Saving the Immortal

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Break

We had settled into the small garden pavilion for a quiet afternoon of tea, a rare peaceful hour I had looked forward to since breakfast, when Fennick and Marrow found us there, their wives trailing behind with expressions that suggested they anticipated entertainment of a considerably crueler sort than tea and conversation.

"How domestic," Fennick said, settling uninvited into a nearby chair. "The demon and his bride, taking tea like ordinary lovers."

"Leave us," Ruselon said, his voice carrying a weariness I recognized immediately — the particular exhaustion of a man who had endured this exact cruelty for his entire existence and had simply run out of patience for pretending otherwise.

"We only wish to visit our brother," Marrow said, though his smile carried none of the earlier apology he had once offered me. "Is that so unreasonable, given how rarely he graces us with proper company?"

The teasing built slowly, as it always did — small remarks about his temper, about the fear his own household still carried around him, about the particular irony of a demon pretending toward domestic bliss. I tried to intervene, tried to redirect the conversation toward anything else, but Fennick pressed harder with every attempt.

"Careful, Princess," he said, watching me defend my husband with something like amusement. "You would not want to upset him too greatly. Are you going to break some glass for us, brother? Show your bride what truly lies beneath that careful composure?"

"Or perhaps burn something," Marrow added, laughing now with Fennick, their wives joining in with the same easy cruelty I had witnessed at that very first dinner.

"Enough," I said sharply. "You have no right—"

"Careful," Delia said, her voice cutting through mine with a sharpness I had not expected. "Perhaps the princess requires reminding of what she married."

I felt Ruselon go rigid beside me, and I understood, in that moment, that something had shifted past whatever restraint he had maintained through every previous cruelty.

"You will not speak to her," he said, his voice dropping into something I had heard only once before, in that courtyard weeks earlier.

"Or what," Fennick said, rising now, some old and reckless confidence driving him forward despite every warning sign plainly visible in his brother's posture. "You will finally show us what you truly are? Go on, then. Prove every fear this family has ever carried about you."

What happened next unfolded too quickly for me to properly track.

Ruselon's composure did not simply crack.

It shattered entirely, the fury that had been building beneath a lifetime of careful restraint finally breaking free with a violence that left the garden in ruins within moments. I saw his fangs elongate, sharp and terrible, his eyes darkening into something I had never witnessed before — not the cold anger of the courtyard, but something considerably older, considerably less human.

Fennick and Marrow went down hard, their earlier confidence evaporating into genuine terror as they realized, too late, precisely what they had provoked. Guards rushed to intervene, and I watched, horrified, as Ruselon met their efforts with a strength that sent them flying, injured badly, their attempts at restraint utterly meaningless against whatever had finally been unleashed.

I called his name.

I do not know if he heard me.

The garden had become something unrecognizable — furniture destroyed, stone cracked, the tea service I had so looked forward to shattered somewhere amid the wreckage — and Ruselon stood at the center of it, breathing hard, his fury still burning through him even as his brothers lay groaning upon the ground.

He turned toward me.

I saw his eyes, still dark with whatever had taken hold of him, and felt, for one terrible moment, the full weight of everything he had feared his entire existence — that I would finally see this, the truth beneath the composure, and that the seeing itself would somehow prove his father right.

I do not remember deciding to faint.

I remember only the world tilting, the shock of everything I had just witnessed finally overwhelming whatever composure I had managed to hold through it, and then darkness claiming me entirely before I could offer him any word at all.

I do not know, in that moment I lost consciousness, what expression crossed his face.

But when I woke later, in our own quarters, the fire burning low and Ruselon sitting silently in the chair beside the bed, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking with something that was unmistakably grief, I understood that whatever had happened in that garden had cost him something far greater than his brothers' injuries.

It had cost him the one thing he had feared losing most.

The belief, however fragile, that he was not what his father had always promised he would become.