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My heart pounds so loudly I can barely hear him when he begins.
“There was a woman,” he says slowly, his voice careful, deliberate, as if each word is a blade and he must choose where to cut.
“No, I must start further back. Once, long before either you or I were born, there was a courtship. A betrothal contract between noble families in Nightfall.”
His mouth hardens into a grim line.
“And when it ended, it ended badly.”
A chill ripples over me, despite the warmth of the room.
I frown, the image forming in my mind like a storybook come to life.
Not the sugar-coated kind, but the old kind—the original fairy tales with jagged edges and endings that always bleed.
And suddenly I’m afraid—not of him, not of us, but of what’s waiting in the rest of this tale.
Afraid of what it will mean for me, for us, once he finishes.
Because if the past is still reaching its claws into tonight, what happens when he lays it bare?
Chapter 31
Kael
A New DawnRises Over Castletide
Phoebe is right to demand answers.
She deserves them.
She deserves more than my silence, more than shadows and half-truths.
I owe her that and more.Much more.
But for one horrible moment, my throat closes.
I have to face it—that this ismy past.
My sins. My cowardice. My refusal to obey my father’s law, my arrogance that I could bend the world to my own will without consequence.
All of it led to ruin. To betrayal. To blood in the water and grief that never left me.
And tonight, it nearly reached through time and dragged my viyella down with it.
Fuck.
The thought cuts so deep I almost can’t breathe.
The image of Phoebe—my Phoebe—slipping beneath the waves because of a wound I caused long before she was ever mine—it’s unbearable.
It is a weight that would sink me to the bottom of the abyss if I let it.
Never again.
Never again will my silence be the reason my viyella suffers.
Never again will I hold back the truth, thinking to protect her, when all I do is make her vulnerable to the ghosts I’ve left behind.
