BOUND BY MIDNIGHT BLOOD

Chapter 11: Broken Trust

I woke in a room I did not recognize, white walls, a low hum of machines, my whole body aching like it had been run through a wringer. Every breath pulled at muscles I did not know I had, and my head throbbed with a dull, steady pain that would not fade.

I remembered his words before I remembered anything else.

I won't let them take you from me.

I could recall every syllable, the exact break in his voice when he said it, the way his hands had gripped my shoulders like letting go was not an option. But the part of me that should have believed him, the part that should have felt anything at all hearing it, sat cold and empty, like someone had scooped it out and left only the shape behind, hollow where warmth used to live.

Kael sat in a chair beside the bed, his uniform still torn from the fight, dried blood streaked along his jaw, exhaustion carved into every line of his face. The second my eyes opened, he leaned forward fast, like he had been waiting hours for exactly this moment.

"You're awake." His voice was rough with relief. "I thought I lost you back there."

"You didn't." My own voice came out flat, distant even to me, and I watched his expression falter at the sound of it.

He reached for the bandage on my arm, gentle, careful, checking the wound with the same steady hands I remembered from the night Vesper attacked me. Every soft touch should have meant something, should have sent that familiar warmth up my arm the way it always used to. Instead it just felt like another thing I could not trust, one more piece of evidence in a case I did not want to build against him.

"Kael." I pulled my arm back before he finished. "The note. Seraphine's note. I want the truth, all of it, right now."

His jaw tightened. "I have told you what I know."

"Have you." My voice sharpened, the coldness inside me finding an edge. "Because from where I am sitting, every single person circling me right now has a reason to want something from me, and you have given me nothing but half answers wrapped in pretty words."

"That is not fair."

"Nothing about this is fair." I sat up despite the ache in my ribs. "You confessed something to me in the middle of a battlefield, and I do not even know if I can trust that it was real."

Pain flickered across his face, raw and unguarded. "It was real."

"Prove it."

"I cannot prove a feeling, Lyra." He stood, running a hand through his hair, frustration and quiet hurt warring across his features. "I can only keep showing up. That is all I have."

The tension between us pulled tight, the old pull still there underneath everything, attraction and anger tangled so close together I could not separate them anymore. I wanted to reach for him, at the same time I wanted to shove him out the door, and my body could not decide which urge to trust, and neither could the rest of me, and the not knowing hurt worse than any wound the fight had left on my skin.

Professor Aldric arrived before either of us said anything else, his face grim as he checked the readings on the machine beside my bed.

"The hollowing this time was severe," he said quietly. "You did not just lose memories. You lost something harder to name." He looked at me directly. "Your capacity to trust. Fully, completely, the way you might have trusted someone before tonight. It will take time to come back, if it comes back at all."

The words landed like a verdict. I looked at Kael, watching his face fall as he heard it too, and even knowing what Aldric had just explained, I still felt nothing shift inside me toward believing him. It was the strangest kind of grief, mourning a feeling I could remember having but could no longer reach.

"There has to be a way to fix this," Kael said.

"Perhaps." Aldric did not sound convinced. "For now, rest. Her body needs it more than her heart needs answers."

He left, and a moment later Liora slipped in, quiet, guilty in the way she had been ever since the ritual, her eyes darting first to my bandaged arm and then away just as fast.

"I heard about the attack," she said. "I am glad you are alive."

"Thank you."

She hovered near the door, not quite meeting my eyes, her hands twisting together in front of her. "I keep thinking about what I said to you before. About Father. I do not know how to fix any of it, but I wanted you to know I have been trying. I told him I would not stand behind him blindly anymore, not after everything I have learned."

"I know." I did not have the energy for more than that, though a small, distant part of me was grateful she had come at all. She seemed to understand, nodding once before slipping back out, leaving the room quiet again.

The speakers overhead crackled to life a few minutes later, Dean Crowe's voice cutting through the quiet.

"A new tournament round has been scheduled, effective immediately. All ranked students, including Lyra Emberly, will report to the arena within the week."

My stomach twisted. I had barely survived the last round, and my body had not even begun to heal from this one.

Kael's hand found mine on the blanket, and for one second I let him hold it, wanting so badly to feel the warmth I used to feel every time he touched me.

I felt nothing.

The door burst open before either of us could say anything else. Two academy guards stepped inside, expressions hard, clearly under orders that left no room for argument.

"Dean Crowe's orders," one of them said. "Mr. Draven, you are to leave the healing wing immediately. No exceptions."

"I am not leaving her." Kael's voice hardened, his whole body going rigid.

"That was not a request."

They moved to pull him back, and he fought their grip for a second before letting them win, his eyes finding mine over their shoulders, wide and desperate, fear written plain across his face for the first time since I had known him, stripped of every mask he usually wore so easily.

"Lyra, I mean it," he said, his voice breaking as they dragged him toward the door. "I won't let them take you. Please believe me."

I wanted to. God, I wanted to believe him more than I had wanted anything in a long time, wanted it enough that it ached somewhere underneath the hollowness.

But as the door shut behind him and the room fell silent, all I felt was the same hollow, unreadable nothing that had followed me since the courtyard, spreading through my chest like frost across glass. I had no idea if that emptiness would ever let me trust him again, or if some part of what we had built together was already gone for good.