“Yes,” I say, because I will not lie to her in this room. “If you ask, I will burn the aisle and the veil and any man who steps between, and I will carry you out past Sneed’s quiet and Kaspian’s kindness and your parents’ plans. But I won’t come for anything less than your voice in my ear sayingnow.”
She nods like a student who disagrees and writes down the lesson anyway. When she looks at me again, her eyes have that shine I have learned to fear and love. “Say it once more.”
“I love you,” I tell her, because vows do not get smaller with repetition. “Not the version of you in a dress. Not the version of you under this roof. The one who sets fire to the sky and calls it language. The one who cheats at chess with jam fingers. The one who doesn’t know how to be small even when she’s being good.”
Her throat works. “I love you,” she says back, like she’s bribing the dark. “The you who taught me to listen for engines and to count doors and to look up when people lie. The you who knows where to cut and where to hold.”
We dress like thieves after a good job. She fixes a strap that has lost its patience. I tie a knot I didn’t have to untie to get here and feel stupidly heroic about accomplishing something small.The pins go back in her hair with a speed that makes me suspect she practices being caught. The mock-up gown drapes wrong now and is better for it.
“This can’t happen again,” I say, and the sentence tastes like rust and medicine. “We are not built for sneaking and pretending the truth is a visitor. This”—I gesture at the table, the glass, us—“has to be enough to last a lifetime in case the world insists.”
She looks at me the way people look at doors that lock from the outside. She says nothing. Her eyes do all the work—betrayal and understanding, fury and love, a hundred things that all meandon’t you dare pretend that was goodbye.
I pull the cloak around my shoulders. I take a breath that is supposed to be final and isn’t. I open the door we came through and the observatory blinks at the shift in pressure like an old cat deciding whether to complain.
“Rayek,” she says, and it’s not a plea; it’s a compass.
“Yes.”
“Don’t disappear,” she says.
“I’m too heavy to vanish,” I try again, and this time she doesn’t laugh. She nods like she’s put the answer in a box and will open it later with better tools.
I leave.
The house has not changed its patterns in the hour we stole. I ride the blind spots like a man who built them. I pass under a camera that will never know it missed the most important thing it was installed to catch. The lemon trees exhale. The stairs down to the river remember my weight in a way that makes the stone warm under my feet. The culvert coughs me out into salt and fog.
Dawn has not committed. The mist is the exact color of regret. The sea keeps its secrets because it is good at that. The ghost skiff wakes under my hand like a cat that learned to purr from engines. I step in. I don’t look back at the window where Ileft a scale, or the tower where the glass knows our breath, or the chess tree that will always look like a man waiting to sit down and lose on purpose.
I don’t pretend it’s the end. Neither does she.
I push off, and the fog makes me into weather again. The skiff hums. The river forgets me. The day will come and try to make us small. It will fail eventually. It’s patient. So are we.
CHAPTER 15
STAR
Dawn breaks like cymbals.
“Up, honey,” Mama sings, throwing the curtains wide so Akura can stick its head in and gawk. The whole sky is a parade—hover-shuttles cutting silver arcs, orchestras riding levitation discs toward the sky courtyard, banners unfurling in colors that belong to old promises. From somewhere above the east towers, brass warms up in a bright, brassy argument with the gulls. The city has put on perfume; even the river smells expensive.
“I’m awake,” I lie, sitting up into a cloud of attendants. Steam breathes from the bath like a tame dragon; rosewater floats in it, sweet and too much. Hands shepherd me—washcloths, combs, murmurs.
“Deep breaths,” one of the bath attendants says, Irene, the gentle one. “In. Out. Again.”
“‘Out’ is my favorite part,” I mutter, slipping into hot water that licks the bruises I’m pretending I don’t wear. Heat crawls up my throat. The room is lemon-polished and quietly frantic.
CynJyn leans in the doorway like she owns the building, robe crooked, eyes wicked. “So… last chance to abscond with the pastry chef. He’s got forearms that make religious arguments.”
“Behave,” Mama says, but she’s smiling.
“I’m a hymn,” CynJyn assures her, then crooks a finger at me. “Blink twice if you want me to cut the power during the vows.”
“I need both eyes for walking,” I tell her. “We’ll trip later.”
“You heard the bride,” Mama says, clapping once to make the room obey. “Hair—up, but not like a tower. Face—fresh, not carved. Jewelry—light. She isn’t a chandelier.”
“Noted,” says Elise, pins clamped at the corner of her mouth. “Tilt, my Lady.”
