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He had talked.

About them… His parents.

I’d asked, half-expecting him to deflect, but instead he’d gone quiet for a long moment, and then he’d given them to me.

His father, Hyperion.

A great mountain of a king, he’d said, with a laugh that could fill a hall and a temper like a summer storm, there and gone in a breath. A man his people had loved. A man who had taught both his sons to ride, to fight, and to rule, and who had carried Atlas on his shoulders through these very halls when he was small enough to fit there.

And then he’d told me about his mother.

His father, Atlas said, had called her his flower. Always, from the very beginning. And when I’d asked why, he’d smiled a small, sad smile in the dark, as he’d given me her name.

Ianthe.

It meant violet, he told me, in the old tongue. Hyperion had loved its meaning so much that the spring after they wed, he’d had a whole bed of violets planted in the castle gardens, so that some part of her would bloom there every year for the rest of their lives. There used to be violets all through those grounds, Atlas had said, his voice gone soft and far away. His earliest memory was of his mother kneeling among them with soil on her hands, laughing up at his father in the sun.

Though he’d admitted, quieter still, that they hadn’t flowered since. He was gentler than ever speaking of her, his voice dropping to something almost adoring. Hair as dark as a raven’s wing, he’d said, and a laugh that Lazaros had inherited. She also had a way of looking at a person as though she could see straight down to the truth of them. He had loved her. That much was plain in every single word.

And yet in all of it, in every warm and aching memory he laid into my hands, there hadn’t been a single word about how either of them had died. I recall he had told me briefly, that day in the woods, how he had come back from a campaign to find his mother had died, nobody really knowing the cause. And of course, Lazaros was blamed for his father’s death, though I still didn’t know the details, and it seemed Atlas still wasn’t ready to share them.

I’d noticed the careful shape of the silence around it. The way he gently steered away from the edge of that particular grief. The way a man learns to walk around a wound that had never quite healed. And I had wanted to ask. Of course, I had. But I’d felt the rawness of it radiating off him in the dark. Like some old, deep wound still bleeding somewhere beneath the surface, and so I’d done the only kind thing there was to do.

I’d let it lie.

I’d kissed the centre of his chest, right over his heart, and told him thank you for telling me. Then I let him pull me down into sleep with his arms locked tight around me as though, even unconscious, he was afraid I might slip away.

And now, here in the dark, I lay watching him.

The worry never showed on his face when he slept. The crown, the war, the guilt he still carried like a stone in his chest over what he’d so nearly done to Lazaros, all of it smoothed away. Now leaving him younger somehow, and unbearably at peace. I knew he was still hiding pieces of himself from me. I could feel it, even now, even after everything. But looking at him like this, I knew I could wait. I knew I could be patient and earn the rest of him a little at a time.

My fingers drifted up to push a strand of dark hair back from his brow.

And then the voice from my dream called again.

‘Alexandra.’

I froze, my hand hovering above his skin.

It was a woman’s voice. Feminine and low and threaded through with something urgent, something close to anguish. As if whoever she was needed me, and needed me now. Which was why I couldn’t bear to wait a moment longer. It didn’t come from the room. It came from somewhere far below it, rising up through the stone of the sleeping castle to find me.

And the moment I heard it, really heard it, I knew.

I had felt this before.

That afternoon, in the corridor outside the kitchens, standing in front of that plain, iron-banded door while Atlas told me it led down to nothing but the cellars. I had felt something then, too.

A pull.

A whisper just beneath the reach of hearing, reaching up through the old wood as if to catch hold of me by the ribs and draw me in. I’d shaken it off. Told myself I was tired and starving. That I was imagining things, before I let him lead me away toward the smell of fresh bread.

But there was no shaking it now.

Now, in the dead black middle of the night, with the whole castle sunk in sleep around me, the voice was obvious. And it was coming from behind that same door… I just knew it.

‘Alexandra.’

It grew louder, more desperate, that hint of anguish sharpening into something that made my chest ache in answer. I looked at Atlas, certain the sound would wake him, certain anyone would wake to a thing so loud, but he slept on, undisturbed, his breathing slow and even.