Chapter 38: Stormbound Secrets
Aria looked at him strangely, her violet eyes narrowing just a fraction. The sharpness in his tone suggested his summoning of me was for a punishment. My stomach, which had been pleasantly warm from the tea and the laughter, turned to ice.
I tried to think of anything I did wrong today to warrant a scolding. The patrol had been flawless, if tense. My leg ached, but I hadn’t faltered. Then I remembered the first day of our rotation, two mornings ago in the training yard. My scythe had felt slippery in my grip, a flash of unwanted orange light sputtering at the blade’s edge as I spun. Ren had been drilling me on close-quarter pivots. I’d over-rotated, the shaft whistling past his temple, close enough to stir his dark hair. A tiny, uncontrolled wisp of my fire had singed the air where his head had been a second before.
“Is this about that incident with me accidentally swinging my scythe in your direction the other day?,” I said awkwardly, my voice too loud in the quiet room, “and almost burning off your hair with my orange fire?”
From the couch, Aria choked back a laugh, then quickly schooled her features into a pitiful look, like she was sorry for whatever scolding I was about to get. It was a poor disguise. I saw the mirth still dancing in her eyes.
“My quarters. Now,” Ren repeated, the words leaving no room for argument. He turned and strode out.
I stood, placing my mug on the low table with a soft click. Alex poked her head out from the kitchen alcove, a half-peeled ration bar in her hand. “Ooh, someone’s in trouble,” she singsonged, not unkindly.
“Give him hell, Red!” Hannah called from behind her, her voice muffled by the cupboard she was rummaging in.
I followed Ren into the dim hallway with my head down, my boots whispering on the stone. I knew I wasn’t really in trouble, not for the scythe. But the performance was necessary. I felt like I was walking to my own execution, about to be served my life on a platter for the crime of wanting him.
His door was a slab of reinforced black steel at the end of the corridor. It sighed shut behind me, sealing us in.
His private quarters were a stark, minimalist sanctuary of blackened steel and polished obsidian. The air hummed with a suppressed tension, as if the shadows themselves were holding their breath. A single flickering lantern cast jagged reflections across the far wall, where a faded map of the Shadow Domain was pinned, one of its corners singed and brown—a silent testament to a moment of lost control that had nothing to do with scythes.
He stood in the center of the room, his back to me, shoulders rigid. He turned slowly.
Then he straightened his back, his chest swelling as he drew in a breath meant to carry. “Do you have any IDEA how IDIOTIC that move was?” he yelled, his voice booming off the hard surfaces, undoubtedly audible in the hall.
But his actions were a violent contradiction. In the same moment, he closed the distance between us, his hands coming up to frame my face, and he was kissing me. Deeply. Desperately. The anger in his voice was a lie, a brilliant, calculated decoy.
I got it immediately. He was yelling so they thought I was being scolded, to cover up what we were actually doing. My body responded before my mind could, melting into the kiss, my hands finding the cool leather of his jacket. The taste of him was familiar now, a dark spice that unspooled the knot of fear in my gut.
He broke the kiss momentarily, his lips a breath from mine. “Respond to me,” he whispered, the sound buried under the aggressive tone he maintained, “like you are kind of scared and apologetic.”
I faked a crack in my voice, pitching it to carry. “I’m so sorry, sir! I won’t let my faults slip up during practice again!”
“See that you don’t,” he growled, and then his mouth was on mine again, silencing the act. He walked me back until my shoulders met the cold steel of the door, pinning me there with his body. His kiss was hungry, all tongue and heat and a barely-contained frenzy that made my knees weak. He bit my lower lip, a sharp, possessive punctuation.
He broke away again, for the benefit of the unseen audience. “Very well. But next drills, I expect ten more laps around the quad!”
I mouthed the words ‘Come on!’ at him, a silent protest at the unfairness of the fake punishment.
He drowned it with another kiss, deeper and slower this time, one hand sliding into my hair, the other splayed low on my back, pressing me into him. When he pulled back just enough to speak, his voice was a rough scrape against my skin, for my ears only. “I just needed to kiss you,” he whispered, the confession raw and stark against the backdrop of his earlier rage. “So badly.”
A stupid, giddy giggle escaped me before I could swallow it. It was the thrill of it, the absolute madness of standing here being secretly devoured while a few yards away my friends pitied me. He smiled then, a real one, a quick flash of white in the gloom that transformed his face before the commander’s mask slid back down.
He stepped back, giving me space. The show was over.
I smoothed my hoodie dress, took a steadying breath that did nothing, and slipped out of the room. As the heavy door shut, I plastered a face of utter defeat onto my features—downcast eyes, a slight, resigned slump of the shoulders.
The common room air felt different when I re-entered, charged with a sympathetic curiosity. Aria looked up from sharpening a small dagger. Alex and Hannah were now both seated at the table, playing a half-hearted game of cards.
“Well?” Alex asked, tossing a card down. “Do we need to start a rescue fund for your lap count?”
“He, uh, clarified the proper pivot technique,” I mumbled, rubbing my arm as if sore. “And added laps. So many laps.”
“Brutal,” Hannah said, shaking her head. “But fair, I guess. You did nearly give him a new haircut.”
“A revolutionary style,” Aria added dryly, not looking up from her blade. “Charred and asymmetric. It might have caught on.”
I shuffled to the sleeping area, my heart still hammering against my ribs. Part of me felt light, euphoric. This sneaking around, having this secret thing with Ren… it made my heart race in a way that had nothing to do with fear. It was a live wire in my chest, buzzing with a dangerous, exhilarating current. It was ours. A tiny, stolen piece of a world that wasn’t built for softness.
But as I lay in the dark, listening to the others settle, the other part of me—the part that remembered the snow and the watching silence—stirred. This secret was a spark in a room full of shadow. Beautiful. Warm. And capable of burning everything down.
I closed my eyes, forcing myself to think of the next mission tomorrow. Of protocol. Of the frozen marsh and the quiet trees. Anything but the feel of his hands and the low, desperate sound of his voice in the dark.
So badly.
The words followed me into a fitful sleep, a secret mantra that did nothing to prepare me for what the dawn would bring.
The words followed me into a fitful sleep, a secret mantra that did nothing to prepare me for what the dawn would bring. My dreams were not of Ren, but of the falling snow, each flake a cold, silent eye. Then the snow ignited.
I was falling.
Golden white light and flame swallowed me whole, a torrent of searing brilliance without heat. Whispers clawed at the edges of my perception, words I couldn’t make out, layered over a scream I didn’t know was mine. A cacophony of voices talked at once, arguing, pleading, condemning, overwhelming my senses until my mind felt like it would fracture along old, fragile lines.
The light spat me out.
I was floating, disembodied, in an apartment in the town nearest the Academy. I knew this building. It was where Aria, Tsubaki, and I had gone to shop for our Solstice dance dresses, laughing in the fitted rooms. The condo looked spacious, an out-of-place design for the Shadow Realm with its clean lines and open plan, resembling more the mortal realm I’d left behind.
Everything was one room; the living room, kitchen, and bedroom merged into a single large space, only the bathroom separated. The large window in the living room stepped down into a vast view that overlooked the beautiful, lantern-lit city grid below. Sitting on the floor before the window with his back to the glass, was a withering-looking Xenon.
His hair was disheveled, dark strands sticking to a damp forehead. His eyes were staring off into the middle distance as if he wasn’t really seeing the room at all. One arm was leaning over his bent knee, holding a half-finished beer bottle loosely by the neck. A few empty beer bottles lay next to him like fallen soldiers.
It took me a moment to calm my nerves, this spectral panic. This was the first I’d seen him since that night in the woods when he had pinned me down with the nulling vines. Since he took a piece of my power, a piece of my forever.
He seemed to notice me, and his eyes began to focus. They shifted from the empty air to where I floated, his gaze sharpening with a pained clarity. He looked at me, pleading. “Are you back here to torture me again?” His voice was shredded, raw from drink and regret. “How many times do I have to apologize? I never meant to hurt you, I never wanted to do that… the darkness made me.”
His eyes appeared frantic, searching my ghostly face for an answer I couldn’t give.
His eyes appeared frantic, searching my ghostly face for an answer I couldn’t give. I tried to speak, to demand to know what he was talking about, what “darkness” he meant. No sound came out, not even a whisper; my form had no substance here, only perception.
I could see the desperation in his eyes, very different from that night in the woods. The cold, clinical hatred that had been swelling in him then was gone, replaced by a raw, drowning anguish that seemed to age him in real time before me. He wasn’t looking at a threat or a resource, but at a person he had profoundly broken.
The hatred that was swelling inside me disappears. He throws the beer bottle and it shatters against the far wall, showering the kitchenette in brown glass and foam. He stands, his movements unsteady, and comes towards where I float. His hand reaches out to cup my cheek as he cries, his fingers passing through the spectral image of my skin, yet I felt the touch—a phantom pressure, cold and tingling, like static from a dead screen.
“My little flamed flower,” he wept, his voice cracking under the weight of a grief so immense it filled the sterile apartment. “How I tainted you.”
She felt the touch. His eyes look at her longingly, seeing not just me, but some older, deeper ghost reflected in my fading light. The raw confession that followed was a whisper that nonetheless echoed in the hollow places of my soul. “I love you, my sweet darling.”
She wakes with a gasp in her bunk back at the squad barracks, sweat covered and gasping for air. The coarse wool blanket was tangled around my legs, a prison. I stared up at the dark underside of Aria’s bunk, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs, the phantom chill of his touch still lingering on my skin.
What was that? A dream? My mind scrabbled for purchase, replaying the searing light, the fall, the overwhelming voices. Was that real? The clarity of Xenon’s apartment, the specific, gritty detail of the beer label, the way the city lights had grid-painted his exhausted face—it felt etched into my memory, not woven from sleep.
I threw the blanket off. The barracks were silent, filled with the deep, regular breathing of my sleeping squad. Alex muttered something about tactical formations, then turned over. I needed to move, to shake the visceral residue of that… vision. I slid from my bunk, my bare feet silent on the cold stone floor.
I headed to the bathroom to splash water on my face. The fluorescents buzzed to life, harsh and unforgiving. I gripped the edges of the ceramic sink, my knuckles white, and stared at my reflection. My orange-red hair was plastered to my damp forehead, my freckles standing out starkly against pale skin. My green eyes looked back, wide and haunted.
I bent, cupping icy water from the tap and pressing it to my skin. It dripped down my neck, soaking the collar of my sleep shirt, but it didn’t cleanse the feeling. Flamed flower. The endearment was bizarre, poetic in a way the ruthless Commander Xenon I knew would never be. Tainted you.
He’d stolen a fragment of my heavenly fire, but he had taken more than that. My pride, my innocence, I remember the blood running down my thigh and the pain. Even after I had begged him to stop. That was the taint. Wasn’t it? The water dripped from my chin onto the stainless steel. But his despair… it hadn’t been about power. It had been about corruption. A personal violation. I love you.
“Get a grip, Kashikoi,” I whispered to my reflection, my voice a ragged thread in the empty room. It was a stress dream. My subconscious stitching together the fear of Xenon, the weird connection from the woods, and my own tangled mess with Ren. It had to be.
I dried my face with a rough towel, the friction a grounding reality. As I walked back to my bunk, the first grey light of a Shadow Domain dawn was beginning to seep through the high, narrow windows. It outlined the shapes of my sleeping friends. Aria. Hannah. Alex. This was my reality. This barracks. This squad. The silent, watching trees waiting for us beyond the wall.
I lay back down, pulling the blanket to my chin, watching the light grow. The dream’s emotional fingerprint—that crushing mix of despair, regret, and a love that felt like a curse—clung to me. It felt truer than the sunrise. And the most terrifying part wasn’t Xenon’s confession.
It was that for a second, in that spectral space, part of me had felt a shudder of pity for him.