Chapter 2: Tears of the past
The click of Ithan’s door latch gave way with minimal pressure; he never locked it, a silent, permanent invitation. Aria slipped inside, the plush carpet swallowing the sound of her bare feet. The room smelled like him—clean linen, the crisp aftershave he used, and underneath it all, the deep, wild scent of Prime. It was a sanctuary.Her sanctuary.
He was sprawled across the unmade bed, a mountain of muscle in gray sweatpants and a worn Pack t-shirt. The faint blue glow of his phone lit his face from below, carving shadows under the strong line of his jaw. Across the room, a sunball game played on the large screen, the commentary a low, rhythmic murmur. A striker executed a perfect solar-flare volley, and the crowd roared in tinny celebration.
Ithan’s thumb paused on its scroll. He didn’t look up, but his body went still, attuned to her presence as completely as if she’d shouted. His green eyes, when they finally lifted from the screen, found her in the dim light between the door and the bed.
He saw it all immediately. The slight tremor in her hands. The way she held herself, arms wrapped tight around her middle. The glistening tracks, still wet, cutting paths through the faint dusting of freckles on her cheeks.
The phone was dropped onto the rumpled duvet without a second glance. The game was muted with a flick of the remote. The sudden silence was thick, a held breath.
“Hey,” he said, his voice a low gravel of concern. He shifted, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The springs creaked. He patted the space beside him. “C’mere. What’s wrong?”
The gentleness in his tone was the final crack in the dam. A sob tore from her throat, ragged and painful. She stumbled forward, not to the spot he’d indicated, but straight into him, burying her face against the solid warmth of his chest. His arms came around her instantly, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other a firm band across her shoulders. He held her as she shook.
“Shhh, Arie. I’ve got you.Just breathe. Breathe with me.” His chest expanded in a slow, deliberate rhythm under her cheek, and she tried to match it, the air hitching in her lungs. The scent of him, the feel of his heartbeat—it grounded her enough to form the awful, tangled words.
“Why did…” she started, the sentence crumbling. She tried again, her voice muffled against his shirt. “Why did he have… why did Micah…” She pulled back, her green eyes, so like his but swimming in agony, searched his face. “Why did it have to be while he was there?”
Ithan’s expression tightened, a storm cloud passing behind his eyes. He knew exactly where this was going. He’d traveled this dark road himself, a thousand times, in the dead of night.
“Why couldn’t Micah do his evil shit to Danika when he wasn’t there.” The curse word fell from her lips, blunt and angry. It wasn’t her style, and that made it more devastating. “He wouldn’t have had the synth in his system if he wasn’t there. He was just… he was just there. He was just in the wrong place. It’s so stupid. It’s so fucking stupid!”
Her fist, small and clenched, pounded weakly once against his shoulder. It wasn’t an attack on him; it was an attack on the universe, on the brutal, random mechanics of a tragedy that refused to make sense. The hiccuping sobs returned, wracking her whole body. “He was just picking me up. He was just… there.”
Ithan didn’t offer hollow platitudes. He didn’t say it was fate or destiny or part of a plan. He just held her tighter, his own breath coming out in a long, controlled shudder. He rested his cheek against the top of her head, his gaze fixed on the frozen image on the TV—the striker suspended mid-air, triumphant—a world of simple victories.
“I know,” he murmured, the words vibrating through his chest into hers. “I ask that too. Every damn day. Why that night? Why that bar? Why did Danika have to drag him into her mess?” The old, familiar guilt bled into his voice, a wound that never fully scarred. “I should have been more careful. I should have seen what she was into.”
Aria shook her head violently. “No. Don’t. This isn’t about you. This is about… about the horrible, stupid, random luck of it.” She drew a wet, shaky breath. “He’d just texted me. ‘Be there in ten. Don’t order the flaming drink without me.’ He used the stupid flame emoji.”
A wet, half-choked sound escaped Ithan. It was almost a laugh, tangled in grief. “He hated when you ordered those. Said you were gonna singe your eyebrows off and he’d never find you a boyfriend.”
The shared memory hung between them, precious and brutal. For a moment, they weren’t Prime and grieving sister; they were just Ithan and Aria, missing Conner.
“I keep thinking,” Aria whispered, the anger subsiding into a bottomless exhaustion. “If he’d been five minutes later. If Danika had chosen a different dealer that night. If the Asteri’s brunch had run long…” Her voice trailed off into meaningless, torturous permutations. “And then I think… if he hadn’t been there, it would have been someone else’s brother. And that’s awful too. My brain just… circles.”
“It does that,” Ithan said softly. He finally loosened his hold, just enough to lean back and look at her. He used the hem of his own shirt to wipe her cheeks, a gesture so fundamentally big-brother it made fresh tears well. “It’s a loop. It doesn’t have an exit. You just… have to step out of it sometimes. Even when it pulls you back in.”
“How?” The question was a plea.
He didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know. Distraction.Fury. Work.” He sighed, his thumb brushing her temple. “Tonight, though? What pulled you in tonight? Was it the summit? That fucking prince staring at you?”
The shift was subtle, but the protective edge was back in his tone. The memory of Daemian’s calculating gaze in the hallway.
Aria hesitated. The truth—the phone contact, the Faegram follow, the liked photo—felt like a betrayal. It felt like stepping into a different loop, one Ithan wouldn’t understand. She couldn’t give it words. Not yet.
“It was just… being in that house,” she said, which wasn’t a lie. “All that Fae perfection. It made our loss feel messy. Ugly. Out of place.”
Ithan nodded, accepting that. He understood the language of spaces, of territories. “It is messy. And it’s ours. We don’t have to pretty it up for them.” He nudged her. “Want to stay here tonight? Like old times?”
When they were kids, after storms or bad dreams, she’d drag her pillow into his room. Conner would usually follow, complaining he’d be left out of the secret meeting, and they’d end up in a pile on this same, larger bed that had replaced their childhood bunks.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice small.
“Okay. Scoot over, runt.”
She didn’t need to be told twice. She crawled over to the far side, the cool sheets familiar, and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Ithan got up, moved to his closet, and pulled out an absurdly oversized hoodie. It was navy blue, faded, and had the logo of a long-defunct sunball team on it. Conner’s.
He tossed it to her. “Put that on. You’re shivering.”
She sat up and pulled the soft, worn fabric over her head. It drowned her, the sleeves hanging far past her fingertips, the hem brushing her knees. It smelled faintly of Conner’s old cologne, buried under years of laundry detergent and Ithan. She wrapped herself in it, a physical anchor.
Ithan climbed back into bed, settling against the headboard. He didn’t turn the game back on. Instead, he picked up his phone again, but this time he navigated to his photos. He scrolled for a minute, then turned the screen toward her.
It was a video. Grainy, shot on an older phone. Conner, maybe nineteen, was attempting to barbecue in their old backyard. He was wearing a comically small apron that said ‘Kiss the Cook’. A flare of flame shot up from the grill and he stumbled back, cursing creatively, while Ithan, behind the camera, laughed so hard he could barely hold the phone steady. Off-screen, a much younger Aria’s voice squealed, “Your eyebrows!”
A watery laugh burst from Aria. She watched the ten-second clip loop three times. It was a piece of him. Not the heroic, tragic figure from the news stories, but the real, messy, ridiculous brother.
“He was a terrible cook,” Ithan said, a real smile touching his lips.
“The worst,” Aria agreed, her voice thick.
Ithan put the phone down. “The bad thoughts… they’re gonna come.Let them. But don’t let them camp out. You counter them with this.” He gestured at the darkened screen. “With the real stuff. The stupid emojis. The burnt burgers. The dumb arguments about which Valgara’s Blade character was the hottest.”
“He was wrong, by the way,” Aria sniffed. “It was clearly Kaelin.”
“See? This is important legacy stuff.” Ithan’s tone was light, but his eyes were serious. “That’s how we keep him. Not in the why, but in the what.”
He reached over and turned off the lamp on his nightstand, plunging the room into darkness save for the city glow bleeding around the edges of the blinds. He slid down under the covers, his back to her, a habit from when they were kids and he’d become a wall between her and the monsters in the closet.
“Go to sleep, Arie.”
“Ithan?”
“Hmm?”
“Thanks. For not trying to fix it.”
A long pause. “Can’t fix it. Just have to live next to it. Now sleep.”
She lay in the dark, enveloped in her dead brother’s hoodie, her living brother a solid, breathing presence beside her. The terrible, circular why still pulsed in the back of her mind, a dull ache. But it was quieter now, pushed to the edges by the memory of a flame emoji, the feel of soft, faded cotton, and the steady, rhythmic sound of Ithan’s breathing.
In the pocket of the sweats she’d left on his floor, her phone screen lit up silently with a new, invisible notification.
D.Donnall is typing...
The glow persisted for a full minute in the dark room before fading away, the message never sent.
The glow persisted for a full minute in the dark room before fading away, the message never sent.
Across the city, in a suite at the top of the Avallen Embassy, Daemian stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, his phone a dark, cold weight in his hand. Lunathion’s skyline glittered below, a constellation of amber and white lights that held no warmth. He’d typed three different messages.
Are you alright?
That photo—
I felt that.
He’d deleted each one. The words were insufficient, blunt instruments for a wound he now understood was fathomless. His thumb had hovered over the ‘like’ on that old photo out of a simple, desperate curiosity. He’d wanted to see her smiling. He’d wanted a glimpse of the girl before the world had carved the light out of her eyes. The gesture had been a private one, a key turned in a lock he hadn’t known was connected to a live wire.
The shock had been instantaneous. It wasn't a thought or a memory. It was a raw surge of sensation that bypassed his brain and flooded his nervous system—a visceral tide of despair, of gut-wrenching why, of a loss so profound it felt like a missing limb. It had slammed into his chest, a phantom fist, knocking the air from his lungs. He’d physically staggered, bracing a hand against the cold glass.
Mate bond.
The knowledge was instinctual, ancient, a truth his body recognized before his mind could protest. He’d felt the faintest whisper of it at the summit, a magnetic pull he’d mistaken for inconvenient attraction. This was no whisper. This was a deafening cry echoing down a tunnel that connected directly to her. Her pain had become a shared current, flowing into him unimpeded. She had no shields, no concept of the tether between them. Her grief was an open room, and he’d just stumbled into it.
He’d stood there, immobilized, as the emotional storm raged—her fractured questions about Micah, about synth, about wrong places and stupid, random luck. The images were fragmented, sensory shards more than clear pictures. The chemical smell of a cleaned apartment that couldn’t erase death. The surreal horror of news reports. Ithan’s face, pale and rigid with a guilt that mirrored his own. The specific, haunting detail of a text message with a flame emoji.
He learned the truth not through files or rumors, but through the bond. It was a brutal education. Micah. The archangel.Synth. A forced, frenzied suicide pact enacted not by choice, but by chemical madness. Conner hadn’t been caught in crossfire; he’d been poisoned and turned into a weapon against his own pack. His death wasn’t a battlefield casualty. It was a meticulously orchestrated murder disguised as a tragedy.
“Gods,” Dae breathed out, the word frosting the windowpane. The cold case was anything but cold. It was a white-hot brand of knowing. He understood her flinching now, her desire to vanish. It wasn’t shyness. It was the permanent alertness of a survivor who knew catastrophe could be waiting in any room, delivered by any hand.
He looked at his own reflection in the dark glass—the prince, the politician, the heir raised on strategy and cruelty. He’d liked a photo and accidentally torn open a vein of the past. The invasion shamed him. To feel her so intimately, without her consent, was a violation. But the understanding it brought was irrevocable.
His knuckles were white around the phone. He couldn’t unsend the like. He couldn’t sever the bond. He could only stand in the silence of his too-quiet suite, feeling the distant, gradual softening of her anguish as she fell asleep beside her brother, a residual warmth that was both a comfort and a curse.
She was draped in a dead male’s hoodie, finding solace in one brother while a stranger, linked by fate and magic, stood guard in the dark miles away. He finally turned from the window. The unanswered message draft was still a ghost in his phone’s memory. He knew he couldn’t explain any of this to her. Not yet.
But he could do one thing. He opened his contacts, scrolled past the advisors and the diplomats, and tapped a new name he’d added hours ago. He hit call.
It rang twice before a sleep-roughened, annoyed voice answered. “Dae? It’s three in the gods-damned morning.”
“Ruhn,” Dae said, his voice stripped of its usual polish, leaving only stark intent. “I need access to something. The closed police file on the Pack of Devils massacre. Everything they have on Micah’s involvement. I need it yesterday.”
A long, static-filled sigh crackled through the speaker. Ruhn was clearly sitting up, the rustle of sheets audible. "That's...not a good idea, Dae." His voice was weary, weighted with more than just sleep.
"I want to know what happened." Dae's own voice sounded hollow, a stark contrast to the storm of feeling still echoing in his veins from the bond’s brutal transmission.
"What happened won’t be in those files." Ruhn said it with a finality that was a door slamming shut.
Dae began to pace, his bare feet silent on the cool, polished stone of the floor. The city’s lights swam in his peripheral vision. He felt a surge of sharp, bitter frustration. "Of fucking course Ruhn knows what happened. He’s Bryce’s brother." He muttered it, not into the phone, but the logic was inescapable, a neon sign in his mind. "If Ithan and Aria know what happened, Bryce knows what happened and that means Ruhn knows what happened."
He brought the phone back to his ear, his tone flattening into something dangerous, a prince's command. "Then you tell me. You tell me what’s not in the files. Now."
A heavy pause stretched, filled only with the faint hum of the open line. When Ruhn spoke again, the casualness was gone, stripped away to reveal the hardness of a male who’d seen the underworld’s blueprint. "It’s not my story to tell, Dae. It’s theirs. Conner’s. Danika’s. It’s Ithan’s, and it’s that kid’s—Aria’s."
Hearing her name in Ruhn’s mouth sent an irrational spike of territorial heat through Dae’s chest. It was the bond, a primitive, possessive flare. He clenched his jaw, forcing the reaction down. "I’m not asking for gossip. I’m asking for truth. The official report is sanitized bullshit. 'Mass hallucinogenic event.' I felt—" He cut himself off, the admission a step too far.
"You felt what?" Ruhn’s sharpness was immediate, a detective’s instinct hooking into the slip.
Dae exhaled, a rough sound. He pivoted, leaning his forehead against the cold window. The confession was corrosive, but necessary. "Something’s… connected. To the girl. The Holstrom girl. Aria." Saying it aloud made it more real, a shackle clicking into place. "It’s a line. Straight to her. I get these… echoes. I accidentally got one tonight. It was her grief.Raw. It was about Micah. About her brother just being in the wrong place."
Silence again, but this one was different. Processing. "Shit," Ruhn breathed out, the word heavy with understanding. "You’re telling me you have a… a bond? With Ithan’s little sister? Dae, he will literally rip your spine out and gift-wrap it for her if he thinks you’re sniffing around."
"I’m not sniffing!" Dae snapped, pushing off the window. He raked a hand through his hair. "I don’t want this. She certainly doesn’t. But it’s there. And I got a direct feed of her pain, and it was centered on the official lie. I need the real story so I know what I’m dealing with. So I don’t keep fucking stepping on landmines I can’t see."
Ruhn was quiet for so long Dae thought the call had dropped. Then, a different sound: the flick of a lighter, the slow inhale of a drag. "Alright," Ruhn said, smoke tinging his voice. "Not over the phone. Not ever over the phone. And this doesn’t come from me, understood? You looked it up in a library. You guessed.Whatever."
"Fine."
"Meet me.Tomorrow. Noon. The cemetery at the end of the Old Rainbow." It was a specific, bleak choice of location.
"Why there?"
"Because talking about this anywhere else feels disrespectful." Ruhn’s tone brooked no argument. "And bring something strong to drink. You’ll need it."
The line went dead.
Dae lowered the phone, his mind already racing toward the next day, the meeting. But another part of him remained tethered to the quiet bedroom across the city, to the soft shape of her grief finally softening into sleep. The bond was a quiet hum now, a drowsy, shielded warmth. He’d woken Ruhn for answers, but the simple act of confessing the bond’s existence had somehow made the relentless tension in his own shoulders ease, just a fraction.
He looked at his darkened phone screen, at the ghost of her Faegram profile behind his eyes. He was just picking me up.
He didn’t sleep. He stood watch at the window, a sentinel for a pain he now carried in his own bones, waiting for the sun to climb and the truth to finally show its face.
The cemetery at the end of the Old Rainbow was a forgotten strip of land hemmed in by the back walls of warehouses and the elevated tracks of the light rail. It was where the city buried its unwanted magic—cursed objects, volatile remnants, the ashes of creatures too dangerous for a standard pyre. The air here always tasted of ozone and cold iron.
Dae found Ruhn leaning against a rusted, wrought-iron fence that enclosed nothing but scorched earth. His cousin looked more like a shadow than a person, clad in head-to-toe black, a grey beanie pulled low over his dark hair. Two paper-wrapped bottles sat at his feet.
Dae nodded at them as he approached. "That the strong drink?"
Ruhn nudged one with his boot. "Bootleg faerie fire-whiskey from the Garden District. Tastes like regret and burnt sugar. It’ll do the job." He looked Dae over, his starry eyes assessing. "You look like hell."
"I feel it." Dae picked up a bottle, peeling the paper. The liquid inside was a unsettling, phosphorescent green. He took a long pull without ceremony. It scorched a path to his stomach, leaving a chemical sweetness on his tongue."Talk."
Ruhn took a swig from his own bottle, his gaze fixed on the barren plot before them. "The file says synth. A bad batch. Danika Fendyr, party girl, got her friends hooked, they all overdosed in a shared psychotic break. Took some innocent bystanders with them, including Conner Holstrom.Neat. Tidy. A tragedy, not a conspiracy."
He took another drink. "The file is wrong because the Governor of the Valbaran Fae, the one who approved its closure, was covering for his boss. Micah wasn’t just an archangel. He was the Hammer. The Asteri’s personal cleaner."
A cold that had nothing to do with the grave-yard chill seeped into Dae's bones.
"Danika wasn't a party girl," Ruhn continued, his voice low and steady. "She was an investigative reporter for The Azure. A damn good one. She was tracking a money trail. A massive, city-wide laundering scheme funneling funds through salons, clubs, construction firms... all the way up. She was getting close. Too close."
He turned his head, meeting Dae's eyes. "The synth wasn't an accident. It was a targeted weapon. Micah had her dealer slip it to her at the sake bar that night. He knew her physiology, her tolerance. He knew the exact chemical cocktail that would bypass her Wolf metabolism and induce permanent, aggressive psychosis. He didn't just want her dead. He wanted her to destroy everything she loved before she went."
Dae's grip on the bottle tightened. The phantom echo of Aria's pain—he was just picking me up—now had a dark, specific shape. A target.
"Conner," Dae said, the name a stone in his mouth.
"Wrong place, wrong time," Ruhn confirmed, nodding slowly. "But it was more than that. Danika was his friend. When she started to lose it, when the synth flipped the kill switch in her brain, she called him. He was loyal. He came running. He thought he could help. He walked right into the trap."
The pieces clicked into a horrifying mosaic. The official narrative wasn't just sanitized; it was inverted. The victims were painted as perpetrators. The murderer was erased from the scene."And the others?" Dae asked, his voice rough."Collateral damage. Or packmates who tried to intervene." Ruhn finished his bottle, tossing it into a metal disposal chute where it shattered with a dull, final ring. "Micah cleaned it up himself. Made it look like a messy, group overdose-suicide. Closed the case before the dawn patrol even arrived. Anyone who asked too many questions after that... disappeared. Or had accidents."
He finally looked fully at Dae, his expression grim. "So that's what your girl is carrying. It's not just grief. It's the knowledge that her brother was murdered as a political message, and the person who did it got a promotion and a parade. It's knowing the truth is an active danger. It's why Ithan is so paranoid. It's why she flinches."
Your girl. The phrase shouldn't have landed with such visceral impact, but it did, a mix of dread and a terrible, unwanted responsibility. The bond hadn't just connected him to her sorrow; it had connected him to a secret war.
"He's still out there," Dae stated. Micah. The Hammer.
"Very much so," Ruhn said. "And if he gets a whisper that a Holstrom is drawing the attention of an Avallen prince, especially one asking questions about closed cases..." He let the implication hang in the iron-scented air. "This isn't a court intrigue, Dae. This is a knife in the dark. You need to think about what that bond truly means for her safety. Your interest could be a death sentence."
Dae stared at the scorched earth. The warm, drowsy hum of the bond in his chest now felt like a beacon, a spotlight shining directly on the most vulnerable person in a city full of hidden blades. He’d wanted knowledge to stop stepping on landmines. Ruhn had just handed him a map of the entire minefield, and Aria was standing in the center of it.
The weight of it was crushing. Princely duty warred with the bond’s raw, possessive claim. Walking away would be the smart play, the safe play for his people and for her. But the bond, now fed with this terrible truth, coiled tighter, a silent snarl of protect.
"Fuck," Dae whispered, the word torn from him.
"Yeah," Ruhn agreed, pushing off the fence. "That about covers it. The whiskey's gone. My conscience is clear. The rest is on you, Prince."
He began to walk away, leaving Dae alone with the green bottle and the vast, terrible quiet of the cursed ground. The bond was silent now, a sleeping thing. But the knowledge was awake, a living creature with sharp teeth, circling his every thought.
He couldn't unfeel her. He couldn't unknow this. The careful, political life he was supposed to lead was already unraveling, thread by thread, pulled taut by the grief of a wolf-shifter girl and the ghost of her murdered brother. He tipped the rest of the faerie fire-whiskey down his throat, embracing the synthetic burn.
He had a choice to make, and both paths led into the dark.