I didn’t know many who’d risk their lives for someone else without command or coin or power to gain. Especially not unmarked. Mortality was too fragile, and most people clung to it like survival was the point. Like simply being alive was the highest thing they could hope for.
But not her. She lived like someone who understood the difference between breathing and burning.
I stepped between her knees, close enough to feel the heat rolling off her skin. Carefully, I threaded the needle and began the first stitch.
I bent closer and anchored my hand against her jaw to steady her as I worked. “Hold still,” I said quietly.
“You’re awfully good at this,” she said, voice low. I didn’t answer right away, focusing on the needle’s path through her skin.
“Before the city fell, before King Talon took Nyxarra, they captured our healers during the Purge. We had to learn to care for our own.”
She was quiet. Watching me. “You?” she asked. “Personally?”
I nodded once. “I would never ask my people to do something I wasn’t willing to learn. I was their general, after all.”
She didn’t say anything. Just watched me finish the final stitch and tie it off with a quick knot. Her eyes flicked to my hand, her brow furrowed. She winced at the way the skin pulled tight around the sutured wound.
“Your palm,” she murmured. “Odd scar. That from stitching yourself up?”
I stilled. The thin, pale line cut across the center of my hand, a wound that would never fade. I flexed my fingers once, then let them fall still again.
“No,” I said at last. “Talon gave it to me. The truth blade always scars. A little token of gratitude for binding myself to Nyxarra—for taking the Keeper’s oath.”
Her gaze lingered on the mark like it might explain more than my words.
When I wiped away the last of the blood, her eyes flicked up to mine. And something lodged in my throat. It wasn’t just the way she looked at me—steady, quiet, unflinching—it was the way I felt under her gaze.
That was dangerous.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
I nodded once. “You’re welcome.”
She stood, brushing her palms on her thighs. But I saw the weight settle back into her shoulders as she reached the infirmary doors. Just before she stepped out, I said, “The ball. You should be prepared. Every interaction, every move is a play at power.”
Her hand stilled on the doorframe.
“There’s a chance King Talon will be in attendance,” I added.
She turned slightly, not fully facing me. “Should I be impressed or afraid?”
“Both,” I said. “He enjoys making people forget the difference.”
Talon. The oldest of the monarchs. Kaelith’s father, and by far the most unpredictable. I’d seen him smile while ordering executions. Raise a glass to peace while razing cities to ash. Promise safety, then bind an entire people to this land. My people.
I wasn’t sure if Talon had taken an interest in Aurelia yet, butKaelith announcing a bride had been one of Talon’s conditions for handing over the crown.
“You know, Malachi,” she said matter-of-factly, “you underestimate me.”
She stepped closer, too close, until there were only inches between us. The smile on her lips wasn’t amusement—it was calculated. A mask, one I recognized too well because I wore my own.
Her fingers traced where my leathers met my belt, walking slowly upward as if daring me to flinch. Up my chest, pausing at my mouth. She tugged my bottom lip down with one finger, eyes fixed on the faint glint of fang. Testing it. Testing me.
“Sharp,” she murmured, voice soft but edged like glass.
Her eyes met mine, dark and sure. “I don’t need sharp teeth to bite back, Malachi.”
She turned and walked through the hall, her strong legs making purposeful strides toward the kitchen. For half a breath I didn’t follow; my gaze had slipped lower. When she called back, I dragged my eyes up and caught the look she left me: heat glinting beneath a sly curve of her mouth, a smirk that said she knew exactly where I’d been looking.