Chapter 573

I didn’t make it to the end of the corridor before my vision blurred.

Finch4

Not crying – I wasn’t crying. I’d made a specific decision on the way out of the quarters that crying was not something I had the capacity for tonight, that the feeling was too large and too complicated for something as simple as tears. The blur was something else. The specific visual effect of moving too fast through a space when your body hadn’t caught up to what your mind had just processed.

I rounded the corner near the secondary stairwell and walked directly into someone.

–

Hands caught me before I hit the floor — reflexive, the automatic response of someone with good instincts and a body that moved faster than thought. I registered the height first, then the grip, then the face when I looked up.

Killian.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

“Are you alright,” he said.

“Fine,” I said, which was so obviously untrue that saying it was almost funny. Almost.

He didn’t release me immediately. Not holding on just the pause of someone checking that the person they’d caught was actually stable before transferring weight back to them. When he was satisfied I wasn’t going to list sideways, he stepped back.

“Where are you going,” he said.

“Somewhere that isn’t the quarters,” I said.

He looked at the corridor I’d come from. Back at me.

“Do you want to walk,” he said.

7

I thought about going back to the quarters. About Kael’s face when he’d said it – you told me to say it – and the specific quality of the silence that had followed, the moment when he’d registered what he’d said and I’d seen him register it and it hadn’t changed anything because the damage was already exactly what it

was.

“Yes,” I said.

We walked.

7.27 pm PP PP

Chapter 573

Firichs

The pack grounds at this hour had the specific quiet of a place that was inhabited but not awake — the guards on rotation, the occasional light in a window, the sense of presence without the noise of it. We too the path that ran along the inner edge of the botanical perimeter, the one Ivory had planted with the nightbloom on the exterior edge so the luminescence was visible from the path without being overwhelming.

I’d been walking this path for weeks during the early morning channel work. It had become familiar in th way that places became familiar when you returned to them enough times that they stopped requiring attention. Tonight it required no attention, which was what I needed – something my feet could do without my head.

Killian walked beside me without talking.

This was one of the things I’d noticed about Killian in the weeks since his arrival – the specific quality of his silence. It wasn’t the silence of someone waiting for you to fill ft. It was the silence of someone who’d spent twelve years in his own company and had learned that silence wasn’t a problem to be solved.

After a few minutes, he said: “Tell me.”

Not what’s wrong* or *are you okay* or any of the questions that required me to perform a version of myself I didn’t have the energy for.

Just: *tell me.*

“He said he loved me,” I said.

Killian waited.

“I kept pushing,” I said. “I asked him directly – do you love me – and he said of course, you’re my fated mate, and I said that wasn’t an answer, and he said I love you, and I asked if he meant it-” I stopped walking.

We stood on the path with the nightbloom on one side and the dark interior of the pack grounds on the

other.

“And he said I’d told him to say it,” I said.

Killian was quiet for a moment.

“Kael,” he said, with the specific tone of someone who’d been in the pack long enough to have gathered extensive documentation on Kael’s relationship with his own feelings and their expression.

“I know,” I said. “I know he didn’t inean it the way it came out. I know he’s – I know he has twelve layers between what he feels and what he says, Ivory said it once and she’s right, I know all of that.” I looked at the nightbloom. “But it’s also been nine months. And he sleeps in the den. And he hasn’t touched me since before the Ghost Hunt. And I watched him every day for nine months and I know exactly where his eyes go when he doesn’t know he’s being watched.”

Killian said nothing.

“It’s not even that I’m angry at him.” I said, and this was the part that was the most difficult, the part I’d been trying to find words for since I’d left the quarters. “I understand how it works. I understand the history and the twelve years and what they built together and why it exists the way it does. I can’t be angry

7:27 pm P PPP

Chapter 578-

Finished

at Ivory because she hasn’t done anything wrong. I can’t even be fully angry at Kael because he’s not – he’s trying. I can see him trying.” I turned to face the path again. “But he loves her. And I’m his fated mate. And the specific unfairness of that is-”

“I know,” Killian said.

The quality of those two words stopped me.

Not *I understand* or *I can imagine* – the specific weight of *I know* from someone who’d used it to mean the exact thing.

I turned to look at him.

“How,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. The specific quiet of someone deciding how much to say. His jaw did the thing it did when he was working through a calculation – whether the information was worth the cost of saying it, whether the person receiving it was someone he was willing to be that honest with.

He looked at the nightbloom.

“Ivory is my fated mate,” he said.

The sentence arrived in the night air between us and stayed there.

I processed it.