Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

You voted. Nesta and Cassian are telling Rhys and Feyre everything. This should go beautifully, provided nobody objects to concealed blood-oaths, ancient magical archives, or possible death before breakfast.…

---

Cassian had walked into burning cities with less dread than he felt walking into this study.

Nesta went first, as if she’d decided somewhere between the balcony and this morning, that whatever came for him would have to come through her first, and dared the world to argue with her.

Rhys stood at the window, already dressed, already watching them like he knew. Feyre sat with tea going cold in her hands. Neither one looked surprised.

The moment the warrior couple stopped in front of them, Rhys’s gaze went immediately from Nesta’s face to Cassian’s bare wrist, and with a sigh, to the place where the vow-mark should have been glowing gold and wasn’t. He raised his eyes to meet the old, darker scar cut across his forearm.

“Tell me,” he said.

“We will. That’s why we’re here.” Nesta shut the door. “Try not to make us regret it.”

Cassian stayed on his feet. Sitting felt like surrender, and he’d surrendered enough for one lifetime in the last few hours he had to explain everything again and again to his mate.

“Seventeen,” he said. “Arran gave me a choice. Swear an oath, or die in the snow. And he made damn sure I understood other boys would die with me if I said no.”

Feyre’s cup hit the table too hard.

Rhys went still. 

“You were a child,” Feyre said.

“Old enough to say the words. Old enough to understand the consequences if I refused.”

“Not old enough to refuse them, though. Not old enough to take care of yourself.” Nesta said, and the bond gave a thin, stretched pulse between them, like her anger had to cross a canyon to find him. It found him anyway. That much still worked.

“What did you swear?” Rhys again. Quiet. Worse than shouting. A deep exhale escaped his lips.

Cassian made himself say it. “When Ilyra came into her power, I’d answer her call. Marry her. Protect her with my blood. Put no vow above hers.”

The lamps flickered. Rhys’s power rolled through the room like a wave deciding whether to drown someone.

“And you never told me.”

“I thought it died with him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” Cassian snapped, done flinching. “I didn’t tell you. I wanted one thing in five hundred years that didn’t start with everyone I love knowing how close I came to freezing to death for scraps.”

Something moved behind Rhys’s eyes. Fast. Gone.

“Let me see it,” Rhys said. “The balcony.”

Nesta’s whole body locked. “No.”

“Only the balcony,” Cassian said, and held out a hand before she could fight him on it.

The brush of Rhys’s power in his mind was gentle. He always was, when he asked. Cassian gave him the memory: ice, moonlight, Nesta’s face breaking into focus, her palm slamming the bond back open.

The oath hit like a blade.

White light. Rhys thrown back into the desk. Every lamp dead at once.

Nesta’s hand found Cassian’s wrist in the dark before he even felt himself hit one knee.

“What did you do to him?”

“Nothing.” Rhys, breathing hard. “It knows me.”

“As what?”

“A competing claim.”

Silence. Ugly and complete.

“I’m digging up Arran,” Nesta said, very softly, “and killing him again.”

“Get in line.” Rhys relit the lamps himself, hand not quite steady.

Feyre stood. “What do we know about Ilyra? And I dont mean what he wanted her to be. I mean, her.”

Nobody had an answer ready.

“Almost nothing,” Nesta said. “Bound beneath Ramiel. Suspended. Waiting for her power to wake.”

“And now it has.”

“Waking,” Cassian said. “Because of the archive. Because of Nesta. Maybe the bond.”

He didn’t repeat the voice.

He promised me first.

Nesta said it for him. Something in his chest felt so heavy; he admired her, she was still right there with him, she carried it like it was hers to carry too, no question asked.

“Was she threatening you?” Feyre asked.

“No.” Nesta, instant. “She was terrified.”

Rhys was already pacing, already three steps ahead. “An archive that old doesn’t hold one oath. If it predates the House—”

“It holds thousands,” Feyre said.

“Borders. Wards. Alliances. If something down there is unraveling them—”

“Everyone who ever profited comes looking,” Nesta said.

“Everyone it ever trapped, too,” Feyre added, and traded a look with Rhys that said they’d already started the war in their heads.

Cassian hated that look for one reason only; he could barely feel his own bond doing the same thing with Nesta anymore. It only felt like a door… a door closing, polite about it, but their bond fading to nothing. He couldn’t imagine a life where Nesta wouldn’t be there, where they wouldn’t be able to communicate with just a quick look in their eyes. She would find someone else… she would have that with another. 

He hated the oath more than he hated himself for the jealousy. Barely.

“I’ll write to Helion,” Rhys said. “His libraries go back further than mine.”

“Tell him only what he needs,” Nesta said.

“Thank you for the lesson in diplomacy.”

“Someone had to give it.”

“Enough.” Feyre, done with both of them. “Rhys writes to Helion. We go back to the archive. No one goes near Ramiel until we know what’s pulling him there.”

“Agreed,” Rhys said.

Nesta looked at Cassian, waiting.

Under his sleeve, the old scar had already started to throb.

North. North. North.

He gave her the grin he wore into battle. “I do occasionally follow orders.”

“You occasionally survive them. Different thing.”

She wasn’t smiling. He’d earned that too.

---

---

The mark pulled the second they hit the street.

Velaris didn’t care that he’d nearly walked off a balcony twelve hours ago. Bakers threw open shutters. Smoke curled into a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Somewhere downhill a cart driver swore creatively at a pothole.

Cassian turned toward the river before he decided to.

The mark eased.

Nesta stopped when he stopped. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“That word is dead to me. Talk.”

He turned east instead, toward the House, and the scar went hot, a wire pulled taut under his skin. He was burning up inside. 

He started walking. Didn’t ask permission.

“Cassian.”

“It’s pointing somewhere.”

“And you were going to follow it without me?”

“I made it six steps.”

“Five. The sixth was mine.” She caught up, shoulder to his arm, close enough he could feel exactly how little of her he could actually feel through the bond right now. The problem was that his mind was missing her, but his soul felt so far away he was starting to forget her.

The mark dragged him up through the artists’ quarter, past a jeweler unlocking her shop, past two males hauling crates of pears and laughing about something that used to matter to him too.

He tested it twice: harbor, temple district. Both times it yanked him back.

North. Not Ramiel. Not yet. The House.

Halfway up the hill the city blurred, and another winter took its place.

Seventeen. One boot full of blood. Arran’s fire burning behind him, the smell of meat he wasn’t allowed to eat.

One promise. A home. Protection for the others. You might become something, if you’re worth the cost.

He’d spent five centuries thinking the shame was his, for wanting the food.

Fingers laced through his. Warm. Real. Now.

“You left,” Nesta said. Not a question. She always knew.

“I’m here.”

“Your body is.” She didn’t let go. “Come back. I can’t go get you from there.”

He kissed her knuckles instead of answering, felt her pulse jump against his mouth, felt the winter loosen its grip. “Bossy female.”

“Traumatized male.”

“Devastatingly—”

“Don’t.” But she didn’t pull her hand away, and under the warning her eyes had gone soft and scared in a way she’d never let him see if she had a choice. She was terrified for him. She just refused to let that be the whole of what she gave him.

He decided, right there, scar burning a compass point into his skin, that he’d follow her voice out of every winter for as long as she kept calling him back.

---

---

The archive smelled like dust and something colder underneath it.

Gwyn and Emerie were already at the long table. Clotho had three ledgers open. Nobody asked why Rhys and Feyre had come. Nesta’s face had probably answered that question three floors up.

“The thread moved,” Gwyn said.

Seven empty hooks lined the wall. Between them, hundreds of threads, silver, black, gold, blue. Some hummed. Some hung dead still.

One was new. Deep red, almost black, stretching into a knot of shadow above the table.

It pulsed. Once.

The scar on Cassian’s arm answered; blood recognizing blood.

Nesta swore, low and vicious.

“That’s yours,” Emerie said.

“Gathered that.” His voice came out steadier than he felt.

Gwyn circled the table without touching the thread. Symbols kindled beside it in red light, fine as a fresh cut. “Same script. Different structure. Layered.”

“Layered how?” Nesta’s hand found the small of his back.

“Give me a—”

The thread snapped taut.

Cassian’s lungs forgot how to work.

Not a figure of speech. The room tilted. He hit one knee, palm cracking stone, and Nesta was there instantly but her voice reached him from somewhere very far away, mouth moving around his name, no sound behind it.

Then the thread slackened. Air tore back into him like a fist.

“Don’t touch it,” Gwyn said, too late.

“No one touched it,” Emerie said.

“Not us.”

Silver ash crawled along the far wall. Between threads. Slow. Deliberate.

Searching.

Clotho’s pen tore the page. It is not only recording the oath.

Gwyn read the new symbols and went white. “Cassian. What did Arran take from you? During the ritual. Not after.”

His pulse was still too loud. Nesta’s hand hadn’t left his jaw.

“Blood. A cut on my palm.”

“Before that.”

The memory came back. Blade. Cup. Blood sinking into snow that didn’t melt for days, like the ground had been told to keep it safe. Weeks of weakness after. Arran calling it the cost of honor.

“He took more than the cut needed,” Cassian said.

Gwyn looked at Nesta, not him. “This thread isn’t secured by his life. It’s holding part of it. Breath. Years. I don’t know how the old language weighs it. But when he swore, the oath took something out of him and locked it here.”

Nesta’s hand went stone-still on his jaw.

“If the thread breaks?”

“It might give back what it took.”

“Might.”

“Or it treats the promise and the life as the same debt.”

Nobody spoke. Cassian watched Nesta do the math he refused to do out loud, watched her land in the same place he already had, watched her decide visibly, deliberately, not to fall apart in front of him.

He loved her so viciously in that second it felt like getting stabbed.

The silver ash crossed another span. Passed one thread. A second. Moving in the exact order the severed oaths had been cut.

Toward the red.

Toward him.

“How long?” Emerie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Days.” A breath. “Maybe less.”

Nesta rose in one motion, fear already burning down into something colder and far more dangerous. She had made up her mind and didn’t need anyone’s permission. “Then we find her first.” Their bond flared with it. Thin, but it still found him. No oath had managed to kill that yet.

Cassian understood what none of them wanted to say. Ilyra might believe she was saving him. She might cut the oath because no starving boy should’ve been bound by it. Maybe she was not claiming him, maybe she was freeing him. Freeing herself, once she came into power.

And she might kill him doing it.

He got up before his legs finished agreeing. Nesta read his face in half a second flat. “What?”

He could tell her the truth, that some part of him was still seventeen, still kneeling in bloodied snow, still waiting to find out if he was worth keeping alive.

He gave her the battle grin instead.

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s go find her.”

Her eyes narrowed. She knew a lie wearing a smile when she saw one… but she let it stand, for now, and laced her fingers through his instead of arguing.

The silver ash reached the thread beside his.

And started, very slowly, to cut.

---

Love my writing? You can grab my books directly from my website or through my Amazon author page. When you purchase from my website, a larger portion of the sale goes directly to supporting my writing, allowing me to create more stories, mental health resources, and magical guides without relying on algorithms or advertising. You’ll also find exclusive bonuses, free reader gifts, and occasional special offers that aren’t always available elsewhere. If Amazon is your preferred bookstore, that’s perfectly fine too. Either way, thank you for supporting an independent author who spends an unreasonable amount of time talking to fictional people and turning it into books.

The Daily Dose of Romance has moved into its new home! Every day, a fresh FREE romance story will be waiting for you.