I look at him because the corner gives me nothing.
"For what he said before they took him," Aven continues, his voice roughening as he listens and repeats in the same breath. "For making you think he hated you more than he missed you. For being cruel because anger was the only thing they let him keep that still felt like his."
Ellis's cruelty had kept me alive in the tower. I see that now with a clarity that has no mercy in it. I kept every sharp word because sharpness meant he hadn't been smoothed into obedience. I kept his resentment like proof. He'd thrown it to me as a rope, and I'd mistaken the burn in my palms for punishment.
"Tell him I thought he was safe," I say. The words come out stripped. There's no elegance left around them, no old polish, no careful distance. "Tell him I thought they wanted me and that meant he'd escaped the worst of it. Tell him I would have come back if I'd known."
Aven's mouth trembles, but he turns toward the corner and gives Ellis the words. Not perfectly. Grief makes language human, and Aven is too human in this moment, bleeding through the bandage and shaking from a dead man's voice in his bones. The answer takes longer. I watch it arrive in him piece by piece, each fragment changing his face before he can decide how to pass it on.
"He says you were in a cage too." Aven swallows and tightens his hands around mine. "He says you don't get to apologize for not opening a door when they'd already broken your hands."
A sound leaves me. It's almost a laugh, but there's no humor in it, only the old recognition of my brother's mouth finding the cruelest possible route to kindness.
Aven listens again, and some small, terrible softness enters his face. "He says he chose you. When they made it ugly, when he was angry, when he knew one of you was going to be used worse. He says the cages were always going to take one of you, and he wanted it to be the one who could still get out." His voice breaks there, and he looks down at our joined hands as if the next part hurts too much to deliver while looking at me. "He says you were always the one who kept looking at the window."
The bond ruptures.
I don't mean for it to happen. I would have spared them if I could, but grief isn't obedient once it finds the deepest room. It moves through every tether we've made, through blood and essence and whatever strange light Aven has dragged into our shared dark. The library seems to inhale around it. Books shift on the shelves. The candle gutters. Somewhere beyond the door, Soren wakes with a sharp flare of magic, and Ira moves like a weapon pulled from sleep already in motion.
Ira reaches the library first. His hair is rough from sleep, his chest bare, a knife in one hand and murder already written into the set of his shoulders. He stops just inside the doorway because there's nothing to strike. His gaze moves over Aven on his knees, my hands locked around his, the blood on the linen, the empty corner, and the space at my sides where the bond is still screaming. The knife lowers before his hand does. He understands enough to know violence has arrived too late.
Soren comes behind him in a thin sweater that's slipped off one shoulder, his red hair flattened on one side and wild on the other. Green-white magic sparks around his fingers, then dies the moment he sees my face. For once, he doesn't fill the room with sound. He steps around Ira as if afraid sudden movement might shatter whatever's left of me, his eyes fixed on Aven because Aven is the one with the terrible task of making the invisible real.
Aven turns just enough to give them the shape of it. "Ellis is Cain's brother," he says, and his voice is so tired it barely clears the space between us. "Adaro sold him to the Church. He's dead. They bound him."
Soren's hand rises to his mouth, but he doesn't cover the sound quickly enough. It escapes anyway, a small, raw thing that belongs to grief before pride can dress it. Ira closes his eyes for one heartbeat. When he opens them, the weapon in him has changed direction. He sets the knife on the nearest shelf withcareful precision, then crosses to the chair and sits on the arm beside me.
His hand settles at the back of my neck as his thumb rests at the base of my skull, steady enough to remind my body that it still has edges.
Soren folds into my other side. There's no grace in it. He lowers himself against me, one knee pressed into the cushion, one hand gripping my shirt at the ribs as if he can hold me in the room through sheer contact. His forehead rests against my shoulder, and the first tear soaks through the fabric almost immediately. He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't pretend it's anything else.
Aven remains in front of me. He's the only one looking directly at the corner because he's the only one who can. Blood has marked both of our hands now, smeared where my fingers close over his and his close over mine. His body trembles with the strain of the connection, but he stays kneeling, still translating, still holding the place between the dead and the living while it cuts him open.
Soren reaches behind my back without lifting his head. His fingers search once, blind and unsteady. Ira looks down at him, and for a moment I feel the old instinct in him, the need to direct, to contain, to build a wall before anyone asks for shelter. He lets it pass. His hand shifts from the back of my neck only long enough to find Soren's fingers and hold them.
The small mercy of that almost undoes what's left of me.
"He's still talking," Aven says. His eyes are unfocused again, fixed on Ellis and somewhere beyond him. "He's trying to tell it all before he fades. I don't think he knows how to slow down."
"Can you hold it?" Ira asks. His voice is low, careful. The question isn't a demand. It's not even strategy. It's concern stripped to its bones.
Aven nods once, then shakes his head, then lets out a breath that trembles through the bond. "Not forever. But enough."
Enough is a dangerous word in a room like this.
I try to loosen my grip on his hands. My fingers resist me, locked around his warmth as if letting go would send me back to the tower, back to the gate, back to a century of not knowing. When I finally manage it, Aven presses his thumbs into my palms, refusing to let me turn guilt into isolation.
"Tell me what he needs me to know," I say.
Aven looks at the corner and listens. The room stretches around the silence. Soren's breathing catches against my shoulder; Ira's hand remains steady at my neck; the candle flame leans toward the unseen figure as if even fire wants to hear what the dead have carried too long. When Aven speaks again, the words are slower, chosen from a flood.
"He followed what he could feel of you after you escaped. The binding distorted him, and the church rites kept pulling him back toward whatever they used as the source." Aven pauses, his jaw tightening. "He could push impressions. Directions. Fear. That's why you kept feeling him behind you. He says you weren't imagining it."
For years, I'd disciplined myself against trusting that sensation. The almost-presence at my back. The prickle of being watched by someone familiar. The instinct to turn in empty rooms. The fractured visitations in the tower had felt like hunger, memory, madness born of captivity. I hadn't let myself call them Ellis because hope is a door that can be locked from the other side.
Aven's expression hardens before the next words come. The anger returns, no longer hidden beneath pity. "He led you to me."
Soren lifts his head. Ira goes still beside me.
