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Fenrir blinked the last of the weight from his eyes and met Vera’s pale stare.

“Mum?”

That she was here seemed more shocking than the loss of his arm.

“How do you feel?”

His snort was sharp, defiant. Vera’s face remained impassive. But that was okay. Because this wasn’t Red. This was his mother. And if there was one thing she was good at, it was facing down the brutality of truth.

“Where is he?”

“We don’t know.”

Fenrir swallowed, breathing through his nose. “How long has he been missing?”

Vera’s lips pressed into a thin line. “It’s been eight days since the attack.”

Eight days? Orpheus had been missing for eight days?

“I need to get up.” This time, when he tried to move, he discovered someone had strapped him to the bed. The leather was thick. The buckles heavy. He couldn’t move his legs let alone his remaining arm, and it was more than the loss of a limb that put Fenrir into a panic.

“Get these off,” he gasped, flexing his left arm and pulling. “Let me go!”

“You need to calm down or—”

“I need to find Orpheus!”

He meant it to come out as a roar, and it almost did. Until Orpheus’ name caught in his closing throat, and the shimmery glass as the edges of his eyes turned to tears.

Strapped to bed in an unfamiliar room, arm gone, the world very possibly back at war, the love of his life missing—Fenrir began to cry.

“Oh, Fenrir,” Vera said beside him, voice quiet and shaking, as close to emotional as Fenrir had ever heard from her. It didn’t help. Too little too late and yet it was all he had left. The mother who hadn’t wanted him traded for the world he had nearly healed, and the man he had worked so hard to save.

“It’s all my fault,” Fenrir gasped through a sob, and finally he felt the straps securing him down loosen.

Vera freed him with a calculated utility. First his arm and then his legs and then the tube inserted into his vein, until it was only her hands holding him. Not down but up, dragging him into the dim light of an unfamiliar room, an unfamiliar touch, her hands as warm as they were rough where they cupped his cheeks. She didn’t say anything while she held him. She looked into his watery eyes like she could dry his tears with the heat of her stare, holding him through each sob with a temerity that, Fenrir thought, could possibly be love.

Fenrir didn’t know how his mother felt about him. He didn’t know if she was capable of more than the protective compulsion that most wild animals shared. But when she finally spoke, he could not deny the pride he heard in her voice—pride for him.

“You are your mother’s son.” She squeezed his face and held his eyes. “You are your mother’s son, and you are strong. You are ardent. You cannot be extinguished.”

“Cannot, or must not?” he asked, chest shuddering with another wet sob, a challenge despite the tears dripping from his chin.

But Vera didn’t rise to the bait. She held his face and shook her head, answering without hesitation, “Cannot.”

It only made Fenrir cry harder.

Time passed in the rhythm of his sobs, the quiet beep beep beep of a machine he could not see. The stump of his arm throbbed with a phantom urge, pain an abstraction that felt more like a missing piece than anything else. But it was the man who should be at his side that haunted him. Orpheus’ absence was an open wound no amount of time or tech or motherly love could heal, and though he wanted to believe Vera’s words, he could not help but think of another flame that had been extinguished. An eternal fire that, unlike him, truly would have burned until the world crumbled if not for him and Orpheus snuffing it out.

Every choice you make comes with both a positive and negative reaction, Orpheus had said once. He couldn’t help but think this was what he meant.

He didn’t want me to do this. I chose them over him.

I broke my promise.

To Orpheus. To the Empire. To himself.

“I thought I could help,” Fenrir admitted, “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”