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He turned then, the smile wiped from his face. “Both alive.”

“Where is he?” My pulse stumbled. “Where is she?”

“She’s in the Wilds.”

“You said that already. But where?”

“That’s all I can tell you. Zephyr is flock.” Then he strode after Torran.

Aster just stood watching me until I said, “I need to concentrate.”

All the secrets that he had always kept… His continued friendship with Kit and Torran. It all erased everything that had happened last night.

I placed my hand on the codex. “I need to be quick, remember.” Because it wasn’t just the codex that I needed to mend; I also needed to see what was so important about the little book hidden in my pocket. And for that, I needed to be alone.

Once the two Riders had left, I hesitated for a moment before reopening the codex and pressing my fingers into the first blank page. Ink started to appear on the page in slow, deliberate lines. Letters were visible one by one before they disappeared again, as if they were considering if they wanted to be read. The moment I relaxed and sat back, full words and then sentences illuminated on the page.

“Bond,” I read aloud. “Exchange… balance…but what does it mean?

My pulse spiked.

“This codex isn’t what they think it is,” I said.

“No,” Aster murmured. He was standing on the threshold. “It never was. But you still need to get out of the oath with Bronwen.”

Wanting to distract myself from impending doom, I said, “Tell me a truth. One truth against all the Shadow stories you spill out into the world.”

“Wren…” His gaze locked onto mine, and everything stilled. “I’ll try.”

Then he ran his thumb over his lip, he was calculating what his oaths would let him say.

I needed to override his default to tell half-truths, so I rose and walked towards him. I came to rest on the other side of the doorframe to study him, watching every micro-expression that I used to know so well. The ones that he hid from everyone but me.

“Are you doing this for me?”

His eyes flicked away—toward the book—and then closed for a second too long, and that was all it took for my chest to contract.

Huffing out a laugh, he broke eye contact to scan the room for the listening runes possibly embedded in the walls. He was always vigilant. “I’m doing it because the Seer believed there was information in a book that you stole that could define the war that is coming, and we need that information.” And there it was. The truth of why he, the Riders, and the Ruckus were so set on breaking the generations-old curse.

“You should have told me earlier, perhaps? That there’s a war coming.”

He shrugged and then smirked. “Didn’t want to scare you.”

I shouldn’t have closed the distance between us. But my body remembered him from last night and the other nights before that. “More like you didn’t want to encourage me.” I leaned into him before I could stop myself. He might not have been safe for my heart, but he was the only softness that I had ever known.

His breath caught, and his gaze swept down the corridor. “Wren—if war comes…” Then we might be on opposite sides. “I don’t want to lose you.”

You already have.

I gripped his shirt and dragged him to me, brushing my lips over his. “When war comes, we’ll fight.”

For a heartbeat, he didn’t move. Then his hand came up to my jaw, and he pulled me to him with a desperation I hadn’t felt from him before.

As if he had read my mind.

His tongue swept inside my mouth and took what it wanted. It wasn’t the same as last night, as if the morning brought reality in with the sunlight. We were no longer like the memory I had held onto in the dark when I needed images of him to anchor myself to. Back then I had been addicted to it. To him. To us.

My fingers twisted into his shirt, pulling him even closer, still needing him.