I still love you. I always will.
No codes. No names. No coordinates. I send it on a civilian band that bounces off the belt and will probably die of loneliness before it hits anything he’s listening to. My thumb shakes anyway when I press send. The band chimes once, meek and brave. I expect nothing. I leave it on the sill, dark.
The next morning, the band is where I left it, dumb and faithful. The next night, I send nothing and tuck it back into the box. On the third day, I forget to breathe during a fitting and the seamstress pats my elbow like I’m a horse about to spook. On the fourth, Kaspian walks me through the garden with a politeness that feels like a pillow pressed gently over my face. On the fifth, Mama tells me a story about her grandmother’s veil and says the wordlegacyso many times it stops meaning anything and starts sounding like a brand of soap.
Three nights before the wedding, I wake in the dark with the feeling that someone has said my name without sound.
The house is quiet. Even the polite ghost in the pipes is asleep. My room smells like linen and a faint whisper of the rosewater they kept pushing at me and I kept declining. The moon is a thin coin caught in the crosshatch of the window lattice. The citrus trees out in the court breathe sugar.
I roll over, tug the sheet, and freeze.
There’s something on my windowsill that shouldn’t be.
I sit up, heartbeat stumbling, eyes trying to make sense of shapes. It’s small. It drinks the moon. A shard of night, curved and matte, the size of my palm. My feet hit the floor before Iknow I’m moving. The stone is cold under my toes. The window is still latched. The curtains are where I left them. The air is just air.
I pick it up and nearly drop it. It’s heavier than it looks. Smooth in the way a river makes things smooth after years of insisting. The edges are hard. When I turn it, the tiny cross-hatching of growth rings catches the light—silver tracing black like frost. Vakutan armor plating. A scale. His.
No witness but me and the moon and the lemon ghosts still clinging to the wood.
I press it against my palm and my whole chest goes electric. The room tilts. The last week rewrites itself in a breath. Not gone. Not gone-gone. Somewhere. Close enough to lay this down without waking the house. Close enough to know I’d find it. Close enough to listen to my breath from wherever he is and match it the way the medic taught him.
“Rayek,” I whisper, and the glass doesn’t fog because the night is dry and my mouth has run out of water. “Ah, saints.”
The scale warms in my hand the way metal does when it’s been touched recently, when heat lingers instead of leaving. I press it to my sternum, right over the place my heart refuses to behave, and something in me that’s been holding itself upright out of spite finally leans.
No note. No promise. No explanation.
Enough.
The lemon smell is suddenly bearable. The dark looks less like a stage and more like a place. I slide back into bed with the scale under my palm, between skin and sheet, my own stupid treasure. My eyes don’t close fast. When they do, I dream of a shadow by the chess tree, of gold eyes where the cypress meet the sky, of a hand on the stone of my windowsill and a breath paused, listening for mine.
Maybe I’m not alone in this house that keeps trying to make me a statue.
CHAPTER 14
RAYEK
Mist slicks the cliff like breath on glass, and I make myself into weather.
Cloak pulled, heat bled off my scales, I lie flat where the rock knuckles out over the sea and let the estate’s lights paint my sight in faint geometry. The river down there is a black ribbon that keeps forgetting it belongs to the ocean. The lemon trees whisper. The cypress hold their long gossip. Two weeks gone, and I never left; I just learned how to be a rumor with teeth.
Her message found me in a place that didn’t have a name, only coordinates and a pipe that sang at night. The comm bead I took off a dead man clicked, coughed, and then gave me her voice in seven words:I still love you. I always will.I have been hit by artillery that gentled me more than that sentence. I did not answer. I stood up. I came back.
I didn’t return to interfere. I told myself that when I bought the ghost skiff and taught it our coastline’s bad habits. I told myself that when I walked the outer paths at hours only dogs and debtors keep. I told myself that when I climbed the old aqueduct and left a single scale on her windowsill because thereare truths a man can’t put into a channel without making them small, and I refuse to make this small.
But there she is now, in the garden, and the lie that I am not here to change anything tilts.
She walks in a gown that hasn’t learned the final hem, white and arrogant, pins glinting like tiny threats at the seams. The seamstresses scatter ahead of her like birds fleeing a tide, fussy, fluttering, excited to have their hands on a legend. She moves beautifully, as if the dress was the one being fitted to her and not the other way around. Kaspian follows at a courtly distance, harmless as a hymn. He speaks; I can’t hear the words through mist and height. She tips her head back and smiles for him out of duty or kindness or the habit of surviving. The smile lands in me like a blade that thinks it’s a mirror.
“I can’t do this,” I tell the rock, which is unhelpful. “I can’t.”
I wait anyway. I count the beacons on the eastern wall while the house checks its locks, while the staff rehearses being generous, while the cameras blink in the slow pattern Sneed thinks I don’t know. I let night distill the day into something a body can breathe. When the fog thickens enough to swallow footsteps and the last polite light goes dim in her wing, I move.
The ghost skiff holds to shadow like sin loves a saint. I take the shoreline, slip under the lowest camera’s stare, slide into the culvert that coughs the kitchen’s wash into the river. It smells like lemon and old stew and plans. I count my handholds by the memory of old scrapes and old escapes; I learned this house’s bones the way a medic learns to listen to the chest. The stones remember my weight. The vines don’t complain. The window ledges recognize the shape of my hands and become steps. I enter the way water enters: everywhere, politely, unstoppable.
No alarms. No voices. Only the hush of vacuum-sealed doors and the soft tick of old wood remembering heat. Sneed shifts the camera sweep at the top of the east stair at this hour; the blindspot lasts five breaths. I make myself into the sixth and step through.
She’s already in the observatory when I open the door without sound.
