Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

Nesta didn’t move from the doorway.

“Explain,” she said. “No deflecting. No heroic silence. What did you promise?”

Cassian’s wings had gone rigid against his back, the way they did before a fight he didn’t want. On his inner forearm, the scar she’d traced a hundred times without asking about, the one she’d assumed belonged to some forgotten border skirmish, pulsed faintly beneath his skin.

“Nesta—”

“You don’t get to say my name like that right now.” Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “You get to answer… and that’s a privilege I’ll allow only once.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched him decide, visibly, to stop running. “I was seventeen,” he said.

The words came out of him like something dragged up from very deep water.

“Half-starved. My camp had decided I wasn’t worth feeding through another winter. I was only a bastard-born, no family name to protect me, no rank, no victories, no wingspan yet to prove I’d earn my keep. I was going to die in the snow, and everyone had already agreed that was fine.” His jaw tightened. “Lord Arran found me before the cold did. He offered me a choice. Swear an oath to him, or go back out into it.”

“That’s not a choice.”

“No,” Cassian agreed. “It wasn’t. And he made sure of it, there were other boys in that camp, bastards like me, and I’d already gotten in trouble more than once trying to keep them from being used the way boys like us got used. He let me understand, without ever quite saying it, that refusing him wouldn’t only cost me.”

Nesta’s stomach turned over. She knew exactly what unspoken threats like that were worth, and exactly how well they worked.

“So I swore.” Cassian’s eyes fixed on some point past her shoulder, in the past, seventeen years old, freezing and out of choices. “He had me promise that when his daughter came into her power, I would answer her call. That I would take her as wife. Protect her with my blood. Place no vow above the one I made to her.”

The room went very quiet.

“Her name was Ilyra,” he said. “I never knew her, not really. A few months after I swore, she vanished. Nobody would say where. When Arran died and the scar stopped aching, I told myself she must have died too, and that whatever I’d promised had died with her. I buried it. I never told Rhys. I never told you.” He finally looked at her. “I didn’t bury it because I wanted to keep a secret from you, Nesta. I buried it because I wanted it to have never happened.”

She should have been angrier than she was. Later, she suspected, she would be, at Arran, long dead and still reaching up out of the ground to put his hand around her mate’s throat. But right now, inside her there was only the cold need to understand exactly what they were dealing with.

“She doesn’t seem to be dead,” Nesta said. It wasn’t a question. The House had been trying to tell her that for two days.

---

Clotho found them in the archive an hour later, moving at such a slow pace that frightened even her. It was beyond clear the news would not make Nesta happy. She set a water-damaged ledger on the table between them: an index of Illyrian bloodline records, names inked in a hand three centuries dead.

“This is all that survives,” Clotho wrote on the small slate she carried. “An index and a damaged note in the margin. The ledger was transferred here after Arran’s death. Whatever archive he built, this book was never meant to be seen by curious eyes.”

Gwyn ran her finger down the page, translating under her breath. Name after name, each one struck through with a single decisive line. Dead, married off, absorbed into some other camp’s book-keeping. All of them, save one.

Ilyra.

The moment Gwyn spoke it aloud, Cassian answered her. He spoke in a dialect none of them had ever heard him use, low and rhythmic and utterly unfamiliar, as though something in his blood had simply reached up and used his mouth.

Clotho’s face didn’t change, which was somehow worse than if it had.

“Arran didn’t let her die,” Gwyn translated. “He bound her, sealed her in an old ritual chamber beneath Ramiel, in an archive far older than this house, suspended between one breath and the next, until whatever power she was born to finally came into itself.”

“Then why can we hear her here?” Nesta asked. “Why does the House know her name?”

Clotho took up her chalk again. “Because you gave it a reason to.” She sighed. “Your magic, your mate’s bond, disturbed something when you came here. Time started moving for her again. And what’s waking up in her is exactly what that oath was written to catch. It’s found this house because it’s found YOU.”

Nesta felt Cassian go very still beside her.

At his wrist, the second mark, the one that had risen the night he’d sworn himself to her, three months after the mating bond had already settled between them, a vow neither Cauldron nor bond had asked of him and that he’d given her anyway because he wanted her to hold something that was his to give and no one else’s, had begun, almost imperceptibly, to fade.

---

He didn’t tell her. She noticed anyway, later that night, when she took his hand and the place where the mark should have blazed against her palm gave off nothing but ordinary warmth.

“Cassian.”

“It’s nothing.” Too fast. Too flat. Nothing like him. She felt it in her core, she was losing him.

“Don’t.” She turned his wrist over, pressed her thumb to the dimming skin. “Don’t do the thing where you decide I can’t survive knowing something’s wrong. I have survived considerably worse than a truthful sentence from you.”

He exhaled, long and unsteady, and didn’t argue.

“It’s fading,” he admitted. “Not the bond itself, I still know you’re mine, Nesta, that hasn’t changed. But our mating bond, yes, it still feels like you…. it just feels like you from very far away, like I’m hearing you through a wall. The oath is trying to put itself first. First promise. First claim.” His hands curled into fists on his knees. “I can’t tell if it’s succeeding.. And that frightens me.”

She recognized the shame under that admission for exactly what it was, she could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he wouldn’t quite meet her eyes.  “Did you want her?” Nesta asked. “Seventeen years old, in the snow. Did you want Ilyra?”

“I wanted to survive the night,” Cassian said, without hesitation. “That’s all I wanted. That’s all I’ve ever wanted from that oath, for it to let me go.”

“And now?”

He looked up at her. “Now I want you,” he said. “Not because a bond is telling me to. Not because some dead man’s daughter has a claim written in my skin. I want you because you’re the one thing in five hundred years I picked for myself, and I am not giving that up to a promise a starving child made to save the people he loved.”

She reached for him, with the conviction that told him there was nowhere left for him to hide. They were in this together.

---

She made him slow down.

She could see it in him the instant her hands found his throat, where she always loved to hold him when they were this close, the need to make this fast and consuming, to prove to himself, to the fading mark, to whatever creature was calling for him from beneath Ramiel, that this was the real thing, this was unshakable. She caught his wrists before his hands could rush and held them there, made him look at her.

“Not like that,” she said. “Not to convince yourself. Tell me what you want. Slowly. So I know it’s actually you talking, and not the panic.”

Something in him broke open at that. He paused, a breath finally released. 

“You,” he said. “Only you. However long you’ll let me have you.”

“That’s a start.” She let his wrists go, dragged her nails slowly up his forearms instead, deliberately avoiding the scarred one, and felt him shudder at the choice. “Now show me you mean it.”

He did. He started at her jaw, unhurried, working his way down the column of her throat with his mouth as if relearning something he was terrified of forgetting, and when she arched into him and hissed his name through her teeth, he laughed, low, wrecked, more himself than he’d sounded all day.

“There she is,” he murmured against her skin.

“Don’t get smug.” She fisted a hand in his hair and pulled, just short of sharp, and felt his answering growl more than heard it.

His hands followed where his mouth led, the curve of her waist, the dip of her spine, the inside of her knee when she hooked it over his hip and pulled him flush against her. He was mapping her body, and he couldn’t get enough. Cassian undressed her slowly, piece by piece, cursing under his breath at every new inch of skin like it was the first time he saw it and not the thousandth.

“You’re doing that thing,” she said, breath already uneven, “where you worship instead of touch.”

“I’m allowed to do both.” His mouth dragged lower, over her ribs, the soft skin below her navel, and she felt the words as much as heard them. “Tell me to stop.”

She didn’t.

Her hands moved over him with the same searching thoroughness he’d given her, down the scarred plane of his ribs, the tense muscle at the base of his wings that made him groan when she pressed her thumbs into it just right, and lower, until he was the one biting back a curse against her thigh. When her fingers found the marked skin at his wrist, her touch gentled instantly, an anchor between them, and she felt the tremor that ran through him at being caught mid-flinch.

“Here,” she said, low, pulling his hand up to press his palm flat over her own heart instead. “Stay here.”

He made a sound against her skin that wasn’t quite a word and was all the answer she needed. When she finally pulled him up her body and guided him where she wanted him, she kept her eyes open, fixed on his, refusing the easy oblivion of letting either of them vanish into instinct and old fear.

“Look at me,” she said, when his gaze started to slip, when his hips rocked forward and his eyes wanted to close against the want of it. “Cassian. Look at me.”

He did, and something in his face came undone at the deliberateness of it, at being seen this closely, this thoroughly, with the knowledge he gave an oath to someone else, and being chosen anyway. He pushed into her slow, watching her the whole way, his jaw tight with the effort of not simply taking, and the sound she made was half his name and half a demand for more.

“More,” she said, in case he’d missed it. “I’m not made of glass, Cassian. I never have been.”

That undid the last of his restraint. He moved like a man reclaiming ground that belonged to him and no one else: deep, deliberate strokes that dragged her name out of him every time she tightened around him, his hand fisting in the sheets by her head, hers digging half-moons into his shoulder hard enough to leave marks she intended him to keep. When she rolled her hips up to meet him he swore, filthy and reverent in the same breath, and told her exactly what she was doing to him, low and rough against her ear, until she was the one gasping his name.

“Say it again,” she managed. “Tell me who you’re choosing.”

“You. Only ever you.” His forehead dropped to hers, both of them breathing hard, the rhythm between them turning ragged. “Say mine.”

“Yours.” She dragged him down for a kiss that was more teeth than tenderness, and felt him groan into her mouth. “I’ve always been yours. Don’t you dare forget it.”

He didn’t. Whatever answer his body gave her after that, it was unmistakable, desperate and certain all at once, both of them chasing the same unraveling thread until neither of them could hold onto anything but each other, until the House itself seemed to hold its breath around them.

For one long, suspended moment, so did they.

The mating bond surged back open between them and the vow-mark at his wrist flared bright gold beneath her fingers, whole again, as if it had never dimmed at all.

Then a second, older mark cut across the inside of his forearm.

Dark, jagged, ancient. And a voice, thin and frightened, whispered through the room from nowhere and everywhere at once:

“He promised me first.”

Nesta went cold straight through, even wrapped in Cassian’s arms, even with his heart still hammering against her palm. There had been no cruelty in that voice. No possession. Only an exhausted terror of someone who had been waiting a very long time for anyone at all to hear her.

---

Nesta woke somewhere past the deepest part of the night because the bond had gone cold again… not just distant this time, but absent, a held breath suddenly cut off.

Cassian’s side of the bed was empty.

She found him on the balcony, barefoot on the ice-slick stone, moving toward the edge with a calm, unhurried walk. He was a man who believed solid ground waited beneath him and just kept going. His eyes were open. He did not hear her say his name. He did not hear her say it a second time, louder, with everything she had.

She reached him three steps from the edge and pressed her palm flat over his heart.

The bond surged back like a struck bell.

Cassian gasped and came back into himself all at once, her name breaking out of him raw and disoriented, his hands finding her face, her shoulders, checking she was real.

“You’re all right,” she said, before he could ask. “You’re all right. I’ve got you.”

It was only once his breathing had settled, once she’d gotten him back inside and wrapped in the blanket he was too shaken to reach for himself, that she looked back out at the balcony…  and understood why the cold in her chest hadn’t fully lifted.

The snow between their bedroom door and the balcony’s edge lay completely undisturbed. Not one footprint. Cassian hadn’t walked there at all, not with his own feet, not by his own will.

But another set of prints began at the outer edge of the balcony and led directly to where he had been standing. Small, bare and half-melted, as though whoever had made them had walked through ether to reach him.

The toes pointed inward.

Toward Cassian.

Whoever had made them had come from the northeast.

They had come from Ramiel.

---