I crawl toward the nightstand and yank the drawer open. The cross is still wrapped in cloth. My mother's journals are still there, waiting with all the things I've been too afraid to know. Cain's number's folded in my fist, already warm from my hand.
For a second, I consider tearing it up. I consider throwing it away, burning it in the sink, pretending the night was only another hallucination with better cheekbones and worse theology.
Instead, I shove it into the drawer beside the silver cross.
Two things I can't wear and can't throw away.
6
Cain
Freedomtasteslikeexhaustfumes and the cold metallic rot of a city that never learned how to sleep. I stand on the sidewalk outside Aven's apartment building with morning cutting through my thin shirt, my skin still humming from his touch and the bond raw enough in my chest that every breath pulls against it.
I shouldn't have left.
That's the first truth, and the easiest one to dress up as mercy. Aven's eyes had been wide with a terror I recognized, the look of a creature that had just discovered the door was open but the predator was still in the room. On the surface, I tell myself I'm giving him space because he's frightened, untrained, and has every right to reject the vampire who walked into his life, silenced his ghosts, and turned one night of peace into another thing he has to survive.
I tell myself I'm being noble because nobility's a prettier word than cowardice when no one else is close enough to correct me.
Underneath, I'm already calculating.
Aven's the third. I know it with the same certainty I know hunger, pain, and the shape of old chains. The bond didn't whisper when I touched him. It locked. Blood to spirit, silence to noise, my magic answering something in him before either of us had language clean enough to name it. Without him, the structure remains incomplete. Without all of us, my blood continues to sour under Adaro's leash, and Soren keeps burning through himself one spell at a time while Ira tries to hold a collapsing house together with both hands and no sleep.
My guilt is real. It sits heavy behind my ribs, a weight no amount of hunger can swallow.
So is my desperation.
I start walking before the two can become indistinguishable. I've got no destination, only the bone-deep requirement to stay within reach of him. The bond's new and raw, a wire stretched too tightly across the city blocks. If I drift too far, it pulls at the back of my skull until my vision sharpens with pain. If I stay too close, I feel the jagged edges of Aven's panic scraping through it.
I keep near enough to know he's breathing. Not near enough to soothe him.
There's cruelty in that. I know it while I do it. I let him sit in the fear because going back without being asked would make his terror true. I let him sit in the noise because some vicious part of me needs him to understand the difference between the world with me and the world without me.
Knowing the name for a sin doesn't make it smaller.
The city thins into early morning fog, my boots clicking against pavement damp with last night's rain. A florist opens two streets over, releasing the smell of crushed stems and wet earth into the air, and for a moment the scent nearly buries the memory of Aven's apartment. Books stacked too high. Whiskey left unfinished. The locked drawer beside his bed. The salt oftears drying on his skin. The furious, fragile way he'd curled around the silence as if I were both salvation and another weapon pointed at his throat.
He's not wrong to be afraid of me.
That truth follows me into the older part of the city, where the brick darkens and the magic under the pavement feels bruised. I know where my feet are taking me before the sign comes into view. Soren's shop sits on the corner, crooked and narrow, its windows clouded by condensation and old wardwork. The faint bitter scent of Essren herbs drifts through the seams of the building: dried sage, iron, ash, and something ancient enough to make my teeth ache.
I stop across the street in the shadow of a recessed doorway.
Through the glass, Soren moves behind the counter, reddish-orange hair a bright wound against the dark wood. His magic flickers too hot around his hands, sparking once against a row of glass jars. He jerks his fingers back and scowls at the shelf as if the shelf's personally betrayed him. The gesture's so familiar that it hurts. He's always picked fights with furniture when fear's got nowhere else to go.
Ira crosses the back of the shop a moment later, large and steady enough that the room seems to recognize him as weight. He says something I can't hear. Soren's shoulders tighten, then drop by a fraction. Ira stays within arm's reach without looking like he's guarding him, because Ira's always understood how to become a wall without forcing anyone to admit they need one.
The ache in my throat is dry and parched, a thirst blood can't touch.
I don't think, I miss them. I don't allow myself the simplicity of it. I count details instead. The yellow spill of lamplight on the counter. The herb bundles hanging in the window. Soren's too-bright magic. Ira's hand hovering near his back and not touching because he's waiting for permission even in exhaustion.
I almost cross the street.
The wanting's so sudden that my body shifts forward before I stop it. I imagine the bell over the door, Soren looking up, Ira turning, the air in the shop changing around the shape of a wound none of us learned how to close. I imagine telling them I found the third. I imagine telling them I found him first, frightened him, took comfort from him, then left him shaking in an apartment full of ghosts because I was too proud to admit I didn't know how to be gentle without also being selfish.
I stay where I am.
Part of it's strategy. If I go to Soren and Ira without Aven, we become another incomplete thing pretending to be whole. Another reunion built on absence. Another promise I can't keep.
