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I have hunted one answer so relentlessly that I refused every other possibility, treated survival as destiny because I have always survived. Through Florence, Morrighan, blood wars and broken oaths.

Dispassionately, I search my features. I look… worn down and torn down.

Maybe… maybe half a millennium is the measure I was meant to have.

Instead of terror, the thought arrives with a terrible, almost beautiful quiet.

Perhaps my fate is no longer to find my mate and claw my way back from the edge. Perhaps the purpose of whatever remains of me is to ensure Morrighan never rises again. Break the curse at its root. Not only for myself, but for all Five Blood.

Rafe, Dorian, Ciaran, Lucien. They can fucking thank me later.

Eira’s irreverence flickers through my mind so vividly that I almost smile. Gods preserve me. I am learning to snark like my hunter.

The ache follows immediately.

My hunter.

Yes. After I have taken care of this latest insult, after Selphine is found, Volkov is dragged from whatever hole protects him, and Morrighan’s newest pathway is sealed in blood and ruin. When I have bought my brothers enough time to be ungrateful in peace… then perhaps I can hope for a short while with Eira before the end.

A night. A week. A month if the universe grants uncharacteristic generosity.

I brace for pain as the thought settles. For the familiar shock of denial, possession, rage at the insult of mortality.

Instead, I look over my shoulder at the woman sleeping in my bed, the hunter who has made a mockery of my control and a battlefield of my blood, and I feel peace.

Dangerous peace.

Unfathomable peace.

The kind a man feels when he has finally understood the shape of the blade aimed at his heart and chooses the hand he wants holding his in the dark before it falls.

I turn back to the Glass. Its fractured surface gives me my own ruined face. ‘Is this what is required of me?’

The Glass remains silent.

Of course it does.

Oracle, cursed mirror, ancient instrument of blood, and it chooses now to develop discretion.

I lay my palm against the cracked surface, shudder as cold bites into my skin and the mark at my throat answers with a black-red pulse. And deep within the Glass, something moves as if listening from very far away.

Eira shifts behind me. And I withdraw my hand before she wakes.

She will rage when she realises I used the Red Stilling. Accuse me of arrogance, manipulation, hypocrisy, and likely at least three creative crimes against free will. She will be right enough to make arguing enjoyable and losing inevitable.

But she will be rested.

And I will have had these stolen minutes to stand before the Glass, weigh my possible death, and discover that the first true peace I have felt in centuries came from the possibility of spending what remains of my life protecting a woman I hired to find another.

So… it is decided? I venture once again.

The Glass pulses once.

No answer.

Only the ticking dark, Eira’s breathing. And the terrible knowledge that she is about to wake and choose a path that may destroy us both.

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