feel her warmth against my skin. My hand finds her hip, pulls her closer until she’s pressed against my side. She comes willingly, settling into the curve of my body like she’s been doing it for years instead of days.
“The forest is different.” She says it quietly, her head resting against my shoulder. “It registers. The thorns are still there, but they’re not hunting anymore. The vines don’t reach. Even the thornpaths are holding steady instead of shifting.”
“The King was the hunger.” I look around the Heartgrove—at the altar where I bound myself, at the bones that still carpet thefloor, at the gaps in the canopy where sunlight streams through. “Without it, the forest is just a forest again. Dangerous, but not malevolent.”
“So it won’t try to kill me anymore?”
“It might still kill you if you do something stupid. But it won’t go out of its way.” I press a kiss to her hair. “Consider yourself a guest instead of prey.”
“Quite the upgrade.” She tilts her head back, looks at me with something soft in her expression. “How do you feel? Really?”
I consider the question. The honest answer is complicated—layers of exhaustion and relief and grief and hope all tangled up in ways I don’t know how to separate. But underneath all of it, there’s something simpler. Something that feels almost like peace.
“Like I can finally hear myself think.”
“And the binding?”
“Still there. Still part of me.” I flex my fingers, feel the forest respond—roots shifting far beneath the ground, leaves rustling in response to my attention. “I don’t think I can leave Briargrave. Not permanently. The ritual went too deep, changed too much. I’m tied to this place in ways that can’t be undone.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It could be.” I turn to face her fully. “I’m asking you to share a prison, Xela. A nicer prison than before, maybe, but still a cage. If you stay here?—”
“I already told you.” She grabs my face, forces me to meet her eyes. Her grip is firm, her gaze unwavering. “You’re not a prison. You’re a choice. The first real choice I’ve made in years that wasn’t about survival or money or running from one disaster to the next.”
“And if you change your mind? If you wake up one day and realize you want more than a monster and his murder forest?”
“Then I’ll tell you.” Her thumb traces my cheekbone, catches on the rough texture of my skin. “And we’ll figure it out. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No. I can’t.” She smiles—slow, genuine, the kind of smile I’ve rarely seen from her. “That’s what makes it interesting.”
FIFTY-TWO
THAROS
