Page 81 of The First Scar
His eyes latched onto mine and they were ablaze with Fury like I'd never seen.
I studied his bleeding hand. The blood was dark, almost black in the torchlight, seeping between the glass shards still lodged in his knuckles. Dripping onto stone. Wasted on my behalf.
Then, I reached out and touched his forearm, just above the scorched edge of his gauntlet. Firm pressure. The same wayyou'd press a hand to a wound. His pulse hammered against my fingertips. I held still and let it slow.
His head snapped towards me, our eyes locked.I see the storm you are holding back because I am holding one back too.
We stood like that, me lowering his pulse, easing his breath for seven heartbeats. Then—he grabbed my wrist. Twisted. My arm wrenched behind my back, his grip iron-firm, his chest a wall of heat at my shoulder. A desperate reflex. A male trying to control a variable that had just gotten too close.
"Afraid I was going to hurt you?" I hissed.
His breath caressed my lower lip. "I've bled for causes worth more."
But his body betrayed him. I felt it—a sudden, searing flare radiating from his chest, hot enough to burn through his cuirass. Punishing him for this. For the proximity. For whatever he was feeling that the King's magic deemed impure.
My own marks answered—an impossible tether between us pulling taut.
He had my arm wrenched behind my back, his chest pressed to mine, but I smiled up at him lazily, because I had been practicing.
A subtle press against the nerve cluster on his inner forearm. The same spot he'd gotten me on the first night we sparred.
His grip faltered. Just a beat. Just enough.
I twisted free, spinning out of his hold, and the rush of victory hit my blood so hard I barked out a laugh and bit my lip. The laugh surprised me. Not the bitter kind I kept sharpened for moments like this. Something looser, more wild.
A grin cut across his face—there and gone, so fast I might have imagined it.
"At least I'm teaching you something, Scar-Bearer," he murmured.
I narrowed my eyes and gestured to his Mark.
"Walk away, Crownforged," I said quietly. "Before that thing kills you for standing too close."
A raw hunger moved behind his eyes—unsatiated and dangerous.
He didn't say a word. Just turned and left. Spine rigid. Blood still trailing from his hand.
The room resettled around me—rebels resuming their whispered conversations, a chair scraped the floor. Normal sounds. The world filling back in after a held breath.
I waited for the rest of it. The part where I took whatever had just happened and filed it undermeaningless. Where I found the sharp, clean sentence that explained it away—adrenaline, reflex, the Marks, anything—and used it to seal the crack before it spread.
I waited.
Nothing came.
I flexed my hand. The one that had touched him. My fingers still felt warm.
I walked away without naming it. Without burying it. Without doing anything at all.
And that silence followed me all the way to my bedroll, louder than anything he could have said.
The cavern had lapsed into that heavy quiet that came in the hours before dawn, when even the restless finally surrendered.
I hadn't surrendered. Couldn’t yet. Brannick crouched beside me, close enough that his warmth radiated against me, far enough that it didn't feel like crowding.
He didn't try to fill the silence. Just sat there, humming something tuneless under his breath, his eyes tracking the shadows beyond the cavern's mouth.
"Sometimes," I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them, "I remember the quiet before it all."
