The rune under where my cheek had been was wrong. Not smudged, not pressure-dented. changed. The lines had rearranged into something other than what I'd copied out a dozen times this week. I'd stared at this page long enough to dream about it. I knew every angle, every flourish, every curve my mother had cut into the blade. This wasn't it.
I blinked hard and looked again. Still wrong.
My hand moved before my brain caught up, dragging the notebook over where I'd written the translations, lining the marks on the page against my own careful script. Destroy. That'swhat I'd written. The primary rune, the whole point of the dagger, a weapon built to obliterate whatever stood in its way. Which fit everything I knew about Eloise and her war with the dark that had followed her since before I was born.
Except the rune wasn't saying destroy anymore. And this wasn't a rune.
After Kearan's helpful explanation of the structure of the symbols, I saw it this time. This one symbol wasn't of the same language and intention of the others.
I leaned in, close enough to feel the lamp's heat, and watched the line move again. Not exhaustion, not bad light. The ink actually shifted against the paper, the symbol folding itself into something new, the same way it must have done for my mother a hundred times while she carved it, the same way it must have done the day she finally understood what she was making.
Free what has been bound.
Not destroy. This was completely different.
The breath I took didn't feel like enough air for the room. My hand went to the dagger across the table in its leather wrap I'd made for it, fingers brushing the pommel without unwrapping it. I traced that rune with my eyes shut. But the whole of it didn't land until I'd read the rest of the inscription.
Protection, one rune whispered. Boundary, insisted another. Blood-right, declared a third, larger than the rest. Then the last one that kept changing meaning. First destroy, and now freedom.
And under that, in letters so small I'd skipped them a dozen times, something in a demon language I vaguely recognized but couldn't seem to place. Probably because my demon powers were on the fritz.
The word sat in the middle of my chest with actual weight, pressing down hard enough that my breath snagged somewherebetween my lungs and my throat, and I had to consciously unstick it or go face-first into the grimoire again.
Ro.
The dagger wasn't built to destroy a demon. It was built to free one. My father. The man my mother had loved enough, or grieved enough, to spend years carving a key meant to crack open whatever cage held him.
Which meant Ro wasn't just difficult, dangerous, or impossibly old and strong. He was all of those and was still possessed. Held by something so big that Eloise had given years to cutting the answer into a blade and leaving it for me to find when I understood enough about my own power to use it.
The awe hit first, the kind that tilts the floor. She hadn't made this to protect herself from Ro. She'd made it for me. A way of saying, I couldn't save him, so I'm handing you the means. I'm giving you back your father.
And that thought slammed straight into the next one. What in the hell possesses a demon that completely?
Nothing good. Nothing he'd have chosen. Which confirmed all of Grayson's suspicions. My mother had known, and instead of trying to break it herself, she'd carved a key, hidden it, and waited.
For me.
The dread came next and brought everything with it. If the dagger could free Ro, I was the one who had to use it. The only one. Which meant walking straight at the man I'd spent my life afraid of. I had to take this blade, and do something that would either save him or take us both down, with no undoing it after.
The six lives of my mates were tied to mine. Which meant if I fucked up my own, then I'd fuck theirs up too.
And the old wound cracked open right beside it, the bone-deep certainty that I ruin more than I fix, that every time I reach for something good I find a way to make it worse.
What if Ro was just truly horrible, and unleashing him on the world would be more of a mistake. My mother's gift would turn into the worst thing I'd ever done with my hands. Free him just to lose him some other, uglier way.
Both at once.
Then I realized I wasn't alone.
Kearan stood in the doorway with one mug and one tall glass of coffee. He'd been there long enough to know I'd hit some kind of wall. I caught it in the way he tracked the grimoire, the notebook, my hands shaking a little as I dragged them into my lap. He didn't ask or push. He took the careful step forward that kept him exactly as far from me as he always stayed, and set the glass of iced coffee on the table beside the dagger.
I didn't trust myself to talk. Saying any of it out loud would make it real in a way keeping it in my head didn't, and it would pull Kearan into the orbit of a thing that had to stay buried until I knew what to do with it.
He'd just watched me wake into the worst kind of news, and he was still holding himself back like closeness was something he had to fight his own body to allow. Guess we were backtracking a bit.
So I picked up the coffee instead. The exact right temperature, cold enough to be refreshing, but not cold enough to give me a brain freeze. Kearan settled at the edge of the lamplight and asked me nothing, and that was the worst part.
The dagger lay wrapped between us. The grimoire sat open, showing off secrets my mother had carried alone. And I held the thing I'd just learned, too heavy to carry and too real to say out loud. Yet. My mother's last gift, my father's invisible cage, and the fact that I was the only key that fit.