Hux’s hand stilled on her hip. She didn’t move, her cheek still pressed against his chest, but awareness in her voice had shifted. Gone quiet. Vulnerable.
He pulled her closer. Didn’t speak. Just held her while she laid herself bare.
She shifted, propped herself up on one elbow to look at him. The starlight through the skylight painted her in shades of shadow and glow.
“What do you see when you look at me?”
Her hand pressed against his chest, over his heart.
“A blank space.” Her voice caught. “You’re the first person whose ending I can’t see. I don’t know if that means you’re safe. I don’t know if it means I’m going to die here before you do. All I know is that when I try to read your chart, your future—” She shook her head. “There’s nothing. Just... possibility. Uncertainty.Life, maybe, instead of death.”
He caught her hand. Brought it to his lips. Kissed her palm, her wrist, the inside of her elbow.
“Either way,” he said against her skin, “I’m here. Whatever this is—whatever we’re building—I’m in. All the way.”
“Even without a bond?”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she kissed him back—deeper, fiercer, with all the desperation of a woman who’d spent her whole life avoiding exactly this.
“Stay,” she whispered against his mouth. “Tonight. Tomorrow. As long as you want.”
“As long as you’ll have me.”
She smiled. It was the first real smile he’d seen from her—not deflection, not armor, just genuine happiness breaking through the walls she’d built.
“Then we might be here a while.”
He laughed. Rolled her beneath him. Found her mouth with his.
“I can live with that, Garden Witch.”
Outside, the stars wheeled toward dawn. The Convergence drew closer with every passing hour. The Hollow King stirred in its prison between realms.
But in the small cottage near the sleeping gardens, two people who had spent their lives feeling incomplete finally found completion.
And for now—for tonight—that was enough.
TWENTY-ONE
LUNARIA
Two days after the night that changed everything, Lunaria stood in the Celestial Pavilion and tried to convince the orrery to wake up.
Her body still remembered him.
The way his hands had mapped her skin in the darkness. The rumble of his lion when she’d gasped his name. The impossible tenderness afterward, when he’d traced patterns on her shoulder and whispered things she wasn’t ready to repeat—even to herself.
She shook off the memory. Focused on the task at hand.
The morning had dawned cool and clear, the kind of coastal weather that made Haven Shores feel like something out of a postcard. Mist clung to the garden paths, burning off slowly as sunlight crept through the cracked dome overhead. The Warning Bells had been quiet all morning—a small mercy after days of constant chiming.
Deia’s ring hummed on her finger, amplifying her magic as she worked the ancient mechanisms with careful hands. The flower-planets were starting to respond—petals unfurling, stems straightening, the first hints of celestial tracking returning totheir frozen positions. But the central mechanism remained stubbornly dormant, the heart of the system refusing to beat.
“Come on,” she muttered, pushing another thread of power into the tangled roots. “You’ve been sleeping for sixty years. Time to wake up.”
The orrery shuddered. One of the larger flowers—a massive bloom representing Jupiter—opened a single petal.
Progress. Slow, frustrating progress.
