Hux told himself he was doing it for the town. As mayor, he had a responsibility to investigate potential threats. The Warning Bells hadn’t stopped chiming. Danger was coming, and it was his duty to understand what.
He was lying.
He was doing it because these evening sessions were the only hours of the day when the ache inside him went quiet. When he sat across from her in that cramped, dusty space—arguing about interpretation, passing documents back and forth, watching her mouth as she muttered translations under her breath—the absence he’d carried for forty years faded to almost bearable.
The beast beneath his skin had noticed. Grown restless during daylight hours, then settled into near contentment when Hux descended the basement stairs each evening. The animal understood a feeling Hux refused to examine too closely.
Tonight, they’d been at it for three hours.
Lunaria sat across from him at the narrow table they’d claimed as their workspace.
She’d been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.
“You decoded that fifteen minutes ago.”
She didn’t look up. “I’m still working on it.”
“No, you’re not.” Hux leaned back in his chair, studying her. He’d learned her tells over the past two weeks. The way she bit her lower lip when she was concentrating. The triumphant little smile when she cracked a particularly difficult passage. The way her whole body went still when distress crossed her face.
She was still now. Too still.
“I watched your face when you finished the translation. Something in that entry bothered you.”
Her head came up. Surprise flickered across her features—surprise, and wariness, maybe. Or recognition that he’d been paying attention.
“It mentions your family.”
The words hit somewhere beneath his ribs. Heavy. Expected, somehow, and yet still devastating.
“Show me.”
She hesitated, then slid the translation across the table. Her handwriting was surprisingly neat—sharp angles and efficient strokes, nothing like the chaos of her personality. He pulled the paper closer and read.
The void-dweller has been fed for generations now. The Holts continue to pay the price, though none of them know why. I’ve traced the original bargain back to Cornelius—he made the deal during the last Convergence, offered up his wife’s family’s potential as the anchor for the binding. Four generations of Holts have been consumed since then. Four generations of incompleteness, of mates never found, of futures devoured before they could form.
Someone needs to know. Someone needs to stop it.
But Cornelius still has influence, even now. He blocks me at every turn. And I’m running out of time.
Hux read the passage twice. Three times. The words didn’t change.
“Void-dweller.” His voice came out rough. “What is that?”
The candle. The darkness when he’d lit it three months ago.
It wasn’t a personal failing. It wasn’t that he was incapable of love.
Someone had done this to him. To his father. To his grandfather and every Holt going back four generations. He was the fifth.
“Hux.”
He realized his hands were clenched on the table. His knuckles had gone pale. The fluorescent lights seemed dimmer, the shadows deeper, and the animal under his skin was making a sound he’d never heard before—a sound between a growl and a keen.
“My father warned me.” The words came out before he could stop them. “About you. About the gardens. He said some things are better left buried.”
“And you’re here anyway.”
“I needed to know.” He looked up and met her gaze. She was watching him with concern, maybe, or understanding. Understanding without pity. “If this wrongness has a reason?—”
