“Give me something real.”

Cassie’s voice burrowed in like a splinter, the kind you can’t dig out no matter how much you pick at it. I’d scrubbed my face raw in the washroom afterward, changed into a nightdress like I could peel her words off with the rest of the day. No use. They stayed.

Real.

Like I wasn’t already balancing two lives just to stay upright. Like she’d caught me hollow in the middle of everything, and I hadn’t even realized I was bleeding until she pressed the blade in.

Cassie Fairborn had the audacity to look at me like that—sharp blue eyes, mouth curling as if I wasn’t even worth the effort of cruelty. That was the worst part. If she’d smirked, or gloated, or leaned on her little queen-bee theatrics, I could’ve brushed it off. But no. She looked… disappointed.

Disappointed in me.

I hate her.

I hate her so much I can still feel the heat on my cheeks from the way her gaze cut through me, like she was peeling back every layer I’ve built, tearing open the seams to see what’s underneath.

And she didn’t like what she saw.

“Give me something real.”

The words loop, snagging on themselves. Maybe she meant nothing by it. Maybe it was just another jab in the endless game of Cassie-versus-Mira. But it sits in me differently. Too raw. Too exact.

Naomi’s voice tangles with it, low and steady, always too steady: You’re not ready to burn, Firebrand.

Kess’s laugh follows, irritatingly smug: Not yet, Princess.

Friends, both of them. My only ones, really. But their voices sting all the same. They never mean to cut as deep as Cassie does, but they don’t realize how much it echoes when they doubt me—even in jest.

And then there’s Seara. Always Seara, with her silence sharper than a thousand insults. I could stand on a table in the middle of the Summer Court, shout every secret I know, and she’d only lift a brow like I was being dramatic.

Too much. Too little. Always wrong.

If I don’t do this, if I stay here and swallow it all again, I’ll choke.

I shove the window open wider, slipping into the corridor where the shadows lean long against polished floors. The cool air sticks in my throat, smelling of beeswax polish and old stone, like even the walls are trying too hard.

My slippers make the faintest whisper. I know how to walk this place. I’ve known since I was eight.

Eight-year-old me standing at the barre, arms trembling, sweat running down my back. The other girls were perfect—perfect posture, perfect smiles, perfect bloodlines. They didn’t stumble. They didn’t shake. They whispered behind their hands when I did.

“Again,” Seara said, her voice a lash. “No, again.”

I lifted my chin until my neck ached, tried to mimic the angles she demanded. My feet blistered inside satin shoes, toes bleeding. My arms quivered like twigs.

I wanted to scream. Wanted to burn the entire hall down around me. But I didn’t. I locked my jaw and did it again. And again. Until the whispers quieted. Until Seara’s lips pressed thin but she stopped correcting.

Until I learned how to move like a blade.

I hated those lessons. Still do. But now, years later, every inch of that pain sings in me as I glide silent down the corridor. My shoulders stay loose, my chin lifted just enough to see what others miss. My breath stays shallow, measured. My steps whisper across polished stone.

Seara meant to make me her perfect little court puppet. She ended up teaching me how to vanish. How to steal silence and make it mine.

The irony almost makes me laugh. Almost.

I round a corner, heart quickening. A pair of servants pass at the far end, arms stacked with crates. Their voices echo soft and distracted—complaints about the kitchen running out of saffron, about Kaelen sneaking sweets again. They don’t look my way. Why would they? I’m nothing. A ghost in their perfect little routines.

My palms sweat anyway. I press one against the wall, cool stone grounding me. The scent of polish clings to my fingers, sharp and chemical. I wipe it on my dress and keep moving.

Every little sound is exaggerated now—the shift of fabric at my knees, the faint squeak of a servant’s shoes, the creak of wood where the beams settle above. My heartbeat feels like thunder.

This is what real feels like.

The thrill of standing at the edge of ruin and stepping forward anyway.

Cassie doesn’t know this. She thinks real is whatever game she’s playing with her crown and her friends and her smug little smirk. She has no idea what it means to stand here, alone in the dark, risking everything because you need the truth more than you need safety.

I stop at the half-open service door, hand pressed flat against the wood. It’s rougher here, less polished than the court’s halls. The sound of crates clattering filters through—servants moving supplies, careless in their rhythm. Easy cover for me to slip by.

My pulse spikes. I can almost hear Cassie’s voice again, curling smug around the words: Give me something real.

Fine. I’ll give her real. I’ll give Naomi and Kess real. I’ll give Seara real.

And when I’m holding the truth in my hands, when they all see me for what I am, none of them will ever be able to look at me the same way again.

I slide through the narrow gap, breath caught sharp in my chest. The corridor swallows me whole, colder, darker, the air tinged with dust and secrets.

Decision made. No going back.

The service corridor breathes differently than the court proper. No gleaming marble, no sun-bright chandeliers—just narrow walls that smell of damp stone and iron hinges, floors scuffed from years of crates dragging. It’s the spine of the palace, unseen but vital, the place where the real work happens while the court pretends things appear polished on their own.

I’ve always felt more at home here than in the ballrooms. Maybe because no one expects you to shine in these halls. You’re meant to vanish.

Dust clings to my slippers, the hem of my dress. The shadows hang heavier, unbroken by the soft lanterns set every few paces. The air tastes stale, and every sound I make feels loud enough to shatter the quiet. My breaths come shallow, measured, just like they taught me in dance—though Seara would lose her mind if she knew what I was using her lessons for now.

Voices drift from farther down the passage, muffled but distinct. Two servants, maybe three. I catch fragments: “new shipment of wine,” “too many guests,” “can’t believe the Lady wants another festival already.” Their tones carry fatigue, irritation. I press myself into an alcove, the stone biting cold into my back as I shrink into the dark.

Their footsteps clatter closer, echoing with the easy rhythm of people who belong here. I do not belong here. My throat tightens, every muscle braced. One glance, one wrong turn of the lantern light, and I’ll be dragged back upstairs, locked in my room, punished in ways Seara never has to say aloud.

But they pass. The light fades. The voices trail off until it’s only my heartbeat in my ears again.

I exhale, shaky, pressing a palm flat against the wall. My hand comes away dusty. For some reason that makes me smile—this court of glass and gold still has grime hidden under its skin. Even the perfect Summer Court has to be propped up by hands no one bothers to see.

I move again, softer, sharper. My body knows how to vanish when it needs to.

Cassie’s voice slides back into me like a knife under ribs: Give me something real.

I grit my teeth. It’s ridiculous that she’s the one echoing loudest when Naomi and Kess have been in my life longer, steadier. Naomi with her calm, unshakable presence, Kess with her ridiculous grin and the way she always calls me Princess like it’s both a joke and a truth.

But it’s Cassie who won’t leave me alone. Maybe because she looked straight through me when she said it. Maybe because she expected something more.

The corridor turns, narrowing tighter, lanterns growing fewer. Here the air chills, curling with drafts from old stone. I let my fingertips brush the wall as I move, grounding myself in its roughness. Sparks itch against my skin—my magic, restless. Tiny motes of heat flicker at my fingertips before I close my hand into a fist and snuff them out. Not now. I can’t afford even a glow.

I reach a stretch of silence, the kind that feels too heavy, too purposeful. The hairs at the back of my neck lift. For a second, I swear I hear something else—something beneath the stillness. A faint hum, like breath caught in stone.

It’s nothing. Probably. Just the castle settling. Except… it doesn’t feel like nothing.

The Veil runs deep through Dominveil. I’ve felt it before, in the corners of the city, in the way magic prickles against my skin when I’m not paying attention. Here, in the Summer Court’s bowels, it feels different. Heavier. Watching.

My steps slow, careful. The silence stretches, unnerving, until I shake myself free and keep moving. I can’t spook myself now.

At last, I see it—the door at the end of the hall. Seara’s study.

It looks so plain, so unassuming, compared to the gilt excess upstairs. Dark wood, iron latch, no carvings or flourishes. That’s her way—save the polish for the rooms meant to impress. The study is for secrets, not display.

My stomach tightens, twisting itself into knots. Every instinct screams that I shouldn’t be here, that the air itself is sharper, waiting to slice if I push too far.

But then Cassie’s face burns in my mind again, that look of disdain, like she’d already stripped me down and found me wanting. Give me something real.

And Naomi’s voice, steady but doubting: Not ready to burn.

And Kess’s grin, mocking: Not yet, Princess.

I curl my hand into a fist before it can shake. They don’t know me. Not really. But they will.

I stop in front of the study door, every nerve lit like a fuse. My palm hovers over the latch.

This is it. One breath away from ruin. One breath away from being seen.

The east wing air is heavier here, like the corridor is a throat swallowing wrong. Every wall sconce feels like an eye. Every portrait frame is a mouth that won’t open. And Cassie’s voice—of course—won’t shut up in my skull.

Give me something real.

Real. Right. I’ll engrave it on a dagger and hand it to her hilt-first.

Naomi’s voice tries to balance it out, calm and infuriatingly steady: Being ready to burn isn’t about dramatics, Firebrand. It’s about consequences.

Kess, chuckling right behind it like mischief with a pulse: Love the ambition, Princess. Shame about the timing.

Fine. Watch my timing.

The velvet rope bars off the double doors like a throat cut clean. Above, the Firebrand seal glows with a soft, smug little burn. I step closer and the shimmer around me falters—my skin prickles, my magic twitches—something invisible skates across me, tasting. A ward. Not meant to maim. Meant to humiliate.

I press the rope. It doesn’t budge. The seal flares once—bright, disappointed—and fades.

Of course.

I drop to a crouch and let my fingers walk along the base, slow, deliberate, feeling for what doesn’t belong. If Seara taught me anything, it was how to read a room she never intended me to understand. There: tucked beneath the left hinge, faint enough to ghost out unless you’re hunting, a glyph drawn in something that only answers to flame. Curled like a question mark. Unfinished. Waiting.

This isn’t about stealth. This is about knowing her.

I brush the dust away with the back of my knuckle. What does Seara value, privately, when the court’s eyes are turned? Control. Power. Discipline. Legacy. Fire. Precision. Too polished. Too obvious. The private lock will always hinge on the private ritual.

The glyph’s line hooks up the way her signature slices at the end. Not a question. A riddle.

I lean in and whisper, “Fire blossom.”

Nothing.

I wet my lips. “Steeped in black tea. No sugar. No honey. Three drops of lemon. Fresh cut. Not bottled.”

The glyph pulses once. Twice. Then drains away into the stone like it was never there.

My chest tightens, sharp and warm and humiliatingly tender all at once—the ache of remembering a door that opened once for me because I belonged to her back when belonging meant nothing complicated. When I was small enough to breathe her steam and call it weather.

Back then, before galas and edicts and curated smiles, I used to sneak to the kitchens during parties and guess her tea by the smell alone. Fire blossom always cut through: burnt citrus and smoke, like the breath right before a storm makes up its mind.

The corridor hum shifts. First ward—gone.

My hand hovers over the brass. The second ward wakes like a snake—not symbolism, but reflex—coiled in the metal waiting for the wrong skin. The vibration threads up my arm and sinks teeth into my nerves.

I could burn through it. I could also tattoo my guilt into the handle for every ward-sense in the wing to feel in the morning. Seara would read the scorch like a confession.

So I do what I’m actually good at. I slow down.

I map the latch with my fingertips, feeling for what it pretends not to be. There. A notch tucked behind the curve of the flame sigil, no bigger than a breath—hidden unless you know to look. Beneath it: a pinprick hollow.

My blood.

Of course.

I glance back. The corridor is empty except for the low whisper of air from a vent, the listening silence of a house that prefers you obedient.

“Real enough for you, Cassie?” I mutter, because pettiness is oxygen, and press my thumbnail into the soft skin at my wrist until it parts. A single drop welts up, bright and disloyal. I feed it to the hollow.

The metal warms under my grip. The latch clicks. Not dramatic. Just a soft surrender, like the lock recognizes me and is embarrassed about it.

I listen. Nothing moves. No rush of booted feet. No alarm like a throat scream. The seal above the door stays dim.

I slip inside and close the door behind me. Twice. The second click lands between my shoulder blades like a finger.

The room breathes around me—warm, recent, occupied. There’s steam curling from a cup on the desk. Perfume in the air: smoke and lemon and something older that doesn’t belong on a human tongue. Seara’s scent, precise as an accusation.

This isn’t a library. It’s a cathedral built to secrets.

Blackwood walls drink the light. The carved edges look like flames paused mid-lapse, and if I stare too long they nearly move. Shelves climb to an arched ceiling, bowed under tomes bound in leather and scale and veined stone. Some books glow faintly, others pulse like sleeping animals who dream teeth.

Moonlight tries the curtains and fails. Flame-orbs hover above the desk, lazy and predatory, their light licking along parchment edges as I cross the rug. They flicker as if arguing about whether I count as trespasser or problem.

My bones hum back. Not sound—sensation. The almost-snap of a match when it wants to exist. The same hum that thrummed outside Kess’s favorite dive in Dominveil when we found the back door you’re not supposed to see. The same hum that lived in Cassie’s eyes while she told me to stop playing and give her something real. The hum Naomi meant when she said the word burn without flinching.

Everything in me says there’s both here: the kind of truth you cut yourself on and the kind of danger you stop pretending you don’t want.

Then I see it.

Not the neat stacks. Not the court-friendly ledgers. This.

Center desk. Glass dome. A ward so fine it’s basically arrogance. Beneath it: a book that isn’t really black, not if you know how to look. The surface slides with oil-slick rainbow like Veil-skin, textless, authorless, stamped with a sigil I know only because I’ve caught Naomi hiding pages with it in the cafeteria, slapping her palm over it when I ask. A closed eye crowned with flame.

She never told me what it meant. She always changed the subject like truth is a game you reward only when the student bleeds enough. Guess who’s fresh out of patience.

My hand hovers. The ward doesn’t bite—it hesitates. And that hesitation brushes the edge of my mind like a fingertip. Not words. Knowing. The kind of knowing that’s older than language and twice as rude.

I lean in and whisper, “I’m not afraid of the truth.” It’s a lie. It is also not.

I draw only from the thin threads I trust, not the deep wildfire that bolted out of me the last time I got cornered. Precision work. Heat with manners. Light without blaze. It wraps around my fingers like a palm warmer as I press forward.

The ward resists, thick and reluctant, more water than wall. I push, slow and mean. Sparks skitter along my skin like someone else’s laugh. The dome exhales into mist that catches on my knuckles, dissolves, and is gone.

The book is warm, almost alive. Of course it is.

I slide it out and place it on a stack of journals that suddenly looks like props. The room’s light shifts when I open it—not because a spell flickered, but because the air leaned in to eavesdrop.

No title. No table of lies. Just one sentence in smoke-colored ink that ripples when I breathe: History is the first magic erased.

Something under my ribs tightens. I turn the page.

The names are wrong in all the right ways: bloodlines we don’t say in class; treaties that weren’t; rebellions stripped back to bone. The voice doesn’t apologize for cutting. It assumes if you’re reading, you came to bleed.

Some pages are cauterized—paragraphs eaten by spellfire, edges crisped black like whoever copied this needed to burn and couldn’t help starting here. Others are maps layered like molted skin, borders flickering between planes: Dominveil drawn as a wound, not a city. A stitch holding when it wants to split.

Halfway through I stop breathing.

The Royal Purge. Not the sanitized coup covered in two paragraphs while the teacher points at a timeline and smiles like genocide is a hiccup. Here, it’s named properly: the coordinated assassination of Fae rulers by infiltrators wrapped in stolen flesh and fabricated memory. Human pawns with leashes. Magical bait that smelled like hope.

Blood ink spatters the margin. It still gleams like the page remembers being a throat.

This isn’t a book. It’s an indictment. A confession catalogued by hands that were tired of dying quietly.

By the time I close it I’m shaking. Cassie cuts through the static, the way she did when she leaned across the table and made being seen feel like a blade and a wish at once: Give me something real.

I hug the book against my chest so hard my ribs protest. “Fine. You want real? I’ll bleed you real.”

But it’s not just for her now. Not even mostly. It’s leverage. It’s proof. It’s key-shaped, and somewhere in here I can hear another lock humming.

Not the lights. Not the chandelier. Something else.

It’s coming from the back where the shelves bow into a crescent, a recessed alcove that feels like pressure points under a bruise. The air there has weight, a distortion that isn’t visible but insists anyway—heat rising from stone, a sigh stalled in a throat.

I move toward it even though the smart part of me has already packed a bag and left.

At the center, a pedestal rises from the floor like the room grew it in one piece, blackstone shot with molten veins. No plaque. No flourish. Just a shallow glass bowl and the thing that waits there like it was always going to be here when I finally was.

A shard. No bigger than a skipping stone. Ink-black, facets uneven like it was broken off something that still misses it.

It hums.

Not a sound you hear. A vibration you find in the hollow beneath your collarbone and then can’t unfeel. It’s older than my bloodlines and feels exactly like home.

My fingers hover. Don’t, says a voice I don’t respect. What I think instead is: What are you.

The shard pulses. Not metaphor. A single thud, precisely matched to my heartbeat. My throat goes dry. My skin prickles. It hums again, lower, fuller, spreading through my bones like Naomi’s growl when the Veil breathes wrong near us.

Except this isn’t warning. It’s recognition.

I take it.

Awareness flares—too sharp to be light. For a blink, I’m looking through a hole that isn’t a hole: a door buried in salt and bone; a tower yawning open where grief split it; my own hand older than this, holding this same shard lit from the inside like it will crack me before it breaks.

Gone. Pulse dead. The shard cools and sits there in my hand like it never did anything.

No sigils. No edges that tell me what it wants. But my gut already wrote it down: not a weapon. A key.

To what? Don’t know. Someone will. Someone will have to.

I don’t want to let go, but I slide it into my pocket and press my palm there like pressure will convince it not to vanish. “This might be the proof,” I whisper to the air, because the room has ears and acting like I don’t know that is a luxury. “This might be the thing that makes them stop patting my head.”

That’s when I see it: the personal drawer left a sliver open.

Not enough to say messy. Seara doesn’t do messy. Enough to say someone touched this recently and forgot their own perfection.

I don’t intend to open it. Then again, I didn’t intend to learn to breathe in the space between want and hurt either. Instinct has already written this page for me.

The drawer should be sealed. It isn’t. Another private insult.

Inside: her usual neatness. Scrolls bound in crimson ribbon. A gold-flecked inkwell. A handkerchief with our crest stitched too precisely to be anything but performance. I almost close it in disgust before I see the plain wooden box tucked behind gray-string letters. Unmarked. Unlocked. Warm.

I lift it like it might cry.

The air tilts when I open it.

A bracelet. Gold and delicate, made for a wrist that hadn’t learned to fist yet. No gemstones. No court flourish. Just a name engraved in a smooth, sure hand, and a tiny flame glyph mid-flicker beside it.

Mira.

I forget to breathe. I asked once—years ago, back when I still thought adults explained things if you asked them properly—if anything from my babyhood survived. Seara looked at me like I’d tried to hand her a human calendar. She said no. She said human years were too short to matter. She said sentiment is inefficient.

But here it is. Perfect. Preserved. Hidden. Something she kept and kept from me.

The hollow in me splits wider. I trace the curve of the letters with a fingertip that shakes. Someone made this carefully, for me. Too elegant for any man I can imagine. Too personal for anyone but her.

She kept it. She hid it. That hurts worse than if she’d thrown it away.

The heat behind my eyes isn’t power. It’s ache. It’s anger I’m tired of chewing until it tastes like sugar.

I press the bracelet to my sternum and I swear it remembers the shape of what I was.

The air changes—slight, deliberate—like weather deciding to be a storm.

I turn.

She stands in the doorway as if doors exist to frame her. Seara. Silent. Watching me with the kind of stillness that always makes me feel seventeen and small and noisy. Smoke-gray silk robe, crown braid catching the room’s feeble light like trapped fire. Her molten eyes take stock: open drawer; empty pedestal; my fist around something that was never supposed to be mine.

Her voice is velvet over glass. “Is that what we are now? Thieves in our own house?”

My stomach knots. I straighten because my spine performs obedience before I can stop it. “I wasn’t—”

“Don’t lie.”

Not loud. Not cruel. Surgical. The kind of cut you feel later when the air hits.

“I was looking. For school.” It sounds thin even to me. “My partner—Cassie—she said she wanted something real. I thought you might have—”

“Something real.” She tastes the words. They burn anyway.

She steps inside and the door seals behind her without saying it did. My fingers bite the bracelet harder.

“You never told me this existed,” I say, voice sharper than I mean and nowhere near sharp enough for the slice in my chest.

“I don’t tell you many things.” She circles the desk like a predator drawing lines I’m supposed to learn by bruises. “You mistake that for cruelty. It isn’t.”

“Oh? Then what do you call it? Love?” The heat climbs my throat faster than I can pretend I don’t want to choke on it. “Is that what silence is? Is that what control is? Training me like a flaw you have to engineer into a weapon?”

“You are not a mistake.”

The words hit hard because for a heartbeat her voice frays. The smallest thread of desperation. There. Gone.

“You’re not ready,” she continues, steel sliding back into place. “You think truth is a prize. It’s a burden. I’ve carried it so you wouldn’t have to.”

“No.” My voice shakes and I refuse to let it apologize. “You kept it so I’d be easier to manage.”

Disappointment etches her mouth into a prettier knife. “You don’t understand the game you’re pushing into. You haven’t even seen outside the board.”

“And whose fault is that?” My chest is a cage and the thing inside is done playing nice. “You send Selene to the summits and the galas and the rooms that matter. You lock me here. What does that make me, other than the secret you’re ashamed of?”

“I kept you alive.”

“No.” The word scrapes as it leaves. “You kept me ignorant.”

Something flickers through her—pain, regret, a shadow of a human expression—and then it buries itself where all her soft things go to suffocate.

“You think the world will reward your recklessness?”

“It might not.” I step toward her because backing down feels like a sin punishable by becoming my mother. My fists tremble and I lift my chin anyway. “But at least I’d die picking the match.”

The room’s temperature lifts like someone pressed a hand against a feverish forehead. Heat pulses slow from behind my ribs, a fog rising from molten stone. Seara’s gaze cuts to my hands.

They’re glowing. Not bright, not safe either—light bleeding at the edges where flame licks my skin and refuses to burn me. It synchronizes with my heartbeat, ratting out every thought I wish would stay hidden.

I try to swallow it down. It refuses me.

“I’m not Selene,” I manage, and the words feel like glass. “I’ll never be her.”

“No.” No hesitation. “You’ll be something far more dangerous.”

My breath knifes my lungs. The air between us warps; the flame-orbs above flicker like they’re remembering how to be afraid. Magic climbs my spine with its nails out.

“You don’t see me,” I spit. “You don’t know me—”

“I see you.” She steps in close enough that I want to run and punch her in the same breath. “I see every fracture. Every fear. Every time you bite your tongue and call it control. You think that’s weakness?” Her gaze flicks to my trembling, glowing hands. “You think this is something to hide?”

“You trained me to fear it.”

“I trained you to survive it.”

Something in me snaps like a wire under too much weight.

“I don’t want to survive you!” I scream.

The room answers.

Not with flame—sound. A pure, shattering ring like glass deciding it’s tired of holding its shape. The chandelier erupts—crystal detonates into a halo that rains constellations, the mirror above the fireplace webs out in fractures that glow before they accept their new reality. Light pours out of me—hands, mouth, eyes—unpolished and true and hungry.

Seara does not flinch.

The doors slam open. Guards flood the threshold with blades and built spells and that feral panic that precedes bad decisions.

Seara raises a hand without taking her eyes off me. “Stand. Down.”

They don’t obey instantly. They obey in the exact amount of time it takes for a person to choose to live.

They step back. No one breathes.

The air still hums with the sound of my losing control. The chandelier’s bones glitter around us like an accusation. Seara holds my gaze like the only thing that exists is this line between us and the things we refuse to admit about what it is.

I move first.

I run.

I shoulder past the guards on the echo of their obedience, scrape through the door that still remembers shuddering, and charge the corridor like it owes me mercy. The marble is cold under my bare feet. The air is hot the way a room is after a scream—warped, shimmering, tasting like scorched silk and ozone and the wrong end of truth.

The bracelet bites my palm. The book thumps my ribs. The shard taps my hip with every step, an animal heartbeat that refuses to sync with mine.

I don’t look back. Not at the ruin. Not at the guards. Not at the woman who insists love looks like triage.

By the time I slam my door, my lungs are serrated. My magic won’t settle; it thrums under my skin like static that wants to be lightning.

I lock the door. I slide down it until the wood digs into my spine like I deserve to be reminded I have one. The floor is cool against my overheated legs. I am not crying. Not yet. The kindling is dry and stacked and pretending.

I look at the bracelet. Just a glimpse. It wrecks me.

Not because it’s beautiful. Not because it proves she once gave a damn. Because I can’t pick which is worse: that she kept it or that she hid it.

I press it to my heart hard enough to bruise the letters into my skin. The gold is cool. Somehow it remembers warmth anyway.

The book sits heavy in my satchel, a low thrum like a heartbeat I can’t hear but can feel. The shard hums faint under my palm, the vibration slinking into bone the way secrets do when they want a permanent address.

I got what I came for. I should feel bigger. I feel like a live wire left where rain can find it.

I didn’t stride out triumphant. I didn’t prove to Naomi and Kess that I’m ready to drag a match across the city and own the consequences. I didn’t earn Cassie’s respect. I stole and screamed and ran.

A sob punches up without permission. Then another. I fold in tight around my knees with the bracelet crushed between my palms like a prayer I never learned the words for. The room smells like her: fire blossom and lemon. It clings to my skin, my hair. I hate that it’s comfort. I hate that it won’t leave.

Seventeen years insisting I didn’t want anything she wouldn’t give. Seventeen years swearing I didn’t care.

I did. I do. I wanted her to see me. Choose me. Love me the way her gaze softens for Selene when pride curls the corner of her mouth.

Instead I got lessons in flameproofing and silence sharp enough to shave off the parts of me that didn’t fit.

“I don’t want to survive you,” I’d said. The truth underneath it is uglier: I wanted her to pick me even when I made it impossible.

Time puddles. Breath hitches in the gap between sob and scream. The last curl of her magic is still licking the corners of the room like it’s marking territory.

A knock. Soft. Then the quiet click of an unlocked door as if it was always going to open anyway.

Selene enters like moonlight—the kind of presence that doesn’t flood a room so much as teach it how to be gentle. She closes the door and the air behaves. Of course it does.

She looks wrong in here, too calm for the mess, too precise for the scattered contents of my bag, the shard pulsing faint by my pillow, the bracelet welded to my hand by grief and sweat.

She says nothing about any of it. She crosses to the bed and sits beside me like a ritual, composed and contained, like a fire that learned its boundaries and kept its heat.

I can’t look. I don’t need to; she’s warmth within reach. Steady. Tidal.

Selene had titles before I had molars. She’s everything Seara wants the world to applaud and none of that stops her from showing up for me anyway.

Her hand lifts. A thumb brushes my cheek. I flinch—not because it hurts, but because I forgot what a touch without strings feels like.

“I ruined everything,” I whisper into the space where my breath ghosts and doesn’t condense.

“No.” Her voice is a low promise. “You cracked the glass.”

I look up. There’s no pity in those molten eyes. No neat disappointment. Shame would be easier. She gives me pride. And sorrow. Twined tight around each other like ivy strangling marble. Beautiful. Violent. True.

“I’ll never be what she wants,” I say, because some truths can’t be kept in a drawer.

Selene studies me, seeing parts Seara refuses to name. “Maybe that isn’t the tragedy she thinks it is.”

The words land like oxygen after too long underwater. I break quietly. No blaze. No theater. Just a full-body shudder as tears finally agree to do their job.

Selene doesn’t pull me into her arms. She doesn’t start telling me who I am. She does the harder thing: she stays exactly here.

One hand steady between my shoulder blades. An anchor disguised as a sister.

For the first time in weeks, the weight of being chosen settles where it belongs. Not because I’m impressive. Not because she needs me useful. Because I’m me. And she loves me even when I am messy and loud and incandescently wrong.

She doesn’t speak again. She doesn’t need to. Her palm keeps time on my back and I let my breathing try to mimic it. The space between inhales stretches and softens until the edges of the room blur.

The bracelet is still in my fist. I don’t remember curling around it; I only notice the curve of the letters pressing into my palm like a brand and—somehow—an answer.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the burn behind my eyes finally goes dim. My body drops heavy as if gravity finally remembered my name. Thoughts tangle until I let them. I lean, shoulder finding hers, and let everything I’ve been balancing crash where it wants.

Her hand stays. Her breathing stays.

The dark comes for me like a tide that loves the shore. And this time, for once, I don’t fight it.