Rubi swirls the cup, watching the liquid cling to the glass. “Alchemy. Contamination. Or… intention.”
She meets Teddy’s gaze then, eyes sharp and unflinching. “And I don’t believe in accidents.”
Silence settles between them, heavy and familiar.
After a moment, Teddy speaks quietly. “Whatdoyou believe?”
Rubi doesn’t answer immediately. Her fingers curl around the cup until her knuckles blanch.
“I believe… that something isn’t right. I’ve tested fifty-two herbs and compounds, and at least one of them should’ve been able to bind to it. This is how we’ve purged it from the body hundreds of times before. I don’t know what I believe, yet, but I’ll find out.”
Something inside Teddy shifts, because seeing Rubi like this—purposeful, determined, working with herbs in this way… it reminds him of who she is. Who shereallyis beyond the guilt, the grief, the liquor.Who she was before Maldrak’s Purge.
He’s seen this before—how people don't choose the vice, they choose the only thing that makes the hurt stop for a while.
But before he can say it, reality fractures.
A ripple tears through the air behind them in the main library.
Magic snarls.
And Seren steps out of the Gateway, bloodied, altered, and not the same woman who left.
For a heartbeat, Teddy doesn’t see the blood. He sees her eyes—brighter, sharper,wrong.
No. Not wrong.Different.Like the softness has been leached from her bones. Like conviction has taken root where wonder used to bloom. Like she’s still Seren, butchanged.
He knows it before she says a word. She has crossed a threshold. Something old and drilled into his bones stirs—the reflex he learned on battlefields, not in libraries. The part of him that knows when a warrior has crossed a threshold they can’t return from.
He takes her in—all five foot and two inches of her. Not weaker. Not broken. Just… sharper. Like something unnecessary has been stripped away. Like a sculpture that has been carved closer to its true shape.
Rubi watches her for a beat too long—like she’s looking at the version of survival she didn’t choose.
Seren’s breaths come in ragged pants, but Teddy’s eyes snag on her hands.
Blood drips from her fingertips in slow, deliberate drops—so dark it reads as black at first glance, until the candlelight catches it and reveals the faintest glint of red beneath, like heat lingering in coals long after the fire has gone out.
Rubi’s breath stutters—not at the wounds, but at the color. Her gaze lingers a beat too long, brow creasing as if her hands itch to test something they shouldn’t.
Teddy’s gaze rakes over Seren’s body, no longer taking her in, but assessing.
Her face.
Bloodied and slashed.
“Why are you back?” he demands, though not unkindly. Just concerned.
Seren strides through the apothecary, brushing past the Ashborne siblings, and slumping in the chair beside the workbench.
She reaches for Rubi’s flask, and takes a long, rough swig like a woman who’s had a night she’d rather forget.
But gods, she’s beautiful like this.
Stripped of fear and obedience, a raging wildfire palpable and alive in her eyes instead.
Teddy closes the gap between them. “What happened, Seri?”
She sweeps her eyes up, mouth twisted—all bitterness and bite. “Oh, aside from a deathly ocean, a sentient storm, a coven of witches who don’t want me, and trials I’m meant to begin after facing the oceanagain? Oh, not much. Just these wounds, I suppose.”
