Page 34 of Blood Currents
“Elio’s been performing his whole life,” I said.“He doesn’t get tonotperform.Not if he wants to survive in that house.If he said those things—”
“You’re defending him?”she asked, disbelief and anger lacing her voice.
“I’m defendingyou,” I corrected gently.“Your judgment.Your heart.You don’t fall for liars, Mari.If you felt something real with him, it was real—even if he couldn’t show it when it mattered.”
She stared at me, clearly wanting to refute it, but her silence told me she couldn’t.
“You think he wanted to condemn me?”I asked.“You know him better than that.”
Her voice cracked.“Then why does it feel like betrayal?”
“Because feelings aren’t logical,” I said simply.“You canknowhe didn’t mean it and stillfeellike he did.Those two truths can exist together.It doesn’t make either of them less valid.”
Her breathing stuttered, and then she leaned against my shoulder.The rigid tension started to ease, bit by bit.
“Cyrus has been… present,” she murmured after a long pause.“When everything was falling apart, he was just there.No masks.No pretending.”
“And that makes you care about him,” I said.It wasn’t a question.
She nodded, looking almost guilty.“And I still love you.And I thought… I thought I loved Elio.Now I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
“You don’t have to know yet.”I shifted to look at her properly.“Love isn’t a finite resource.What you feel for me doesn’t get erased because you care for Elio or Cyrus.It just… changes shape.Resonance doesn’t disappear when it splits.It grows.”
Her eyes flicked to mine, wet but steady.“How can you be so accepting of this?”
“Because I nearly lost the ability to feel anything,” I said honestly.“Months of being broken down until I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine.You fought to give me myself back.How could I not want you to have the freedom to feel fully, too?”
Her tears spilled then, quiet and unguarded.
The words scraped against old fears, relics of silence I hadn’t dared break for years.But I said them anyway.“I love you.”
She let out a shaky laugh that was half a sob.“I love you too.Always have.”
I wrapped my arms around her, feeling Scout press closer against her ribs.Wisp lifted her head briefly before settling with a faint shimmer of portal-light.
“For what it’s worth,” I murmured, “I think Elio loves you too.He just doesn’t know how to show it without breaking himself.”
“And Cyrus?”she whispered.
“Cyrus already shows it,” I said.“He doesn’t have to say it to make it true.”
She went quiet at that, her breathing finally steadying.She’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, her breath even, body soft with trust.And I sat there in silence, not needing answers.Just trying to hold on to the quiet truth that I was still me—and I was still hers, however this ended.
15
Elio
The royal dorm was stillstanding.Untouched.No Shroud Guard pounding at the doors with their black armor, no parental visits that arrived with the cold efficiency of surgical strikes, no sign of Keane’s uncle slithering through the wards like poison through an open wound.
Too lucky.
I’d been raised to know there’s no such thing as luck—not in my family’s world, where every advantage was calculated and every coincidence was orchestrated.If things looked calm, it was because someone had set the stage that way.Someone was pulling strings I couldn’t see, arranging pieces on a board I didn’t fully understand.
And it worried me.As if I needed anything else to worry about after that dinner.
Echo clung to my shoulder, her scales flickering a restless orange as she shifted from one clawed foot to the other.She mirrored me too well—restless, sharp-edged, a performance wound so tightly it could snap.
We sat in my sanctuary, the vast night sky spread above us through the enchanted glass dome.Stars wheeled overhead in their ancient patterns, cold and distant and honest in a way nothing else in my life could be.This was supposed to be my refuge—the one place where the mask could come off, where I could breathe without measuring each exhale for its effect on my audience.
