“Walk with me,” he says.
We walk past the tree line, where the canopy closes over and the compound disappears behind us. He stops in a small clearing. Faces me.
“Do you know what today is?”
I don’t. I stopped tracking dates a long time ago.
“March fourteenth,” he says. “The night you were turned.”
I didn’t know that. The fight. Valentina. Waking up in a warehouse with a note and no memory of what happened between. Nobody ever told me the date.
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve known it since the night I brought you in.”
“One year,” I say.
“One year.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a small leather box, dark brown, worn at the corners like something that’s been carried close.
He opens the box. Two rings. Gold. Signet rings similar to the one I lost. The faces engraved with two letters worked together so tightly they read as one mark. His initial and mine. Styled into a single crest.
“I had them made,” he says. “My father’s ring carried his house. His name. Generations of history on a single band.” He looks at the box in his hands. “I want that ring back. I’ll take it off Konstantin’s hand myself. But it won’t mean what it used to. This is my house now. Ours. And I wanted it to have a crest that belongs to both of us.”
He takes the smaller ring from the box. He slides it onto my finger.
I’ve worn his ring before. That one was his. This one is ours.
I take the second band and reach for his hand. His fingers are cool against mine as I work the gold into place, and the metal catches light that shouldn’t be there under this canopy.
His hand closes over mine, the ring pressing between our palms.
I step into him. His arms close around me and his chin settles on the top of my head and I press my face against his chest where the mark lives under his shirt.
After a while he lifts my hand and turns it over, runs his thumb across the gold on my finger.
Seraphina arrives through the trees without sound, Mira beside her. They’re not carrying anything. Seraphina said to bring nothing from the mortal world, and she said it in a voice that doesn’t leave room for negotiation.
Maximus straightens beside me.
Seraphina stops at the edge of the clearing. Tips her face toward the sky as if she’s measuring.
“I spent thirty days in the realm,” she says. “Nine passed in the mortal world.” She turns to face us. “Your time will not be the same. The Veil decides. You may return to find nine days have passed. You may return to find three months have passed. The realm knows why you’re coming, so that may work in your favor. Or, it may not.”
Seraphina faces the trees. The air between the trunks is unchanged, but the shift in the soil is palpable, layers peeling back, the deep magic in the ground pulling toward her. She raises one hand. The air shimmers, then parts, and a gap forms.
The world splits along the tree line. On the other side, the sky is a blue I’ve never seen, and the light doesn’t match anything Ican name. Stone, green things, and a charge that lifts the hair on my arms.
Thessivane. The Veil is open, and the Fae realm is on the other side.
Seraphina steps to the side. She doesn’t gesture us forward. She waits.
No going back from this one.
I walk through first. The Veil closes around me, and for one suspended second, I am between worlds, neither here nor there, the compound behind me and the realm ahead. Then color hits me. Warmth. The ground under my feet is solid and alive and humming with a frequency I feel in my bones.
I’m through.
Thessivane.
