The Current Between Us

Nightfall II

## Chapter 5: Nightfall II

Bale was tied to the post in the execution ground, the rope biting into wrists that were already too thin, the fibers rough enough to draw blood with every small shift of his weight. Malnourished and gaunt, his ribs showed beneath his thin tunic like the ridges of driftwood left to bleach on some forgotten shore. He couldn't even hold his head up without shaking, the effort costing more than he had left to give.

Around him, the guards tore through the quarters with the particular brutality of men who enjoyed having permission to destroy things. Bags were upended, their meager contents scattered across the sand. Bedding and gear ripped apart in the search, seams torn open, straw stuffing drifting loose in the current like snow that would never settle. Tridents stabbed through mats, through baskets, through anything that looked like it could hide something smaller than a fist. The sound of splintering wood and tearing fabric filled the execution ground, punctuated by the occasional curse when a search turned up nothing.

Bale couldn't stop them. He could only watch, and watching was its own particular torture — worse, in some ways, than anything Alpha's trident could have done to him directly.

His eyes drifted to Lily, the way they always did when he let his guard down even slightly.

She stood a few paces away, face pale, watching as they ransacked her room without so much as a flicker of protest crossing her expression, though he knew — he *knew* — what it cost her to hold that stillness. Brown hair fell loose around her shoulders, wild from being pulled out of its tie by careless guard hands checking for hidden objects woven into the braids. The tan scales on her skin looked dull in the torchlight, like they'd lost their shine sometime in the last eight years and never quite gotten it back. To everyone else, she looked older than she had back then. Tired. Weathered by work and worry in equal measure.

To Bale, she was still everything. Still the girl who'd taught him how to laugh in the reef shallows when they were young enough that laughing cost nothing. Still the one he'd left — deliberately, carefully, at terrible cost to himself — to keep her safe from exactly this kind of night.

It hadn't worked. He understood that now, watching guards tear apart the life she'd built without him. Nothing he'd sacrificed had bought her the safety he'd meant it to.

They'd had feelings for each other. They always had, every single year of the eight that had passed since he'd forced himself to walk away from her without explanation, without a goodbye that made sense, just a cold silence that had probably hurt her more than the truth would have. That was the problem. That had always been the problem — that walking away had never actually severed anything, only stretched the rope thinner and let it cut deeper where it still held.

Lily knew about his magic. She knew he could read minds — had known since they were young, back when he'd accidentally pulled her secret from her head during a stupid, forgettable fight about something neither of them could even remember now. She'd gone white that day, he remembered. White and then furious, and then, weeks later, quietly, unbearably sad.

That was why they broke up, in the end. Not a fight, not a betrayal, nothing so simple. She didn't want to drag her family into trouble, didn't want the king's attention turning toward them because of what Bale could do — because a gift like his, unregistered and untaught, was itself a kind of crime in a kingdom where every advantage belonged first to the crown. Love was dangerous when one of you could hear the other's thoughts, when every private moment carried the risk of being overheard by accident, by fatigue, by a slip neither of them could fully control.

So now she kept her mind guarded, had kept it guarded for eight straight years without a single lapse until today. Stone walls, locked doors, the mental architecture of someone who had trained herself out of every unguarded thought the way some people trained themselves out of a limp. No stray thoughts. No memories bleeding through. No windows he could slip through, not even by accident, not even when exhaustion should have worn her defenses thin the way his own had worn thin at the boundary.

Only her voice reached him now, low and steady, speaking to Beatrice in fragments the guards couldn't piece together even if they'd been listening for it. Words that meant nothing alone, strung together in a private code built over years of practice. Warnings that only made sense if you already knew the shape of the danger they were warning against.

Beatrice caught Bale's eye for half a second across the ransacked quarters. Confusion crossed her face first, quick and genuine. Then fear, sharper, more immediate. Then recognition — the exact moment her expression told him she'd realized he knew something she'd never told anyone. Something she'd hidden even from her own mother, buried so deep she probably hadn't examined it herself in the light.

The water grew darker as the last of the daylight bled out of it entirely. Torches flickered along the reef wall, throwing shadows long and thin against the rock, shadows that seemed to reach for the prisoners and then retreat, over and over, with each guttering flame. The light made everything look sharp for a moment, then blurred it into something almost dreamlike, almost merciful in how it softened the edges of what was happening.

Three of them, bound together by a secret none of them could say out loud without unraveling everything. Bale with his mind-reading, a gift that had cost him a family once and might cost him his life tonight. Lily with her silence, built brick by brick over eight hard years. Beatrice with the comb hidden under her tunic, small and cold and utterly capable of ending them all.

And nightfall hadn't even come yet. Not fully. Not the deadline itself.

The king's deadline was still hours away, technically, but the execution ground already felt like a grave that simply hadn't been filled yet. Bale tested the rope out of habit more than hope and felt it cut deeper into skin already raw. He looked at Lily one more time, drinking in the sight of her the way a drowning man might drink in his last breath of air, and thought, with everything left in him, *I'm sorry I couldn't stay away. I wish I wasn't so scared of death, and I wish I could save you.*

A guard's shadow fell across him then, blocking the torchlight, and Bale felt the current shift with the unmistakable weight of Alpha's approach.

Then he closed his eyes and waited — not for death exactly, not yet, but for the question that would decide whether Lily's daughter lived to see another sunrise, and whether he would be the one forced to answer it.

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