“I was trying to protect us.”
“So was I.”
Silence fills the space where the storm had been. The bond is still there. Still strong. But it feels… raw. Tender. Like skin burned and newly healed. He steps back.
“I cannot fight Velcryn,” he says quietly, “and fight you at the same time.”
“That’s not what this is,” I breathe.
“It is exactly what this is.”
His eyes soften, but in hurt. I hurted him.
“You don’t trust it,” he says. “And you don’t trust me with it.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then why did you try to sever it without telling me?”
I don’t have an answer that doesn’t sound like fear. He sees that, and something in him closes.
“I need distance,” he says finally.
The words feel like ice sliding beneath my ribs.
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
The bond flickers uneasily as he moves toward the door.
“I will not be cut away like a strategic liability,” he says without turning back. “Not by Velcryn. Not by you.”
The door opens with a sharp pulse of magic.
“Zeidan—”
He doesn’t wait. The door shuts behind him.
23
ZEIDAN
Ihave endured torture without screaming. I have stood in snow with a blade through my shoulder and not allowed my knees to bend. I have watched cities burn and chosen not to flinch.
None of that prepared me for what an ignored bond can do.
I lock myself inside the northern tower chamber and seal the wards personally. Not out of fear of attack. Out of fear of weakness. The room is sparse, stone, a narrow bed, a meditation dais carved with ancient Velcryn sigils meant to reinforce discipline and emotional compartmentalization.
I sit at its center.
I breathe. I empty my mind. And she is there.Not physically. But everywhere else.
The bond does not scream the way it did during the flare. It aches. A deep, constant pressure behind my ribs, like a second heartbeat slightly out of rhythm. I attempt to compress it, to fold it inward the way I have folded every inconvenient emotion since childhood. It does not fold. It resists.
Hours pass. Or minutes. Time becomes irrelevant when the only thing that exists is absence.
I see her when I close my eyes. Not memories. Projections.