“And then you came here,” he said. “You made a life that was yours. You built safety. And now, someone’s gotten close enough to rattle it. Tomatter.And you’re scared because that means they can break it.”
Her voice cracked. “He won’t understand.”
“Hedoes,” Rowan said quietly. “Maybe more than you do. That lion’s been walking around with a broken heart and too much swagger for years. He knows what it means to be betrayed by the ones who were supposed to love you.”
She blinked, vision blurring.
“He doesn’t need perfection. He doesn’t need the perfect words. But hedoesneed the truth.”
“And what if the truth is… I don’t know if I’m enough for this?”
Rowan smiled. “Then that’s the truth. And he’ll still choose you. Every day.”
Lillith buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know how to let someone stay.”
“Then let them stand beside you,” Rowan said. “Start there.”
Upstairs, something clattered. Dominic’s voice cursing low, and Markus’s amused laugh echoing after.
Lillith exhaled, slow and shaking. She wasn’t ready. But maybe she was willing to try because if she didn’t, she was going to lose the one thing that had ever felt like hers not out of obligation, or magic, or curse—but out of something deeper.
Love.
Maybe not yet spoken. But it's already real.
21
DOMINIC
Dominic hadn’t said more than ten words to Lillith since they left Rowan and Markus’s place.
Not out of spite. Not really. Just… protection. From himself. From her. From what he might say if she looked at him the way she had the night before and didn’t mean it.
She’d flinched at his affection like it had teeth.
And maybe it did. Maybe love, real love, had always been a little too wild for people like them to hold without bleeding. So he focused on the one thing that didn’t twist him into knots—the woods.
The very reason they were in this mess.
Because before there was kissing and curses and shared homes, there was a magical storm ripping through Echo Woods and a prince with too much power and too little conscience.
He needed answers. And if Lillith wasn’t going to help him find them—at least not right now—he’d do it himself.
Which was how he found himself at Everglen Market with a basket of empty spell jars on one arm and a temper hovering somewhere between simmer and explode.
Lillith had obviously had to go with him but he had insisted that she stay and visit with a few of her friends at their stand while he did his shopping and inquiry. Mainly because he didn’t feel like explaining who he was meeting.
“Dominic Kane,” drawled a familiar voice behind a stall full of glowing vine cuttings and moon-sweetened herbs. “I was beginning to think you forgot about the rest of us.”
He turned, cocking a brow. “Bea. Still hoarding every magical garden secret like a dragon?”
Bea Blackthorn, half-fae, full menace, and occasional provider of hard truths, grinned like she had something sharp between her teeth. Her long braids were threaded with silver charms, and her hands were stained green from the elixirs she brewed in her alchemy greenhouse two towns over.
“I don’t hoard,” she said, plucking a leaf from his collar. “I just don’t hand things over to shifters with more brawn than brains.”
“Bold coming from someone who once sold me talking chamomile.”
“You’re still mad about that?”
