Notes:
There are softer ways to pray. But none as honest as blood.
Sleep didn't take him gently. It wasn't soft or quiet or kind. It felt more like being hunted by something patient, something that waited until his thoughts slowed just enough to strike. It didn't arrive all at once. It pulled him down piece by piece, dragging him under with fingers that didn't care if he was ready.
There was no comfort in it.
No warmth.
Just the steady closing-in of the world, his mind folding inward until nothing made sense anymore.
He shifted beneath the blanket, restless and tense, the bed too yielding beneath him, like it meant to swallow him whole. Every time he tried to settle, another part of him twitched or locked up, like his body had forgotten how to rest. The air felt wrong. The dark felt alive. His lungs wouldn't fill properly. His legs ached from holding tension they wouldn't release.
And still, sleep came anyway.
Not as relief. Not as escape.
It came like pressure.
Like something he couldn't stop.
No dreams met him there, or if they did, they stayed too deep to reach. There were no images, no whispers, no story to trace.
Just her.
Not her face. Not her voice. Not even the scent she always carried when she moved past him in the hallway.
Just her hand.
He felt it. Right there, in the center of his chest. It wasn't heavy. It wasn't warm. It didn't radiate anything at all. It just existed, steady and pale, a hand placed flat over his heart like it had always been meant to rest there. Not for comfort. Not for closeness. There was no tenderness in the touch. Only the quiet weight of something sure.
She didn't speak.
She didn't need to.
That single touch carried more truth than words could ever manage. It didn't ask. It didn't console. It didn't burn or soothe. It claimed. Not with force. Not with cruelty. Just presence. A silent, unshakable presence that made itself known in the most ordinary way.
The hand never moved.
It didn't caress. It didn't curl or tense. It just held.
Again and again, the same gentle pressure repeated itself like breath, so measured and unwavering that it stopped feeling like a gesture and began to feel like something older. Something instinctive. Something almost ceremonial.
He couldn't say how long it went on. Time wasn't right in that place. The edges of it had dissolved. What remained was the weight of her palm and the place it found inside him, the quiet corner that still resisted sleep, still resisted safety, still refused to be seen.
She found it.
And she didn't leave.
Her touch didn't soften it. Didn't try to fix it. It just stayed, calm and unwavering, as if she only wanted to witness it, to know it, to hold it in place long enough to understand what had always lived there.
There was no sweetness in it. No comfort. But there was clarity.
And when the rest of the world finally slipped away, when the dark thickened and the house stilled, that feeling remained. Not like a memory. Not like a dream. But like something carved into him, sitting in the hollow of his chest, pulsing with the quiet truth that someone had reached the part of him he never meant to share.
And stayed.
Her movements were slow and deliberate, neither gentle nor cruel. There was no kindness in the way her palm kept returning to that same place over his heart, but there was no malice either. It wasn't comfort. It wasn't affection. It was something else entirely. A presence, quiet and unshakable, that returned again and again with the same calm pressure, as though it had always known where it belonged.
The repetition settled into a rhythm. Not quite a heartbeat, not quite a prayer, but something between. And his body, helpless to resist it, began to follow. His pulse adjusted to the tempo she set. His breath matched its pace. The silence grew thick around them, and the weight of her touch deepened. Not in force. In meaning. In the way it began to hollow him out from the inside.
It was worse than pain.
It was certainty.
The kind that lives in the bones and rewrites what you thought you owned. The kind that doesn't ask who you are before deciding what you'll become. He could feel himself giving way to it. Piece by piece. Slowly and without resistance.
Whatever had started the moment she tied that thread around his wrist was still unfolding here. Not with words. Not with magic. But with something older. Something quieter. Something that didn't need permission.
It dragged him deeper, not into sleep but into her. Into the shape of her will. Into the space she had carved inside him without speaking a single word. It didn't explain itself. It didn't wait for understanding. It simply arrived. And stayed. And he could feel it settling, could feel her presence taking root in the place where no one else had ever dared to reach.
He woke as if torn from a depth too far beneath the surface to leave cleanly. No soft drift into consciousness. No warmth of morning. Just a violent jolt that snapped his body upright, his chest heaving like someone had punched the air out of his lungs. His breath came fast and ragged, throat tight, head spinning. It felt like being pulled too quickly from cold water, like some part of him hadn't made it back.
The room around him was still, but the air felt thin, too sharp against his skin. The sheets were twisted at his waist, damp with sweat. His fingers trembled when he raised them. His skin didn't ache. It didn't burn. But it felt wrong. Off. Like it no longer belonged entirely to him.
Like something had been taken.
Or worse, like something had been left behind.
The silver thread burned gently against the inside of his wrist. Not the heat of fire. Something worse. The kind of warmth that lingered. The kind that moved. It slid through his nerves with deliberate precision, not painful, but aware. It pulsed. Once. Then again. And with each pulse, he could feel it syncing not with his own heartbeat, but with something outside him. Something beyond. Something that knew her name.
He stared at it for a long moment, chest rising and falling in uneven bursts, muscles tight like they were bracing for an impact that hadn't come yet. The thread didn't glow. It didn't shift. But he could feel it watching him, embedded in the skin like a second rhythm, faint but unrelenting. A presence he could not shake.
The room was still. Not quiet in the way of peace, but in the way of places that are listening. Shadows had gathered in the corners. The air held its breath. The lamplight by the door had gone out, not long ago by the look of the wick. Nothing moved.
He pressed his hand to his chest, to the place where her palm had rested in the dream. The spot was cool beneath his fingers, but the feeling lingered. Not imagined. Not ghostly. Real.
He had not slept alone.
And the worst part was that some part of him didn't want to.
But the moment his fingers closed around the thread, the warmth surged again. It moved upward, sliding through his veins with an eerie sort of calm, not cruel or hostile, but terrifying in its confidence. It didn't fight him. It didn't resist. It simply insisted. It knew where it belonged. And it refused to be shaken loose by panic or shame or whatever brittle edge of willpower he had left to offer.
He clenched his jaw and squeezed harder, hoping to cut off the feeling, to sever the sensation before it could root deeper. But the thread only stirred beneath his grip, not glowing, not shifting, just… waking. The feeling of it sharpened like the focus of a dream too vivid to fade. It burned, not with heat, but with recognition.
He knew, then. Not guessed, not suspected, but knew, with the kind of clarity that made the breath in his lungs turn heavy and wrong. Whatever had happened in the dream—her hand, the quiet command it carried, the rhythmic weight of it pressed over his heart—had not ended with sleep. It had not broken when he opened his eyes. It had followed him back.
It lived inside him now, threaded through breath and pulse, tucked somewhere behind the cage of his ribs, too deep to claw out.
He rose from the bed without thinking, slow and strange, each muscle dragging as if the dream had left behind a film he couldn't shake off. His limbs didn't obey the way they should have. They moved with the thick, drugged resistance of someone wading through water, or memory, or something worse.
The air hit his skin in a cold sweep. He shivered, but not from the chill. It was awareness. It was memory echoing in the shape of a touch. Something inside him had been tethered, and now every shift, every breath, every movement came with the knowledge that he was not entirely alone in his body anymore.
His steps began with precision. Measured, practiced, calm. Like a soldier trying to walk off adrenaline. The sharp angles of each stride tried to mimic control. His back was straight. His gaze focused. But underneath it all, the truth trembled. He wasn't walking to calm himself. He was pacing to stay upright.
Thoughts circled. The same image, over and over—her hand on his chest. The slow, deliberate way it pressed down. The silence it carried. The weight of it was unbearable. He couldn't stop feeling it. Couldn't stop tracing the imprint with his mind, even as he moved across the room in tight, purposeful lines.
The silver thread against his wrist pulsed faintly. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to be felt. Just enough to say I am still here. Still hers.
His bare feet made no sound on the floorboards, but the room did not feel quiet. It felt crowded. Not with sound. With attention. With presence. The walls didn't creak. The shadows didn't stretch. But he could feel it all watching. The house. The thread. The weight of the dream still humming in his bones.
Everything was still. Too still. The lamplight near the door had gone out, and yet the dark didn't feel empty.
It felt full.
But something in the room seemed to breathe with him. It inhaled when he did. It exhaled when he didn't. And every time he passed the tall standing mirror near the corner wall, the thread at his wrist shimmered. It didn't glow with enchantment or hum with visible power, but it caught the low lamplight in a way that made it seem alive. Not vibrant, not flashing, but steady and knowing, like it had seen something he had not. Like it understood more than it should.
Still, he didn't look at his reflection.
He didn't avoid it out of fear. It wasn't superstition either. It was something colder than that. Something sharper. The deliberate choice of a man who knew that if he turned, if he shifted his gaze even slightly to the left, if he saw the version of himself that existed now—barefoot, drenched in sweat, eyes wide and dark with some growing, gnawing hunger—he would not look away. He wouldn't be able to. And once he saw it, he knew, he wouldn't be able to pretend he hadn't.
So he didn't. He kept moving. Heel to toe. Across the same floorboards. Back again. And every time he passed the mirror, the thread caught the light like it wanted him to notice. Like it had something to show him. Like it knew.
Like it was waiting.
He didn't stop with clarity or purpose. He stopped because his body gave out before his mind could tell it to keep going. The rhythm broke down. His legs stiffened. The illusion of control wore thin. The silence pressed in, too close, too dense, until the simple act of breathing felt like an intrusion into something ancient and sacred. That was when he knew, with a weight that settled low in his gut, that the dream had not ended when he opened his eyes.
It had followed him. It curled now beneath his ribs, clinging to the lowest part of his spine. It whispered in the coil of thread wrapped warm and tight around his wrist. It lived in the memory of her hand on his chest, steady and still, like she had left part of herself inside him while he slept.
He didn't remember leaving the room. Not really. One minute he had been standing in place, the next he was in the corridor just outside her door. The air was colder there, heavy with a stillness that didn't feel like rest. It felt ceremonial, like he had crossed a threshold he wasn't meant to name.
The wood was old. Dark. The edges of it softened by years of being near her. And though there was no glow beneath the door, no flicker of candlelight or sound to mark her presence, he knew she was inside. He could feel it. Not just in his wrist. Not just in his pulse. But in the way the hallway seemed to lean toward her, in the hush that deepened the longer he stood there.
His heart thudded once. Then again. Each beat a little slower, a little heavier, like it had lost interest in keeping proper time. He didn't knock. He didn't move. He simply stared at the door as if something might reach through it and pull him in.
It didn't. Nothing moved. Nothing opened.
But the silence told him she already knew he was there.
The knot at his wrist stayed still. No pulse. No glow. The silver thread curled against his skin with the same quiet weight it had carried all day, silent now, unmoving. The house didn't creak. It didn't whisper. It didn't offer any sign that it noticed him standing there.
He didn't knock. He didn't speak her name.
He didn't even shift his weight, as if even the smallest movement might break whatever fragile thread had brought him to this hallway in the first place. He stood pressed against the wallpaper, spine grazing the cool surface, arms folded—not to close himself off, not in defense, but in some faint attempt at containment. As though if he allowed them to fall, even just a little, his hands might move on their own. Might reach for the door without asking him first.
His breath stayed shallow, tight in his ribs, the way someone might breathe in a cathedral, afraid of being heard by whatever lived on the other side of reverence. He wasn't sure what would be worse—if she answered, or if she didn't.
The silence wasn't peaceful. It had shape. It had weight. It wrapped itself around his shoulders and settled into his bones, a pressure that grew with every second the door remained shut. The walls felt too close. The corridor too narrow. Time stopped behaving the way it should.
Still, he didn't move. He didn't look away. He stared at the wood in front of him like it might respond to the intensity of his gaze. As if sheer focus could wear down the barrier between them. As if want alone could undo whatever boundary she had chosen to keep in place.
But she didn't come.
The door didn't shift. The hinges didn't groan. No wind moved through the seam beneath the frame. Nothing greeted him but the soft ache of knowing she was just beyond his reach.
And still he stayed.
The hours bled together. His feet numbed. The house let out the occasional sigh, the kind old wood makes when it remembers how to stretch. And even then, he didn't go. He let his head tilt gently back, resting against the wall. His eyes stayed forward. Not waiting for her face. Not waiting for a sound. Just remembering the press of her palm from the dream. Just feeling the soft, steady warmth of the thread at his wrist. Not reacting. Not alive.
Simply there.
He didn't return to bed. The door stayed shut. The house held its breath. And her silence, heavier than any spell, curled against the inside of his chest like something bruising from the inside out. Not sharp. Not sudden. Just slow. Just sure.
And he let it bloom.
~~~
The garden had thickened under the weight of late-afternoon humidity, not with the familiar heaviness of summer heat, but with something closer, something more suffocating. It felt as if the house itself had exhaled and left its breath hanging low over the land, damp and unyielding, hovering just above the soil until every inhalation carried the taste of storm residue and salt-drenched roots.
The air clung to Theo's skin with a slow, unwelcome persistence, curling beneath the collar of his shirt and creeping along the back of his neck. Each movement felt labored, each shift of weight resisted by the stillness pressing in around him, as if even standing upright required an effort the garden no longer wanted to allow.
The sea breeze, once a reliable cut of sharpness against his skin, barely stirred. It drifted in short, reluctant wisps that barely reached the hedgerows, avoiding the western edge where the clover grew thick and the rune-dust had been freshly laid. It felt like even the wind knew not to cross that boundary. Like something in the air had changed, and whatever lived in the garden now wasn't meant to be disturbed.
They had stopped speaking long before they reached this patch of ground, and the silence had only deepened since. Luna stood a few paces ahead, barefoot again, her weight balanced with ease on the wet soil, already murmuring soft phrases to the ground that Theo couldn't catch. The sound of her voice didn't reach him in words, only in texture. Like water over stone. Like something meant for the earth and not for him.
The space between them had grown wide in all the ways that mattered. And though neither of them moved to close it, it lived thick in the air between every breath.
The earth itself was good soil. Dark and full, dense with storm-wrought nutrients, the kind of ground that made spells sink deep and stay. The kind that remembered what was written in it. It gave back what it took. It made magic hold. And still, despite its richness, despite the way it yielded easily to his touch, Theo felt the tension rising. Not in the soil. Not in the sigils. But in the magic that wove through the space between them like thread stretched too tight.
He had been working without a word for over an hour. But it was not a companionable silence. It was sharp and bristling, gnawing at the edge of thought with a quiet kind of insistence that refused to be ignored.
His shirt clung to him in patches, sweat blooming across his back and beneath his arms, damp cotton pressing against his ribs with each movement. The weight of the heat refused to lift. It filled his lungs, coated the inside of his throat, and sat heavy behind his eyes. Every breath came with the smell of overturned soil and something older, something bitter.
His boots were no longer boots. They were instruments of labor caked in ribbons of wet earth, every step thick with resistance, the ground sucking at his heels like it wanted to keep him there, slow him down, pull him inward. The mud was thick and rich and still full of storm magic. It moved like it remembered. And it didn't seem to care that he was tired. Or angry. Or afraid.
And neither, it seemed, did she.
He knelt at the edge of the perimeter, where the sigils had begun to glow faintly beneath the dirt, their light pulsing low and slow like breath held too long. With steady fingers, he pressed the fourth anchor stone into the groove he had carved earlier, the line cut with aching precision. His skin was slick with sweat and grit, and his knuckles stung where the soil had fought him. The stone clicked into place with a resistance that felt almost personal.
Dirt had climbed to his wrists, hiding the scars there, burying them like secrets better left unseen. His jaw had locked somewhere near the half-hour mark, and it hadn't loosened since. The tightness had settled into his shoulders and across the back of his neck, not quite pain, but not far from it either. A weight that felt like apology. Like punishment. Like armor he didn't remember putting on.
Her silence had lived too long in the space between them. It had taken root. Grown teeth.
And then she spoke.
Her voice reached him not with anger, not even with judgment, but with that impossible stillness she always wielded when she intended to ruin him without raising her voice. It was calm. Cool. No tension in the delivery. No emphasis to soften the blow. Just a simple truth, one that had clearly existed before she spoke it, one that would continue existing long after.
The sound carried easily across the garden. It slipped between the threads of wardlight and through the runes half-hidden by grass, threading itself into the moment like it had been waiting to arrive. She didn't look at him. She didn't say his name. She didn't even raise her voice. Her attention remained on the far line of trees, where the outermost ward flickered unevenly in the fading light, a weak, uncertain glow that threatened to vanish with the next gust of sea mist.
"That's too shallow."
She said it as if it were fact. As if the earth had told her. And maybe it had. The angle of her body leaned just slightly forward, her feet bare, her hands loosely at her sides, as though she were listening to something Theo could not hear.
He didn't answer right away. His teeth pressed together with such force he thought his molars might crack. He exhaled through his nose, slow and rough, like that alone could push the feeling back down where it belonged. And for a moment, he stayed exactly where he was, crouched low, hands buried in the dirt, letting the weight of her words pass over him like weather.
He had walked this ground a hundred times. Measured every angle. Carved the runes himself. Chalk and blood, both. His palms were still raw from the work. He had earned this perimeter. Every inch of it. Every breath of it.
The sigils should have held.
"It's fine," he muttered, the words rough at the edges, low enough to sound like a warning even if it wasn't meant to be one. The spade in his hand moved before he thought it through. He drove it into the soil harder than necessary, and the metal caught on something buried—a stone, or maybe just the resistance of magic itself—and the jolt climbed through his wrist and into his shoulder like a curse biting back.
He didn't lift his gaze. His grip stayed tight on the handle, the knuckles white where his hand flexed, too rigid now for reason. "Not everything has to be done your way."
That was when the shift happened. Barely perceptible, but there. The light of the ward paused in its flickering. The air stilled just enough to be noticed. Not cooler. Not warmer. Just quiet. Deep quiet. The kind that pressed into your ribs and waited.
Even the house seemed to notice.
And it was not on his side.
Luna turned slowly, the hem of her robe dragging through the wet grass, dampening the pale edge where the stitching had already begun to fray. Her sleeves were still rolled up past her elbows, and on the inside of her left forearm, the dark curve of a protective sigil glimmered faintly where the runes met sweat. A smear of ash streaked across her cheekbone, sharp and angled like an accidental stripe of war paint, but neither of them said anything about it. She didn't wipe it away.
She looked at him with the kind of silence that settled into the marrow of things. Her expression wasn't cruel, wasn't even cold. It was something far worse than either. It was steady. And exhausted. And old in the way that grief is old. Not bitter. Just done.
"It's not my way," she said, voice quiet and leveled, calm in that terrifying way hers always became when she had already made peace with being misunderstood. "It's the way that works."
There was no pride in the sentence. No smugness. No challenge. Just a certainty that sounded older than either of them had any right to feel, the kind of truth that didn't rise like a blade, but fell like a verdict. It didn't accuse. It didn't blame. But it did not bend either.
That was what broke him.
He stood too fast, his legs unfolding with a kind of violence that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the way her words had found the weakest spot in him. His spine snapped straight, his shoulders drawn back like he meant to throw something, or run, or crack open completely.
He dragged his palms across his trousers, wiping dirt and rune chalk into streaks across the black fabric without care, without thought, as if marking himself could somehow restore the power she had just stripped away.
He stepped forward, not enough to invade, not enough to touch, but close enough that his body remembered hers. Close enough for the thread at his wrist to respond, heat blooming along his veins in that same terrible rhythm it had taken on the night before, that quiet hum of awareness that always knew when she was near.
The heat in his chest was not from the sun. It was rage. Not sharp, not loud, but coiled and pulsing beneath his ribs like a lit fuse.
"You treat me like a fucking pawn," he said, low and raw, his voice clipped not by restraint but by the strain of keeping it from breaking open entirely. "Like I was sent here to haul stones and mutter incantations and be grateful you even remembered to look at me. Like I haven't bled for this place. Like I haven't watched it try to take you."
The words hit the air like stones skipping across still water. Not thunderous. Just precise.
His chest rose and fell, the motion unsteady now, like the fury had unmoored something deep in him that he hadn't meant to reveal. His hands flexed at his sides, not into fists, but into something quieter. Something lost.
He had not wanted to say it. Not like this. But once it was out, the weight of it was unbearable.
Across from him, Luna did not react the way he expected.
There was no flicker of shock, no flinch, no sharp retort shaped by equal hurt. She didn't rush to correct him, didn't offer softness or pushback or distance. Her eyes didn't narrow. Her mouth didn't tighten. Her hands didn't lift in some instinctive plea for peace.
Instead, she simply looked at him.
The breeze that had curled through the hedgerow only moments ago stilled to nothing, like the garden itself had forgotten how to breathe. The leaves stopped rustling. The air thickened. Even the light shifted, slanting inward as though drawn to her silence, softening its glare, dimming with reverence, as if the house understood something ancient about her quiet that he had never been meant to grasp.
And then she moved.
No words. No warning. No need for drama. Just the slow, inevitable turn of her shoulders, the brush of fabric against wet grass, the kind of poise that didn't belong to this world, that made her seem less like a woman and more like the echo of a dream not yet finished, something the universe had conjured and never quite let go. She walked away with that maddening grace he hated for how much it humbled him, every footstep soft as breath, every inch of retreat its own lesson in how little noise power needed to make.
He didn't think.
There was no plan, no decision, only the lurch of something primal and scorching rising through his chest and seizing his limbs, a hunger to be seen or stopped or remembered in the face of her leaving. His body reacted before his mind could catch it. His hand lashed out, too fast, too rough, his fingers wrapping around her wrist in a grip that wasn't violent but wasn't gentle either. He didn't squeeze. Not truly. But he held her. Anchored her. Called her back with the urgency of skin against skin, with his pulse beating hard against hers like a question clawing its way out of silence.
And then the air shifted.
Not from sound. Not from breath. But from her.
Because she didn't startle.
She didn't stiffen or pull away or even turn.
She simply moved.
Her body flowed with the silence, no stutter, no hesitation, only grace sharpened into precision. In one seamless, breathless motion, her hand slipped into her sleeve and emerged with a blade so sudden it felt conjured, summoned from air and instinct. The metal caught the dying light and held it, a gleam of silver that flashed against the faint shimmer of the nearest wardline, drawing power from the soil like it had been forged in the bones of the house itself. It didn't shake. It didn't falter. It belonged to her the way storms belong to clouds.
She didn't raise it to his throat. She didn't drive it between his ribs. She simply held it. Low. Certain. Ready. The way some people hold grief. The way others hold god.
Her voice, when it came, was soft enough to be mistaken for mercy. "Touch me like that again," she said, her words curling through the air like silk dipped in frost. "And the house will bury you."
It was not a threat. Not a guess. Not a test to see if he believed her.
It was law.
She said it with the kind of terrifying calm that made weapons unnecessary, her voice slipping beneath his skin like a spell written in bone, like the ancient kind of magic that didn't need to be cast to be obeyed. The garden heard it. The house heard it. Even the air pulled tighter.
They stayed like that, caught in a stillness so dense it might have been mistaken for silence, but it wasn't. It was louder than that. It was the space between lightning and thunder, between the decision to run and the moment the ground gives way.
His hand was still on her wrist. Her fingers still curved around the hilt. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed the way humans were meant to breathe.
The garden waited.
The sky deepened toward twilight, the light neither bright nor gone, a half-lit hush that stretched too long across the hedgerows. The wards flickered along the perimeter like a heartbeat learning a new rhythm, and the soil beneath their feet pulsed, slow and certain, alive with whatever she had just called forward.
He didn't release her right away.
He couldn't.
Something inside him clung, not in dominance, not in desperation, but in a confusion so vast it touched reverence. His body no longer knew where it ended. Only that it wanted to remember the feel of her. Even if the memory cut. Even if the house kept it.
Even if she didn't.
He let go with the cautious hesitation of someone withdrawing from open flame, each finger peeling back slowly, as if his hand had only just realized it was wrapped around something capable of burning straight through him. The motion was careful, quiet, like reverence masked as restraint, like surrender softened by shame. And still she didn't move. Still she didn't flinch. But the warmth of her skin clung to his fingertips even after the distance opened between them, not like a touch, not like forgiveness, but like a mark.
She didn't raise her voice.
She didn't spit his name back at him with fury sharp enough to wound.
She didn't walk away in some dramatic sweep of robes and fury.
She simply lowered the blade.
With the same eerie, unsettling stillness she had carried since the beginning, she let the weapon slide from her hand, back into the folds of her sleeve like it had never existed at all, like it had been no more threatening than breath, no more disruptive than a shift in the wind. The air between them remained heavy, charged with everything she didn't say, everything she didn't need to say. She looked at him once, and in that single glance was something far more brutal than anger.
She didn't glare. She didn't sneer. She didn't narrow her eyes like someone building a case to prosecute him later.
She just looked.
And what he saw there was silence turned sentient. Not forgiveness. Not fury. Just something ancient and still. The same look she had worn the first time she ever stood at his door and asked if he ever heard the sound of his own heart when the room went quiet enough. A look that knew too much. A look that would never ask him to explain.
And then she stayed.
She didn't step back. Didn't retreat. Didn't vanish the way he sometimes feared she would, folded back into the house that seemed to love her more than it should. She stood exactly where she had been, the mud drying along the seam of her boots, the salt-wind tugging at her hair, her hands now empty but the weight of her blade still thick in the space between them.
She didn't offer him absolution. She didn't pretend it hadn't happened.
But she didn't leave.
And somehow that was worse.
Because it meant she had seen all of it. The impulse. The mistake. The hurt hiding inside the grip. She had let him touch her in anger and chosen to stay anyway, not out of mercy, not out of affection, but because something had shifted. Something had cracked open between them, dark and wordless and real, and neither of them had the tools to mend it or the courage to destroy it.
The silence that followed wasn't soft. It wasn't kind. It pressed into his ribs and sat behind his teeth like a stone, and yet still he didn't speak. Still she didn't leave.
They stood there with the tension still breathing around them, with the thread still wrapped around his wrist, and the house still listening.
And for once, the quiet between them did not ask for explanation. It only asked for truth.
And they both knew it had already been spoken. Without words. Without violence. Just a moment held too long, and a hand that took too much.
~~~
The day hadn't started with sound or movement, but with a thick, weighty quiet that settled against the skin like damp wool, clinging in all the wrong places. It was the kind of silence that didn't calm so much as press down, heavy and familiar, the sort that reminded him of all the things left unspoken the night before. Every rustle in the trees felt too even, too timed. The birdsong, usually scattered and aimless, now rang out with eerie precision, like someone had written the melody in advance. The whole world seemed to be pretending, playing at normal, while something deep beneath the surface waited for its moment to rupture.
Theo had found himself at the southern edge of the property before he'd even realized where he was going, drawn not by choice, not by plan, but by that quiet tension in his chest, the one that always flared when something shifted in the wards. He crouched near the boundary line, elbows bare, hands pressed into the soil with more desperation than care. The ground was cold, slick with last night's rain, and it welcomed his fingers like it had been expecting them, curling damp earth around his knuckles with the slow gravity of something ancient.
The soil here wasn't like the rest. It was darker, denser, heavy with that slow heartbeat of old magic, not loud or flashy but quiet and certain, humming beneath the surface like it had been watching him since the day he arrived. This wasn't magic meant to be harnessed or bent into shape. It didn't sparkle or flare. It didn't belong to him. It didn't belong to anyone. It just was. Timeless and alive in a way that made the air feel too full, as though something invisible was still breathing beneath it.
He could feel it through his palms, that slow, pulsing awareness that had nothing to do with spells and everything to do with memory. The land remembered. And it would outlast every ward, every glyph, every intention he set into its skin.
That morning, the house had asked something of him. Not in words. Not in any way he could write down or repeat or prove. It spoke in the way old places did—through pressure, through the strange shift of air at the top of the landing, through the quiet resistance of doors that used to open easily but now held just a fraction longer before giving way. It asked in the fog that collected on the inside of the windows despite a clear sky, in the shiver of warmth that lingered on the brass of the doorknobs when no one had passed that way in hours.
Luna hadn't said anything. Not over tea. Not in that way she usually did, half-sentences and glances that felt like riddles instead of conversation.
The change was already there, subtle and sure, threaded into the shape of the morning itself. The candle flames near the east corridor had bent inward when he passed them, not once but twice. He had touched the wall just after and felt the warmth soak into his skin as if someone else had touched it seconds before. Someone who had never learned to leave a trace.
And that was how the house spoke. Not with sound. Not with signs. But with the memory of things that should not be remembered at all.
The ground had felt strange beneath his boots. Not just soft, not just disturbed, but wrong in a way that had nothing to do with weather or thaw. There was something else beneath the surface. Something deep and unsettled. As if the soil itself had grown weary of keeping secrets. As if it had begun to remember every body buried in it and was slowly, inch by inch, beginning to consider letting go. Each step landed heavier than the last, and the earth gave more than it should have. It swallowed his weight in silence, and the pull in his chest that always came near the southern boundary, the one he used to pretend was just coincidence, tightened until it felt like someone was threading a wire through his ribs.
The wards were failing again. Not loudly, not in a way anyone untrained would see. But he felt it. He felt it in the sick little tremors that ran along the skin of the spellwork. A stuttering hum that should have remained steady. A rising pitch just sharp enough to make his molars ache, like the world itself had begun to tune its magic wrong. It wasn't collapse. Not yet. It was something worse. It was the kind of slow undoing that only the caster could feel. A decay you could taste if you listened too closely.
They had spent weeks building that lattice. Thread by thread. Glyph by glyph. A web of old and new magic braided with chalk and blood and breath.
They had carved runes until their fingers ached, until the bones in their hands remembered the shapes even when asleep. But now, the entire structure was warping. Twisting. Turning against itself like a body rejecting what it had been given. As if the magic was sick of obedience and had begun gnawing at its own foundation. The shapes no longer held. The logic of it bent in on itself like paper soaked through. Patterns cracked like thought spiraling under pressure. It was madness disguised as protection.
He hadn't called for her, hadn't needed to. Luna came anyway. As she always did.
No sound announced her. She was simply there. Present the way certain truths were present. Silent and sure and so unshakably real that it made questioning her seem absurd. She stood beside him with that same quiet weight that had never required explanation. Not once had she asked if he needed her. She just knew. She showed up like gravity. Like breath. Like the answer to a question he hadn't voiced out loud.
Her cardigan hung off her shoulders, too large and too soft, worn so thoroughly that it looked less like clothing and more like something the house had spun out of the air and draped around her as a kind of offering. The sleeves had slipped far past her wrists, her fingers curling out just enough to remind him she was made of skin and bone and not the mist she so often resembled.
She moved through the garden like the land had parted just for her. As though her steps asked for nothing, and the world gave way in response. The breeze, faint and briny, circled around her instead of touching her, like even the wind had learned to respect her stillness. It wasn't floating, not exactly. But there was something not fully rooted about the way she walked. Something that made the trees lean ever so slightly in her direction.
He had grown used to her that way. She didn't speak unless the quiet made space for it. She didn't interfere unless the ground cried out for her hands. And she never startled. Not when the floorboards screamed. Not when the walls cracked. Not when the bones beneath the house shifted and groaned and called out through the wards with voices that did not belong to the living. She never flinched.
But today was not like the others.
There had been no warning. No shift in the pressure of the air. No birds taking flight in panic. No unnatural shadow sliding across the grass to announce what was coming. Just stillness. A breath held too long by the land itself. A quiet that rang hollow. A moment too calm.
And then it happened.
The ground pulsed once beneath their feet. A low, gut-deep thud that didn't ripple like magic or echo like thunder. It moved inward, inward and down, striking the bone instead of the ear, as though it had come from beneath the roots, from whatever lay buried too deep to name. And in the next instant, the spell shattered.
It didn't fray or collapse. It snapped. The sound was precise. Surgical. A crack of pressure so sudden it stole the breath from the garden itself. Like a femur giving under too much weight. Clean. Final. Wrong.
Something surged upward from the boundary line, unseen but searing.
A whip of heat and force that sliced through the clearing like a blade thrown blind. It wasn't a spell. It wasn't anything shaped by intention. It was the magical equivalent of a scream, wild and unformed, rising out of the earth with the instinct of something that had been hurt too many times and had finally struck back.
The energy burned as it moved, too fast to dodge, too sudden to shield against. Theo felt it arc across the top layer of his skin, not like flame but like the aftershock of one, and every nerve in his body fired in tandem with the noise.
It didn't aim. It didn't think. It just wanted to be free. To break. To lash out. And the magic recoiled around it like breath from a blow that couldn't be absorbed.
He moved before the thought could form.
Not a choice. Not a plan. Just the muscle-deep memory of survival. His arm came up fast across her chest.To shield. To keep her out of reach. His other hand lifted too, instinctively forming a barrier as the flare passed over them, a streak of magic so fierce and bright it carved the air clean and left only silence in its wake.
Heat brushed past his skin. His shirt lifted slightly from the force of it. His throat caught in the moment it passed. The magic coiled and spun around them like a creature that had just remembered its teeth. And then it vanished.
Gone as quickly as it came.
But the quiet it left behind was not the gentle kind. It was too precise. Too sharp around the edges. The kind of quiet that made you think something was still listening. The kind that filled the lungs with the weight of what almost happened.
He didn't move right away.
Still crouched, still breathing hard, still waiting for whatever came next. He knew better than to assume the danger was done just because the noise had stopped. His magic whispered warnings along the edges of his skin. The wards throbbed once, like an apology.
And then he turned.
Fast, scanning. His eyes swept over her, top to bottom, back to front. Her boots. Her legs. Her hands. Her arms. The curve of her shoulder. The fabric of her sleeve. Was she bleeding? Burned? Had he been too slow?
But there was nothing. No scorch. No mark. No tremble. Just Luna. Standing in the same place, wrapped in that familiar cardigan, her hair wild from the sudden wind, and her face turned not toward him but toward the horizon. Toward something he could not see. Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. Her mouth was still. Her brow relaxed. She didn't look hurt.
She looked distant.
Listening. Something beneath them. Her body held the kind of stillness that didn't come from shock but from reception, as if her bones had picked up a frequency the rest of the world couldn't hear. The flare hadn't frightened her. If anything, it had spoken to her. She stood as if it had not been an attack, but a message.
And she was trying to understand what it meant.
It unnerved him more than a scream ever could have.
She only looked down, her eyes shifting slowly to her hand, with that eerie, focused stillness that made the air seem thinner just from watching her. Her gaze found her palm with the certainty of someone who had already known what she'd find. And when he followed it, when he saw what she saw, something in his chest gave a sharp, involuntary pull.
It wasn't a dramatic wound. Just a single, narrow line, barely deeper than a scratch, running clean along the base of her fingers. Precise. Pale at the edges.
The skin had parted with unnerving neatness, not jagged but smooth, like something deliberate had carved it, like the land had marked her and not by mistake. Blood gathered slowly along the line, deep red and glossy, not rushing but forming with the measured pace of something aware it was being watched. It clung to her skin rather than spilling, curved along the cut like a secret deciding whether or not to be spoken.
Her fingers twitched once, a tiny, automatic flinch. Then they stilled again, her entire hand settling into the light as if posing for it. She tilted her wrist slightly, inspecting the wound without haste, the way a botanist might turn a strange leaf in the sunlight, curious but unafraid. There was no fear in her face. No sharp breath. No signs of pain at all. Only a quiet concentration, like she was waiting to see what the injury would tell her.
He couldn't breathe for a moment.
The morning light touched her skin gently, catching the wet curve of the blood, turning it a rich, shadowy black that looked more like ink than anything human. It didn't trickle. It didn't fall. It hovered. Balanced there in silence, like it had been summoned and was waiting for instruction.
Her brow furrowed, as though her body had interrupted her, and she was deciding whether it was worth the trouble to acknowledge it at all.
The quiet pressed tighter around them. The garden didn't move. The wards didn't hum. And still she stood there, holding her wounded hand up to the light like it was a message, not a mistake, her blood a punctuation mark that hadn't yet decided what kind of sentence it belonged to.
And he could not stop looking at it.
And that was when he moved.
There was no weighing of choice, no internal debate to measure the risk. His body leaned into the space between them before his mind could catch up. His hand rose, unhurried but certain, and closed gently around her wrist with the familiarity of a motion already lived.
His grip was light, nothing that sought control. It felt more like reverence than possession, as if his fingertips had recognized her skin before his eyes ever had. Her pulse pressed steadily beneath his hand, warm and alive, and still he didn't look up. He didn't speak. He didn't ask.
Instead, he guided her hand closer, and with a quiet that felt sacred, he pressed his lips to the cut across her palm.
There was no softness in the gesture. No gentleness meant to soothe.
His mouth met her skin with a kind of still desperation, like the act could draw the pain into him and leave her untouched. It was not a kiss meant to heal. It was not a kiss at all. It was something older than language, something shaped by need and fear and the helpless ache of watching someone bleed and knowing there is no real way to stop it.
It didn't feel romantic. Not even close.Only urgency. Only instinct.
His lips stayed there a second longer than they should have.
Just because he didn't know what to do once the act was done.
The silence between them felt suspended, as if even the air had paused to take notice. The magic that lingered, thick and unsteady, began to settle again. And still, he didn't lift his head.
He wasn't trying to be noble. He wasn't trying to make a point. He just didn't want her to bleed anymore.
It was not the touch of a man in love. It was the vow of someone who had never learned how to pray, the kind of kiss made not with devotion but with blood and silence, a contract etched into flesh where no words dared go.
He felt the warmth of her skin beneath his lips, the slow rhythm of her pulse against his mouth, the taste of blood sharp against the back of his throat. Salt clung to the breath between them. And still, he did not look up. Not until something old inside him finally let go with a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
Only then did he lift his head, slowly, as though coming up from water too deep. His body followed in kind, slow to release, like stepping out of a spell not meant to be cast. Whatever line had existed before, whatever boundary might have kept him safe from what he had just done, had been crossed long before his lips had touched her skin.
"Sorry," he said, the word small and broken at the edges, more breath than sound. It was not an apology so much as a confession, shaped from guilt and disbelief, a whispered admission that he had taken something sacred without asking. He did not let go of her immediately. His fingers lingered, just barely, holding the last of her warmth like it might tether him to something solid.
And then, with a quiet, deliberate motion, he released her. He let his hands fall to his sides, each movement careful, restrained, like he was disarming himself piece by piece. His shoulders remained tense. His breath came in shallow pulls. His fingers curled inward, the shame of them settling deep in his palms, as if they could unmake what they had done by folding into silence.
Luna did not move.
She did not step away. She remained still. So still that the moment felt like it had been pinned in place, held aloft by something ancient and unspoken. The silence between them thickened, not with fear, not with anger, but with the weight of what had just passed between them.
She stood like something elemental, unmoved by storm or fire, unbothered by the tremble of another's breath. Her gaze never left his face. It was not sharp. It was not soft. It was something else entirely.
She watched him the way the moon watches the tide, calm and distant and inevitable. Not with warmth, not with disdain, but with a gaze that seemed to hold the whole of him, stripped bare and trembling, and saw every fault without blinking.
And still, she did not turn away.
Then, after what felt like an entire season had passed between heartbeats, her head tilted. Just a small shift, so slight it might have gone unnoticed if the world hadn't been holding its breath. A subtle angle, like a question had just occurred to the moon and she was waiting to see if the ocean would bother to answer. Her braid slid over her shoulder like silk unraveling. The light from the boundary caught the line of her jaw, soft and pale where her skin still glistened faintly from exertion.
And then she spoke.
"You should stop apologizing for telling the truth."
The words didn't demand anything. They didn't explain themselves. They simply landed and stayed. They hung in the charged quiet between them like a stone dropped into still water, not heavy enough to sink, but dense enough to disturb.
He blinked.
Not because he didn't hear her, but because her voice had struck something inside him that wasn't ready to be reached. It hit the part of him that always answered without words, the part that flinched without moving, the part that kept truth buried because naming it made it real.
She didn't elaborate.
She didn't try to make it easier, didn't offer a path out of the moment. She didn't soften her words to fit neatly inside his understanding. She didn't need to. The truth was already there, woven into the silence, stubborn and strange and unmovable, like smoke curling up from a fire that had already been put out but refused to be forgotten.
He didn't know how to respond.He wasn't even sure what she had meant in the full shape of it, not in the way that could be spelled out or pinned down.
But he felt it. Felt it in the tightness beneath his sternum, in that hollow behind the ribs where unspoken things went to hide. Felt it in the wrist where the thread she had tied around him still clung with quiet insistence, its pulse barely noticeable unless he stood completely still.
He felt it in the ache that hadn't left his shoulders since the day he crossed the threshold. He felt it in the way she never filled the silence with noise, only with presence. That was always enough. And it was also never easy.
The cut on her palm had already begun to dry. The line no longer bled. The blood had darkened into rust, quiet and unceremonious, no longer a warning, just a mark. Just another story without a narrator. Just a quiet scar waiting to be remembered in the strange and sacred ledger that forms between two people too afraid to name what they have already become.
The wind shifted slightly.
The wards beneath them hummed like breath, low and steady, curling beneath the soles of their boots. She turned, without ceremony or pause, and began walking back toward the house. Her steps were even. Her spine steady. Her injured hand still bare. Still marked. Still visible. She did not hide it.
He remained where he was.
Long after her figure had blurred into the shadow of the house, he stood there, hands at his sides, breath held too close to the top of his chest. The kiss still burned in his mouth. Not sweet. Not shattering. Just there. The taste of her blood lingered behind his teeth, not wrong, not cruel, just present in a way that made it clear nothing would be the same.
It hadn't been affection. Not exactly.
But it had been something.
And the house, silent and watching, had already added it to the list of things it would never let them forget.
Because the house always knew.
And it never needed to ask.
~~~
They sat down just after sundown, the last of the light bleeding through the windows in thin, golden streaks that failed to warm the kitchen. The clink of cutlery broke the hush now and then, joined by the soft bubble of something herbal steeping in a pot near the stove. It should have been peaceful. It almost was. But peace had no room at the table that evening.
The tension wasn't obvious. No shouting. No raised voices or sharp looks. It lived in the quiet instead, in the way the air didn't move easily between them, in the way the steam rose straight up from their bowls and didn't curl. It lived in the space between their chairs, in the silence between gestures, in the way neither of them reached for their food right away.
The table felt larger than usual. As though the distance between them had stretched during the walk back and refused to return to normal. They sat still, facing forward, eyes flicking toward but never landing on each other.
Theo cleared his throat once. Then again. The sound felt out of place, too real in a room pretending at quiet. His voice, when it finally came, was lower than it needed to be, as if he didn't trust it yet. "I would like to apologize for my behaviour today."
The words hung there for a second too long. Not rejected. Not received. Just suspended in air like dust caught in the light, unsure where to land or how to settle.
Luna didn't look up. Her spoon stirred the broth slowly, absent circles in a rhythm that had no urgency, no purpose. Her expression was as unreadable as ever, though not cold. Just distant, in the way of someone listening to a sound far away. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and almost dreamlike, barely stronger than the steam curling above her bowl. "Nothing special happened, Theodore."
The sentence was too calm. Too weightless. And it struck something in him that made his back straighten just slightly, his jaw tight.
"You got hurt," he said, slower this time, like the words were heavier in his mouth than they had been in his mind.
She set the spoon down, not with force but with a quiet precision that gave the moment more weight than it should have had. Then she met his gaze. Direct. Steady. No flinch, no avoidance, no softness to make it easier for him.
"And you healed me," she replied, her voice firm but not unkind. As if that was the entire truth and to explain further would only cheapen it. "That's all."
It should have ended there.
Maybe it did.
But the silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It held something unspoken between them, something raw and barely formed, like the first shape of a question that neither of them wanted to voice. It stretched on without becoming comfortable. It just lingered, taut and pulsing, the kind of silence that didn't fade on its own but had to be endured.
They sat in it anyway. Two people not quite ready to speak the thing that had happened. Two people still carrying it in their bodies, pretending their hands didn't remember, pretending their breath hadn't changed, pretending it wasn't already too late to go back.
He set his fork down too hard. The sharp clink of metal against ceramic cut through the quiet like a crack across glass. The sound lingered for a beat before his voice followed, brittle and tight, thick with all the heat that had been gathering in his chest since she walked into the house pretending that blood on her hand meant nothing.
"You don't take any of this seriously," he said, and the words came out like stones, every one jagged. "You walk barefoot through active wards like you're picking herbs. You laugh when the house groans, like it's telling you bedtime stories instead of screaming a bloody warning. You treat danger like it's a game. Like it'll stop being lethal if you're just polite enough."
She didn't flinch. Didn't drop her gaze or hide behind that soft silence she used when she didn't want to fight. Her head lifted slowly, eyes meeting his across the flickering line of candlelight. "Maybe," she said, voice low, even, unnervingly calm, "because I'm not afraid of it the way you are."
Something in his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite anger. Disbelief cracked across his expression like lightning. "You should be," he said. Not loudly, but with enough force that it felt like the table had tilted forward between them.
Her eyes sharpened, the softness falling away to reveal something leaner, something cut from iron. "Why?" she asked, her voice rising just enough to sting. "Because you are? Because you need everything labeled and measured and weaponized just to sleep through the night? Because if it doesn't fit into a rule or a runic pattern, you can't stand the thought of it touching you?"
He breathed through his nose, slow and narrow, like he was trying not to let the rest of his rage show. "Don't ruin dinner with your bloody snark, Luna."
She tilted her head. The sound that came from her wasn't a laugh, not really. It was a sharp exhale laced with contempt, hollow and mean. "You ruin your own life just fine without me," she said, lifting her spoon as if the conversation bored her. "I just sit here and watch you do it."
The words knocked something loose in his chest, and he leaned forward, elbows braced against the edge of the table. The light caught in his eyes, and for a moment, he looked like a storm caught mid-collapse. "That's rich," he said, voice dropping low. "At least I still have a life. You're just a ghost in a house that's already rotting. You whisper to things that were never alive and pretend that counts for something."
She stilled, and the shift in her expression was nearly imperceptible, but he saw it. Something drew back behind her eyes, something old and quiet and wounded. When she moved again, it was slow, deliberate, like a blade being unsheathed.
"What exactly is your problem, Theodore?" she asked, her voice gone smooth and dangerous. "Are you angry because you haven't gotten your cock wet in months? Is that it? All that bottled fury and nowhere to put it? You snap at everything like some spoiled schoolboy with too many nightmares and no one left to fuck the fear out of him."
He stood so quickly the chair shrieked across the floor. His jaw was clenched hard enough to ache. "I suggest," he said, each word carved from his throat, "you shut your fucking mouth."
She didn't flinch. She pushed her chair back with infuriating grace, collected her glass, and rose without breaking eye contact. "You'd like that," she said. "Someone quiet. Someone sweet. Someone who never says what she's thinking and smiles while you unravel."
He said nothing. The heat in his chest had tipped into something wild, and his tongue couldn't form the words fast enough to contain it. He just stood there, fists loose at his sides, heart pounding loud enough to drown the candle's flicker.
And she didn't give him so much as a second glance.
She didn't wait for him to answer. With a kind of poised fury that only she could pull off, she stepped away from the table, lifted her glass, and in one fluid motion, threw the full contents of red wine across his face. The liquid caught the light as it flew, a dark arc through the air, staining the collar of his shirt, the sharp line of his cheek, the hollow just beneath his throat.
He was after her in an instant. His boots struck the floorboards with hard, echoing steps, breath locked tight in his chest. It wasn't calculated. It wasn't measured. What moved him forward was something ragged and furious, something boiling so hot it refused to stay buried. He caught up to her in the hall, his voice coming low and tight, brittle around the edges, like it might snap if he gave it too much air.
"Are you finished?" The words weren't really a question. They sounded more like a threat disguised as restraint, or maybe a plea wrapped in anger he couldn't quite swallow.
She didn't even look back. "Not quite," she said, her voice smooth as glass, cool as a blade, her back still to him, her stance infuriatingly calm.
His fists curled at his sides. "You're feral. Completely fucking unhinged. You should be locked up. You need a fucking hospital, Luna. A padded room with no sharp corners."
The sound came before he realized what was happening. A sharp crack, quick and hot with fury, echoed off the walls like a shot.
His head jerked to the side, not from the pain but from the shock of it. He stood there for a second, blinking, then gave a bitter little laugh, his lips twisting like something sour had settled on his tongue.
"Oh, that's what gets you going?" he snapped. "Being called—"
The second slap came faster, and this time he felt it. The sting bloomed across his cheek like fire, and his ears rang from the impact.
She was shaking now, only slightly, but her voice stayed calm. It came out cold and quiet, like venom through silk. "We're already the same person, Theodore. Don't pretend we're not. We are stitched together baby and that's not going anywhere. Ever."
Something in him cracked. Whatever had been holding him back broke open in that moment, some old pressure that had been building every time she looked at him like she saw what he tried so hard to hide.
His hands found her shoulders, not to hurt, not to dominate, but to steady himself as much as to stop her. He pushed her back against the wall, not rough, not soft either, just enough to make it real.
His breath came fast, too fast, his body too close to hers. His restraint had left the room before he even realized it.
"You want me to shut you up?" he asked, voice cracked and low. "Fine."
And then he kissed her.
It was not careful. It was teeth and heat and months of swallowed silence. His mouth crashed into hers like it meant to leave a mark. It was a question and a threat and a scream, all at once. And for one breathless second, she kissed him back.
Her hands grabbed at his shirt, knuckles white with tension. Her lips parted like they had always been waiting for him, like they had been holding that space open for this very moment.
But then she pulled away.
She shoved him back with a force neither of them expected, and he stumbled a half step, blinking. Her eyes met his with a kind of cold fire, furious and bright, like stormlight trapped beneath glass that might crack at any second.
"Don't ever use me like that again."
Her voice wasn't loud, but it landed like a breaking bone. The words split something open in him, deeper than even her hand across his face had managed to reach. Her tone made the air feel colder, like it had been scrubbed clean of warmth.
He stood frozen where she'd left him, his chest rising and falling far too quickly, the air slicing into his lungs like something sharp. It felt like he'd just been dropped into deep water, the kind that swallows sound and steals breath.
Then the house exhaled.
The floorboards creaked in a way that sounded almost thoughtful. One of the candles near the hall guttered low, and the scent of smoke curled through the room like it had been holding its breath too. The air shifted, heavier now.
"I am not using you," he said at last, his voice so hoarse it barely reached her. "I am practically begging you. To see me. Not through me. Me."
She blinked once. Slow. Her expression didn't soften. Her voice didn't rise. "You want attention from a madwoman, is that it?"
"I want attention," he said, his steps drawing him toward her again, slower this time. His voice had lost its edge. It came out raw and quiet. "From the person I am tied to. Forever. That's not something I can undo. And it's not something I would undo even if I could."
She gave a short, bitter laugh, the kind that didn't carry any real sound, just shape. It stopped halfway through, like it had caught on something inside her. "Don't worry. You'll be free in the afterlife."
"That isn't what I want," he whispered, now close enough that her breath stirred the air between them. "That has never been what I wanted."
He raised a hand. Slowly. Carefully. Not to grab, not to demand, but to touch. His palm cupped her cheek, the same one she had slapped, his thumb tracing the faint sting that still lingered there. The gesture held no heat. Only reverence. Only grief. Like he needed to remember it, not as punishment, but as proof. That she had felt something. That she had struck him because he mattered.
She didn't flinch.
"Say it," she breathed. Her voice cracked slightly at the end, but she didn't waver. She didn't move. She just stood there, head tilted into his hand like the weight of her body had finally settled in her bones. "Say something real. Say it, or don't touch me again."
"Luna," he said, the sound barely formed, as if her name had to tear itself out of him just to exist. "Come on. Please…"
There were a thousand things he wanted to say. Apologies that wouldn't be enough. Promises he wasn't sure he could keep. The truth of it, whatever it was, stuck in his chest like a splinter he couldn't reach. He wanted her to understand. He didn't know how to make her understand.
But she didn't wait for him to figure it out.
She turned away. No sharp movement, no sudden exit, just a quiet, slow step back. Then another. Then her hand on the doorframe. And finally the soft click of her bedroom door closing behind her.
He stayed standing there long after she was gone, eyes fixed on the place where she'd stood, like maybe if he stared hard enough, the door might open again. His chest felt too tight. His hands hung uselessly at his sides. The hallway had gone still, the candlelight gone pale and flickering against the walls, the silence pressing in around him like a weight.
He didn't know what exactly had broken in him. He didn't even know when it had started. Maybe it was the sound of her voice. Maybe it was the part where she looked at him like she had already made her decision and was just waiting for him to catch up.
It took him hours to find the courage again.
Hours of walking the same short stretch of corridor, of running his hands through his hair until it stood up in strange directions, of standing in front of her door and trying to will it open just by looking. He hated how much time he spent imagining what she might be doing behind it. He hated the silence most of all, the way it didn't offer answers or punishments, only the same maddening quiet.
When he finally raised his hand to knock, the door creaked open before he could touch it. The old magic still lived in the wood, and he had the sudden, irrational feeling that it hadn't responded to him at all. That the room still remembered her softness and had allowed him in only because of it.
She was already asleep.
The light from the hallway stretched just far enough into the room to paint her in soft outlines. Her body was curled beneath the blanket, her knees tucked in, her face turned toward the wall. One hand rested near her chin, delicate and half-hidden by her hair.
He stepped inside quietly. The floor beneath his feet felt too old to be trusted, as though it might betray him with a single careless creak. He moved like the house might notice and change its mind.
Before he reached the bed, her voice found him. It was quiet. Barely more than a breath. Drowsy and slow, but not cold.
"What do you want, Theodore?"
He stopped. His shoulders dropped, the tension bleeding out of them one knot at a time. "To apologize," he said, and it came out low, barely shaped.
Her reply was muffled by the pillow. "Do it in the morning."
He might have laughed if the moment didn't feel like glass, too easy to crack with anything sharp. She didn't sound angry. She sounded exhausted.
Still, he didn't leave.
He crouched down beside her bed, his knees protesting slightly against the wood, and pressed his lips to her hand. Just once. A slow, careful kiss to the back of her fingers, his breath catching as he did it. Like he was trying to speak without words. Like he didn't trust his voice not to ruin it.
Then, with the same kind of quiet that had brought him to her door in the first place, he leaned in and kissed her forehead. The warmth of her skin beneath his mouth startled him. She was real, not some phantom made from regret and habit. Real and alive and still here.
She shifted just slightly, just enough for the blanket to rustle.
Then, without turning to look at him, without saying anything more, she lifted the corner of the blanket.
It wasn't a gesture soaked in forgiveness. It wasn't a surrender or a promise. It wasn't even tender, not in the traditional sense. It was simple. Uncomplicated. Space made for him, if he wanted it. If he could be quiet.
He didn't hesitate.
He climbed into the bed with the graceless urgency of someone who feared the moment might vanish if he took a second too long. The blanket fell over them in a slow wave, trapping their warmth together. He meant to keep some space. He told himself he would just hold her, keep things calm, let the quiet be enough. But the second his arm circled around her, she shifted toward him without hesitation.
Her eyes were still half-closed, heavy with sleep, her face soft in that particular way it always was when she let her guard down. She moved closer until her nose brushed against his collarbone, and then, without a word, she pressed a kiss into the side of his neck. Light at first. Barely there. Then another. And another. The kind of slow, determined kisses that weren't really trying to seduce, but somehow still undid him completely.
His breath caught. His body betrayed him instantly.
"I advise you to stop that," he muttered, voice tight, trying to sound unaffected and failing miserably.
Her lips didn't pause. She only smiled against his skin and replied just as quietly, "Absolutely not."
He clenched his jaw. His arm pulled her tighter against him without permission from his brain, a quick, panicked motion born of instinct.
He didn't want her to feel what was already happening, how hard he was beneath the sheets, how fast his heart was pounding. Everything about this felt too much. Too close. Too intimate. He hadn't prepared for this. He hadn't prepared for her.
And still she kissed him like she had every right to.
Like she'd already made up her mind.
Like his neck had been waiting for her mouth all along and she was just following the map of it, memorizing it in pieces.
He couldn't take another second of it.
His hand came up to cradle her jaw, the way he might have if she were made of something fragile, something breakable and holy. But there was nothing fragile about the way he kissed her. Not this time.
He kissed her like it was the only thing he still knew how to do. Like the words had failed him too many times already and this was all he had left. Their mouths met, and then met again, deeper now, slower, until the air between them grew thick and everything outside the bed slipped into silence. His thoughts drowned beneath it. His breath hitched. He didn't know how long it lasted. It could've been a minute. It could've been hours. He didn't care.
All that mattered was the way she kissed him back.
Like she meant it.
Like she wanted it just as much as he did.
Like she understood exactly what she was doing to him and wasn't planning on stopping anytime soon.
And he let her.
Not because he had no choice.
Because this—her, here, now—was the only thing that felt real enough to hold onto.