“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means…” she replies, her voice quieter now, “… that I expected balance. Ice tempered by fire. A dragon who could choose restraint. I expected you to feel for her, but not the other way around.” Her eyes lift fully to Raze. “I did not expect your evolution to also include my daughter’s.”
A faint crack runs through the air near his shoulder, light bending toward him before smoothing flat again.
Bennett shifts uneasily. “Yeah, I was gonna say… whatever he’s doing now? That’s new.”
My mother watches him the way generals watch a battlefield finally fall into place, not surprised, not impressed… just certain.
“I did not miscalculate you,” she says quietly. “I allowed the pieces to move until you became what you were always meant to become.”
Raze’s eyes narrow, frost creeping across his knuckles in thin, cracking lines. “Allowed,” he repeats, voice low enough to make the walls listen. “Funny word choice.”
She doesn’t deny it. “The Seelie Prince has grown ambitious,” she continues, tone measured. “His court began pushing against boundaries that were never meant to be tested. I needed him to reveal himself fully… and arrogance is easiest to expose when it believes it is hunting prey.”
Understanding prickles along my spine.
Raze goes perfectly still beside the sofa.
“You didn’t just foresee this,” he says slowly. “You fed him something worth chasing.”
Her gaze flicks toward me for a heartbeat.
Not maternal.
Not cold.
Deliberate.
“I showed him possibilities,” she says.
Scar lets out a quiet curse under his breath.
Raze’s jaw tightens. “You baited him with Roxy.”
“I baited him with a future he thought he could control,” she corrects. “The difference matters.”
“The outcome doesn’t,” Raze snaps, fire and frost flashing under his skin. “He took her. He nearly broke this world open to do it.”
“And you answered,” she replies. “Exactly as I knew you would.”
Silence stretches, thick and heavy.
Raze exhales slowly, but the air around him warps, that new gravity in his power pressing against everything like a held breath.
“You pushed me into evolving,” he growls, realization settling in with dangerous calm. “You knew the seelie strike would force me past balance, past curse, into… whatever the fuck this is now.”
Her eyes sharpen, something like pride glinting through the violet-gold light gathering faintly around her fingers. “I saw the shape of what you could become,” she admits. “The prince would never fear fire alone. Ice alone, he already understood. But something born from both… something that bends the edges of reality…” She pauses, her voice lowering. “That is a language even fae royalty listens to.”
Raze lets out a short, humorless laugh. “So, you threw him at me like kindling?”
“I placed him where his own arrogance would lead him to burn,” she replies.
“And if Ihadlost control?” His voice drops, quiet enough to be more dangerous than a shout. “If that… thing inside me had torn through his realm? Throughours?”
There’s a pause.
Not hesitation.