Page 20 of The First Scar
"I said.Yield."
The command rumbled through his torso and into mine. Something deep in my core answered. Pulled toward all that immovable weight before I could stop it.
I told that part of my brain to go fuck itself.
I gnashed my teeth at him instead, snapping inches from his face like a feral thing.
"Make me."
His helm was near enough now that I could see below the shadow—sharp jaw, scar through one brow, and eyes that were devouring me. Taking in every breath and defiant line etched on my face.
"You have no idea," he said, voice dropping low enough to scrape, "how badly I want to."
The air between us thickened. Went hot and savage.
His body rose and fell against mine with each uneven breath. Heat radiated through the casing despite the cold metal. His thumb traced my wrists with maddening slowness and I bit my lip, hard.
His scent hit me again. A dangerous storm brewing. A storm my traitorous lungs wanted to breathe deeper.
My Marks stirred.
Slower than the plaza. Deeper. The Luminar thread lit silver under my skin and the Griefweaver stirred with it—both of them straining toward him. Toward his blood. Hungry and familiar, like a scent I'd known before I had words for it.
They'd never done that. Not for anyone. Not once, and now they’d responded to his nearness at least three times.
His breath caught—a small hitch that brushed across my sensitive skin.
A tendon pulled taut in his neck.
"Your Marks," he gritted out. "Control them."
"I'm not doing it on purpose!"
But even as I said it, the pull intensified. The Griefweaver stretched toward him like a hungry flower turning toward sunlight. I tried to yank it back, tried to muzzle it the way I'd taught myself years ago—
It didn't listen.
The Griefweaverpulled.
It lunged. A door I didn't know existed ripped open and I wasthrough—past the stone wall of him, past the armor, past the control, plunging into memory raw and bleeding that he'd buried so deep I should never have found it.
A boy on his knees. Spine rigid, jaw locked against the scream climbing his throat. The brand seared into his chest and the smell of his own flesh burning filled his nostrils, but he didn't cry out. They were watching. They were always watching. And he had learned, even then, that his pain belonged to them too.
I knew that boy.
Not him—not his face, not his name. But I knew the set of that jaw. The way a child learns to swallow screaming because the ones holding the blade will enjoy it if you don't.
I'd made that same face under the prayer tree. Different hands. Same lesson.
The memories hit like waves, the weight of one dragging me down just as the next crashed overhead.
Bile on his tongue when the orders came. The hollow click of his own voice sayingyes, my Kingwhile a piece of him died. Every kill that carved another piece away—not the violence itself but the obedience of it, the way his hands moved without his soul's permission, the way he'd learned to go somewhere else while his body did terrible things.
And beneath it all, threading through every memory like blood through water—
Alone. Surrounded by soldiers who feared him, servants who flinched, a King who owned his blood and never let him forgetit. So utterly, achingly alone that the isolation had become its own kind of armor. If no one got close, no one could use closeness against him. If he needed nothing, nothing could be taken.
The exhaustion of being a weapon that could never choose its target. The quiet, suffocating death of needing a piece of the world—any piece—to call his own.
