*Aria*
By day, I trained my body until it shook.
By night, I burned myself from the inside out.
Lucian’s confession had settled in my bones like a stone at the bottom of a river—heavy, unmoving, distorting everything that flowed around it.
His father’s bargain.
The witch at the border.
The mark under his ribs that pulsed and whispered.
The way that wrongness recoiled from my touch.
“If we’re going to cut at this together,” he’d said, his hand over mine on his chest, “you need to know where the blade might slip.”
He was finally giving me truth.
I owed him the same from my side.
Which meant I needed to stop playing with my power like it was a party trick and start treating it like the knife it clearly was.
That night, after the manor had sunk into its usual post‑dinner murmur and
