“Cornelius lived there. After he married into the family, he made it his base of operations.” She reached for his hand, found it cold and rigid. “Hux, I don’t think the Holts knew. Your ancestors, the ones who were alive then—I think they were victims too. Cornelius used them. Used their home. Used their bloodline as a sacrifice, and then killed anyone who got too close to the truth.”
“My father.” His voice cracked. “You said he was silenced. Like Georgia.”
“Georgia told me. She doesn’t know when it happened or how, but Isandro has been fighting the same binding she has. He’s known the truth for years, and he hasn’t been able to say a word.”
Hux pulled his hand from hers. Stood. Walked three steps away, his back to her, his shoulders a rigid line beneath his shirt.
“My whole life,” he said quietly. “I’ve felt wrong. Incomplete. Like I was broken in some way that everyone else could see but no one would name. I asked my father once—I was sixteen, and I’d just watched my cousin find his mate, and I asked whyI didn’t feel anything when I looked at girls. When I looked at anyone.”
His voice cracked.
“He said some people just took longer. That I shouldn’t worry. That my time would come.” A bitter laugh. “He knew. He knew I was cursed, that my potential was being eaten alive, and he couldn’t tell me. He just had to watch me suffer and lie about why.”
“Hux—”
“Don’t.” He turned. His eyes were wet, but his face was hard. “Don’t tell me it’s not his fault. Don’t tell me he was a victim too. I know that. I understand that. But he let me think I was broken, Lunaria. For twenty-two years, he let me believe there was something fundamentally wrong with me.”
She stood. Crossed the space between them. Put her hands on his face, forcing him to look at her.
“He was protecting you.” Her voice was fierce. “If they’d tried to tell the truth and failed—if someone had realized they knew?—”
“They might have been killed too.” He closed his eyes. “Like Deia.”
“Yes.”
The silence stretched. She kept her hands on his face, feeling the tremor that ran through him, the effort it took to hold himself upright under the crushing burden of revelation.
Then his arms came around her, and he pulled her against him, and his face buried in her hair, and he shook.
Not crying. Not quite. But release—a release of decades of confusion and hurt, a grief for the life he could have had, the feelings he should have felt, the completeness that had been stolen before he was born.
She held him. Let him shake. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
This was the moment she’d been dreading since she’d opened that locket. The moment when all his carefully constructed walls came crashing down. The moment when the man behind the mayor finally broke.
But he wasn’t breaking. He wasfeeling. Maybe for the first time in his life, letting himself feel without analyzing, without controlling, without pushing it down to deal with later.
And he was feeling it with her. In her arms. Against her body.
That mattered. Even in the middle of this mess—especially in the middle of this mess—it mattered more than she wanted to admit.
After a long moment, he pulled back. His eyes were red-rimmed but dry. His jaw was set.
“What do we do now?”
“We find a way to break the curse.” She held up Deia’s ring, still on her finger. “She was building a weapon. The ring, the orrery, the gardens themselves—all designed to channel enough celestial power to destroy the Hollow King. She didn’t finish, but I can.”
“How long do we have?”
“I don’t know. The Convergence is coming—weeks, maybe days. When the stars align, the barrier between realms will be at its thinnest. That’s when the Hollow King will try to cross.”
“And if it does?”
“Then everyone in Haven Shores loses what your family lost. Every fated bond. Every potential future. Every capacity for love, consumed by an entity that lives in the dark between stars.”
His face hardened. The grief was still there, but steel was rising beneath it. Determination. Rage. The protective instincts of a leader who’d spent his life defending this community.
“Then we don’t let it cross.” He took her hand—the one wearing the ring—and lifted it between them. “Whatever youneed. Whatever resources, whatever access, whatever help. You have it.”
