Notes:
He was never taught to love. So he learned how to own.
When he woke, the first thing he felt was the absence. Not the pull of light against his eyes or the weight of the sheets tangled around his legs, not even the lingering ache in his body from the hours before. It was emptiness, cold and sharp, like a blade drawn slow across skin, and it cut through the haze of sleep in a way that no sound or touch ever could. She was not beside him. The space where her warmth should have been had gone cool beneath the linen. The pillow barely held the ghost of her scent, as if the house itself had already begun to erase the proof that she had been there at all.
And it hurt. Gods, it hurt more than he wanted to admit. It was a raw, consuming need, clawing up from the base of his throat and settling behind his ribs like a weight he could not shake loose. He needed her there. Needed to wake to the curve of her spine beneath the blankets, to the soft tangle of her hair fanned out against the pillow, to the steady rise and fall of her breath, grounding him before the world outside could sink its teeth into his mind. He needed it like air. Like blood. Like something he should not be so dependent on and yet was.
Every fucking day. The words burned through him, jagged and restless. He needed to wake next to her every single fucking day. Anything less felt wrong, like a spell gone sour, like a curse he could not name. And as he lay there, staring at the ceiling that seemed suddenly too vast, too empty, he knew with bone-deep certainty that no fight, no silence, no threat the world could throw would change that one simple, brutal truth.
He needed her. Here. Now. Always.
He rose slowly, every movement deliberate, pulling clothes onto skin that still felt too exposed, too raw from the night before. He splashed water over his face as if it might banish the ache behind his ribs, but the hollow remained, pulsing with a rhythm that refused to be drowned. By the time he had dressed, fingers tightening each button with more force than was necessary, the thought had already planted itself deep in his mind. He needed to find her. Not later. Not when it was convenient. Now.
The house seemed to stretch beneath his steps, each hallway longer than it had been the night before, the air too still in places where it should have breathed. He walked through the rooms with a purpose that felt far too sharp for morning light, boots soft against ancient wood, every turn of a corner met with disappointment, with another absence that made the thread at his wrist feel tighter somehow. It was ridiculous, and he knew it. Knew how absurd it was to be ruled by this sudden hunger, this low, thrumming need that had no shape beyond the shape of her.
He finally reached the threshold of the garden, the tall windows pushed open to let in air thick with sea salt and the green hush of growing things. And there she was.
She sat cross-legged in the wild tangle of the herb beds, sunlight slipping like coins through the shifting leaves above her, casting uneven patterns across her skin and hair. A mismatched shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders. A chipped mug of tea balanced precariously on the stone beside her knee. And surrounding her in a ridiculous, reverent semi-circle, like subjects gathered at the feet of some strange and whimsical queen, sat the guinea pigs, plump and blinking, their little faces tilted upward in apparent rapture as she fed them sprigs of parsley with a kind of ceremonial patience.
He stopped in the doorway, gripping the frame as if the sight of it had knocked the breath from his lungs.
He truly loved her. Gods, he truly did. A loony person with bare feet and wild ideas, a woman who spoke to herbs and danced with the wind and had tied a piece of herself to him without ever asking permission. He loved her in a way that left no room for logic or caution or pride. And standing there, watching her smile faintly as one particularly fat guinea pig tried to climb her lap for another bite, he realized just how hopeless he had become.
Utterly, completely hopeless.
He stepped out into the garden with the air still crisp and cool, salt from the sea riding on the wind, the sky above them stretching pale and endless, and the moment he saw her, sitting there among the wild green tangle of herbs with sunlight braided through her hair, something in his chest softened, almost against his will. The words came out warmer than he intended, rough with sleep and some strange, possessive tenderness he could not quite shake.
"Good morning, darling," he said, voice low but carrying, meant for her and her alone.
She looked up at him, eyes unreadable, face calm as ever, and answered simply, "Good morning."
Encouraged, foolish perhaps, but caught in the gravity of wanting her as he always did, he stepped closer, leaned down with slow, deliberate intent to press a kiss to her mouth, needing the feel of her beneath his lips to ground the spinning ache inside him.
But she pulled away. Smooth and sure, just far enough that the space between them widened like a chasm, and the emptiness it left hit him so sharp and sudden that it felt like a blade sliding straight through the softest part of his heart.
He caught himself before the full weight of it could show on his face, before his hands could betray the tremor that had surged through them, and straightened with effort.
"May I join?" he asked, tone carefully even, almost too careful, holding back the sudden urge to demand instead of ask.
"You are not welcomed," she replied, voice flat, cool as glass.
He blinked, the words thudding in his chest, leaving a hollow ache behind. "Darling," he tried again, this time with more desperation curling beneath the word, unable to help himself.
She looked at him now, properly, eyes bright with something sharp and gleaming beneath the calm surface. "Let us be, Theodore. Go do your morning duties. You know, your work," she said, each word clipped, deliberate, not loud but with enough edge to cut deep.
And something in him snapped then, something fragile stretched too thin after too many nights of watching her sleep and too many mornings of waking without her warmth beside him. His voice rose, raw and biting.
"What is wrong with you? The day hasn't even started and you act like a bit—"
He did not finish. The coffee cup flew through the air with startling speed and hit him square across the cheek and chest, hot liquid splattering down his shirt, burning and bitter and utterly humiliating.
He wiped a sleeve across his face, fury and disbelief warring inside him, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. "Yeah, exactly," he ground out through gritted teeth. "Like a fucking bitch."
The words hung between them for a heartbeat. Then two. And on the third, her composure shattered.
"Get the fuck out of my house. My fucking life. Leave me alone!" she screamed, voice breaking, raw and wild, no longer the Luna who floated through the halls in silence but something fierce and bright, shaking with too much emotion to contain.
She scooped Sol into her arms with shaking hands and strode toward the house, her back rigid, her breath ragged, shoulders trembling.
Theo stood frozen for a moment, soaked and furious and aching in ways he could not begin to name. Slowly, almost mechanically, he bent down and lifted Artemis into his arms, the little creature blinking up at him in wide-eyed innocence.
And as he stood there in the wreckage of the morning, the sting of coffee on his skin and her words echoing in his skull, he realized, bitter and confused, that he had absolutely no idea why she was acting this way, or why the thought of losing her was terrifying him more than any mission or any war ever had.
~~~
The rain had come sometime after noon, slow at first, a mist that laced itself through the brittle garden and drummed faint against the warped windowpanes, though Theo barely registered it.
The sound of it faded in and out around the edges of his thoughts like an old song he refused to remember, and by the time it thickened into a steady, insistent downpour that blurred the cliffs into smudged gray shadows and made the house groan in protest beneath its weight, he had long since stopped noticing.
He had spent the last hours stalking the house like a cornered animal, pacing the length of the corridor, circling the perimeter of each room with restless, predatory steps, as though movement alone might bleed off the thing rising inside him, the thing that had taken root and refused to be named. Rage simmered just beneath the surface of his skin, tight as wire, sharp as glass.
Every glance toward the empty kitchen where her presence lingered in the ghost of a half-drunk cup of tea, every echo of her footsteps drifting soft and slow across the floorboards upstairs, every trace of her scent caught on the air, sharp and clean as dried herbs and rain-damp skin, turned that simmer into a boil.
And yet beneath all of it, beneath the fury that prickled hot against his temples and the raw humiliation that still curled low in his gut, beneath the sharp ache in his ribs where her words had lodged like splinters he could not dig out, was something colder.
A clarity that only came when he was pushed too far, when instinct rose above reason and stripped everything else bare. It was not calm. It was not control. It was the kind of cold that came from knowing exactly what he was capable of when the world refused to give him space to breathe. The kind of cold that whispered the next move before he could even think to question it. And he felt it now, humming under his skin like a second pulse, waiting.
Waiting for what, he did not know.
He had gone to the south wards to walk it off. That was the only thought that passed through his mind. Move. Move before you do something you cannot undo. His boots hit the wet stone in rhythm, hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat, breath sharp and fast in the cold.
He almost missed the shift in the wards at first. Just the faintest flicker beneath the steady hum of the boundary magic, a ripple so small it could have been dismissed as nothing more than the weight of the storm pressing against the edges of the spellwork. Almost.
But not quite. Because his body caught it before his mind did. His spine stiffened. His breath held. His heart, which had been pounding in an uneven rhythm for hours now, stumbled once, then slammed back into its frantic pace. Too small for a proper breach. Too deliberate to be weather. He stopped instantly, every muscle gone taut as wire. The silence stretched thin around him, and for a beat he heard nothing but the sharp ring of his own pulse in his ears.
The spell slid off his tongue without thought, ancient and thin as bone dust, whispered through clenched teeth like a promise. His eyes narrowed to slits. Someone was there. Someone was watching her.
And just like that, the cold inside him sharpened to a blade.
Not her. Not while she was alone. Not while she was still raw from their fight, her voice still ringing in his skull, her eyes still burning through him. She could hate him all she wanted. She could scream at him, throw things, cast him out of her room, her house, her life. Fine. He could take it. He would take it. But no one, no one, was going to watch her. No one was going to track her through the garden, through the storm, through the soft rooms where she moved like light, where her skin still smelled like salt and rain and wild things. No one had the right to look at her like that.
Not unless they wanted to die for it.
His fingers twitched once against his wand, grip tightening. He did not think about alerting the Ministry. He did not think about procedure. He did not think about wards or warnings or containment. No. There was only one thought burning through him now, pure and absolute. Find them. Find them before they got close enough to breathe her air. Find them before they saw too much. Before they saw anything at all.
She was his.
She did not want to be his, perhaps. Not today. Maybe not ever. But it did not matter. The thread burned hot and bright against his wrist, tighter now, humming with a violence that felt almost alive, as though the magic itself had caught the scent of the intruder and was urging him forward. And gods help whoever it was, because if they had touched her wards, if they had so much as thought of her with wrong intent, there would be nothing left of them but blood in the dirt and a name no one would dare speak again.
He moved before the thought fully formed, fast and silent, already crossing to the edge of the wards, already hunting.
He found the man crouched low behind the dead bramble hedge that bordered the western edge of the garden, half-hidden in the tangle of thorned branches and skeletal roots that twisted up from the ground like old fingers. Cloaked, but sloppily, the fabric catching on the thorns with every twitch of movement. Trained, perhaps. But not trained well enough to outmatch someone like Theodore Nott.
Not trained enough to understand what it meant to trespass here. Not trained enough to realize that of all the gardens, of all the cursed places on this rotting stretch of land, this was the one corner of the world where Theo would let the monster in his blood off the leash. Because this was where she lived. This was where she breathed. And this man had come with eyes full of hunger, or curiosity, or some cold order passed down from cowards in offices who did not know what they had sent him into.
Theo's blade was unsheathed before his mind caught up, his body moving on pure instinct, the sound of metal whispering free lost beneath the scream of the wind. The first strike was not meant to kill. No, that would have been mercy. This was not about mercy. This was about sending a message. About feeding the part of him that had been wound too tight since the moment she pulled away from him in the garden. From the moment she shouted at him to leave. Since the moment her voice carved him open and left him raw.
It was almost too easy. A flicker of silver through the dark, a clean slice across the back of the man's thigh, severing tendons and dropping him like a stone into the roots. A pulse of blood spilled into the earth.
A scream that started loud but ended strangled as Theo's hand clamped over the intruder's mouth and dragged him deeper, deeper, into the belly of the hedge where no one could see, where even the house might choose to look away. His fingers were iron on the man's throat, pressing just enough to make the eyes roll wild, to make the pulse thrum harder beneath skin slick with sweat and rain.
He leaned close then, breath cold against the intruder's ear. Words were not shouted. Words were not needed. The questions came low and brutal, shaped like promises of pain. Who sent you. Why now? Who are you watching?
The answers came stuttering, fractured. Names Theo did not recognize. Orders that meant nothing. Ministry, maybe. Or mercenaries. Or worse. It did not matter. The words were not fast enough. Not good enough. And Theo's patience had already been stripped bare hours ago, peeled away by her voice, by her rejection, by the sight of her walking away from him with Sol in her arms and no glance back.
He pressed the blade flat against the man's cheek, slow, deliberate. The metal cold enough to bite. You looked at her. He did not phrase it as a question. It was a statement. An accusation. A sentence. And when the man choked out a panicked denial, Theo smiled without warmth. He pressed harder. You looked at her.
There was no world in which this man would leave here with his eyes intact.
No world in which Theo would allow it.
The first cut was precise, a thin line drawn beneath the left eye, not enough to blind, but enough to remind. Enough to scar. The second cut came lower, across the hand that had gripped the spyglass, the fingers that had dared trace her shape through glass. They would not hold a lens again.
The blade slowed only when the man began sobbing, wet and broken, words spilling too fast now. "Please. Please. I was paid. I didn't know. I swear. I didn't know."
"Now you know", Theo said softly.
When it was finished, when the man was left half-conscious in the roots, bleeding and shuddering, stripped of everything that made him a threat, Theo pried a ring from the man's trembling hand. A signet, plain but marked with the faint outline of an unfamiliar crest. Not Ministry. Something else. He pocketed it without thought.
And as he stood, wiping the blood from his blade with mechanical precision, his heart still thundered not with triumph, but with one single, unrelenting thought.
No one looks at her. No one touches what is his.
Not unless they wish to be buried beneath her garden.
Something twisted deep inside him at the sight, something black and cold and uncoiling like smoke through his chest, a thing with teeth that had been gnawing at him all afternoon, fed first by her voice, then by her distance, then by this man's face leering through the wards like a worm squirming beneath glass.
His breath came fast, ragged, not from the exertion of the fight but from the way his hands trembled now, from the way he could not seem to unclench his jaw as he stared down at what was left of the intruder. No one looks at her. No one breathes her air. No one watches what belongs to me. The words rang over and over behind his teeth, louder than the rain, louder than the man's gasping sobs, until all that was left was the ringing in his ears and the raw, vibrating pulse beneath his skin.
He reached down, fingers shaking, slick with blood and cold rain, and pried the ring free from the man's limp, twitching hand. The skin beneath was raw where Theo's blade had caught it earlier, the knuckles cracked and flayed. Good. Let him remember. Let the bones remember. He turned the ring over once between his fingers, the simple band glinting faintly in the sick light bleeding through the hedge. Not any organization. Not anyone Theo recognized. That was worse. That meant someone else had sent him. Someone else had dared send eyes toward her.
Toward her house.
Toward their fucking house.
His pulse thundered in his throat. He pocketed the ring without a second thought, sliding it deep into the hidden seam of his coat where no one would ever find it. No one would know. No one would report this. The Ministry would not ask questions they did not want answers to. He would not give them the chance. This man would vanish like all the others who had wandered too close to things they were too foolish to understand. There would be no trail. No name left behind.
The body would stay. The house would take care of it. The house always did. It had its ways, old ways, rooted deep beneath the garden where the vines listened better than any spy ever could. Already the roots were moving, whispering beneath the earth, the brambles twitching in strange, eager rhythm. They had tasted blood before. They would not refuse it now.
Theo stood slowly, blade still in his hand, breath still uneven. He stared down at the broken figure one last time, and the thing inside him, the thing that had unfurled so fast he had no hope of stopping it, whispered softly against the shell of his mind. Mine. Mine. Mine.
The house groaned low around him, old wood settling, wind pressing against the windows. He wiped his blade clean on the tattered edge of the man's cloak, turned, and walked back toward the house. Not hurried. Not afraid. Just certain. More certain than he had been in days.
Because whatever had snapped inside him now refused to be caged again.
And if anyone else came for her, if anyone else even thought of looking, they would meet the same fate.
When he returned inside, soaked through and hands still trembling with the aftershocks of violence, the house felt different. Too quiet. Watching him. Judging him. But he shoved the feeling aside, marched to his room, stripped off his bloodstained coat and shoved the ring into the back of the drawer beneath his spare wand holster. Locked it tight. Told himself it was done.
But it was not.
~~~
Hours later, long after the sun had drowned beneath the bruised edge of the horizon and the lamps in the house burned low with a sickly, wavering glow that made the shadows lean too far into the walls, long after he had paced the floor of his room until the boards beneath his boots remembered the pattern of his anger, long after he had told himself again and again that he had done the right thing, that it had been necessary, that no one would ever know, not even her, the door opened without sound.
She stepped inside without knocking. Without hesitation.
And she was holding it.
The ring caught the light as she moved, gleaming dark and sharp against her pale fingers, her grip firm, almost reverent, as if the metal itself burned beneath her skin but she refused to release it. Her face was unreadable, but her eyes were not. They burned. Cold. Focused. Lethal.
Her voice cut through the air, low and blade-thin. "Where did you get this."
The words lodged in the space between them like a knife hammered into stone. And something inside him, brittle from the hours of pretending calm, snapped so sharp and so fast that it almost left him breathless.
"You should not be touching that," he said. The words came too fast. Too loud. They echoed in the room like a gunshot.
She stepped closer, slow, deliberate, her gaze locked on his face, her fingers tightening around the ring as though daring him to try and take it from her. "Where. Did. You. Get. This."
Each word landed harder than the last, paced with the cold deliberation of footsteps leading toward a precipice that neither of them could see clearly anymore but both had known was waiting all along, and as she moved closer, unhurried and unblinking, as the air between them grew thick and strange with everything they had not said, with the weight of a hundred unsaid things that had been straining beneath the surface for hours, Theo felt the edges of his control begin to fray in long, thin strands that terrified him in a way no blade ever had.
It was not the threat of the ring or her words that broke him. It was the sight of her standing there, pale and burning, the ring in her fingers like a verdict, her gaze like a hand pressed straight to the center of his chest. It was the knowing that she could see through him, that she was seeing him now for exactly what he was.
And then he was moving before thought could catch up to instinct, before reason could cage the thing inside him that had already torn loose. He crossed the room in two long strides, shoulders taut as wire, pulse deafening in his ears, and his hand lashed out, snatching for the ring with fingers that shook from more than just rage.
His other hand caught her wrist, too hard, too rough, the skin beneath his palm fragile and hot and real, and his breath came in a ragged growl that scraped up from somewhere too deep to name.
"Drop it," he hissed, voice shaking, barely a voice at all but a guttural command, a plea tangled in warning.
She did not drop it. Her eyes met his with that unbearable, unblinking clarity that had undone him from the very start, the kind of gaze that stripped a man to bone and made every lie inside him shrivel and die, and the sight of it, the steadiness of her, drove a knife straight through his chest with more precision than any curse could have managed.
"You killed him," she whispered. There was no question in it, only knowing. No room for denial, no room for spin. Just truth, dropped between them like a stone in deep water. "You did not report it. You tortured him."
"Do not speak like you know," he bit out, teeth gritted, voice fraying at the edges, the words tasting of blood and shame and something darker that pulsed beneath the skin of his throat.
"But I do know," she said, and her voice was steady now, soft and deadly, the kind of calm that came only after a decision had already been made. "And you are lying to me."
He could barely think. Could barely breathe. His grip tightened without him even realizing it, his fingers pressing into the fragile skin of her wrist as though the very act of holding her there might tether him to something solid.
But nothing felt solid anymore. Not the floor beneath his feet, not the walls that seemed to close in around them, not the thread that burned hotter and tighter with every passing second.
The rage that had been coiling inside him since the moment she had pulled away from him at breakfast, that slow suffocating fury that had bloomed beneath every cold glance and clipped word, now surged upward unchecked, flooding through his veins with a ferocity he could not contain. And beneath that rage, twisted just as tightly, was something uglier.
The hollow ache of her distance. The sick, gnawing grief of her rejection. The image of her turning her face away when he had leaned down to kiss her. The taste of her coffee on his skin. The memory of her walking away. It all roared through him now, and there was no escape from it except through her, through this impossible moment where his grip had turned bruising and his breath trembled and his pulse hammered so violently he thought he might tear apart from the inside out.
"I did it because I had to," he ground out, each word forced through clenched teeth, jagged and raw as a blade dragged through flesh. His voice barely sounded like his own, deeper now, torn open by everything he could no longer control. "He was watching you. Watching this house. Watching us. I am the only thing standing between you and the fucking grave you seem so determined to dig for yourself."
She stared at him. Her wrist still trapped in his hand, the ring still gleaming between her fingers, her eyes locked onto his with that cold unbearable clarity that had always undone him. And in that silence, in that absolute refusal to look away or soften or yield, something inside him broke so cleanly it felt like shattering glass.
His hand loosened, fingers slipping from her skin with a sick little tremor that betrayed more than words ever could. His breath caught hard in his throat, uneven and ragged, the sound of it almost painful in the stillness of the room.
And the weight of the day crashed over him all at once, merciless in its timing. The fight, the blood still drying beneath his nails, the man whose screams still echoed faintly in the back of his skull, the raw frantic need that had been clawing at the edges of his mind for hours now, rising like a tide he could no longer outpace, it all caved in around him until he thought he might drown beneath the sheer force of it.
"You do not get to be angry with me for wanting to protect you," he said, voice dropping low now, shaking, stripped bare of all control, all pretense. The words came out hoarse and desperate, almost pleading, and he hated himself for the sound of it, for how much of his hunger for her was bleeding through. "Not when I would burn this entire fucking world to the ground if anyone laid a finger on you."
But her eyes did not soften. They did not waver. And that, more than anything, destroyed him. Because it was not her anger that killed him. It was her distance. It was the fact that even now, even here, even with his soul flayed raw and laid bare before her, she looked at him as though he was just another threat to be weathered, another storm to be outlasted. As though she could survive him. As though she already had.
"Find someone else for this job. I do not want you here anymore." Her voice came from across the room, low but sharp enough to split him clean down the middle, every word deliberate, paced like the steady rhythm of a blade sliding through skin. She stood with her back half-turned to him, shoulders tense beneath the thin fabric of her blouse, hands trembling just slightly at her sides. But her voice did not tremble. It cut.
Theo stopped in the doorway, breath catching like he had been struck in the gut. His hands flexed uselessly at his sides. His mouth opened, closed again. Then the words came, rougher than he meant, too loud in the suffocating quiet. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
She didn't turn. Not fully. Just tilted her head enough that he caught the glint of her profile, that cold little smile that wasn't a smile at all. "You have asked this question before," she said calmly. "Many things are wrong. Mainly you."
His jaw clenched so hard it ached. His voice dropped to a growl. "What have I done?"
At that, she turned. Finally. Slow and controlled, until her eyes found his and held them there like a noose tightening around his throat. "Fucked me like one of your whores," she said, voice like ice snapping beneath a boot. "And then threw me away."
He stared at her. Dumbfounded. Staggered. The words sank into him with a weight he could not bear, with a truth he could not touch. His mouth worked silently for a beat too long, then the words tumbled out, unsteady, desperate. "I... I would never. Never do that to you. Not you." His voice cracked at the edges now, thin and hoarse. "I made love to you."
"Did you?" Her voice came soft now, like a question posed to a child who did not understand the game he was playing.
"I... I do not know what to say to that," he managed, hands lifting helplessly, voice thick and pleading. "You came on my cock several times. I thought you enjoyed it." His voice caught on the last word, already breaking under the weight of what she was turning this into, already lost beneath the sick pulse of shame clawing its way through his chest.
Her eyes narrowed, burned straight through him. "You were degrading." Her voice hit like a slap. "You fucked me like something you wanted to ruin, not something you wanted to keep. And I am asking you again. NO. I am demanding." She took a step forward now, eyes flashing with something cold enough to freeze the blood in his veins. "Leave. Leave me alone."
Theo could not move. Could not breathe. Could not believe what he was hearing. His body shook with the need to cross the space between them, to grab her, to make her see, to make her hear what he could not seem to say right. "You have no idea," he bit out, voice hoarse and ragged, "how much I love... fuck." His voice cracked wide open. "I would rather die than leave you."
She looked him dead in the eye then, and her words came soft, steady, lethal. "Then die."
And she turned without another glance. Without a flicker of hesitation. Without mercy.
She walked away.
And he stood there, hands shaking, throat burning, pulse roaring so loud he thought it might rip through his skin.
And in that moment, Theo had never hated the woman he loved more than he did now.
And never loved her more either.
~~~
The house felt wrong when he slammed the door behind him, wrong in the way skin prickles when fever begins to bloom beneath it, wrong in the way breath thins at the edges when grief wraps its cold hands around the throat and squeezes too hard, too fast. The argument still rang in his ears, sharp and merciless, her voice slicing through his chest with the precision of a blade honed on bone and regret.
The lights flickered faintly above him, their glow pale and sickly, stuttering like a faltering pulse, and beneath his boots the wards thrummed unevenly, as if they no longer recognized him, or perhaps no longer cared to.
The walls seemed to tilt as he moved, the air too thick, pressing down against his skin in waves. He paced the length of the room without direction, coat half torn from his shoulders, movements jerky and raw, breath coming in sharp, ragged bursts. His hands shook uncontrollably.
He dragged them through his hair over and over, fingers catching on the knots of tension that had twisted tight beneath his scalp, as if tearing at himself might somehow ease the coil tightening deeper in his chest. But nothing helped. Not the pacing. Not the airless room. Not the clawing, desperate ache behind his ribs that only worsened with each breath.
He could not stop seeing her face. Could not stop hearing her voice. Could not unhear the words that had ripped through the thin threads of control he had spent the last weeks convincing himself were strong enough to hold. Find someone else. Die, she had said. And gods, if she had meant it, if she had spoken it as command and not venom, he was no longer sure he would have had the strength to disobey.
The thought made his stomach turn. His skin felt wrong. His body felt wrong. Every muscle too tense, every nerve strung so tight he thought he might splinter from the inside out.
His throat burned with the words he had not said, the ones he should have said, the ones that were still lodged there like barbed hooks. He wanted to tear the room apart, wanted to strip the walls bare, wanted to find something, anything, to bleed the noise from his head.
But he only kept pacing, kept circling the room like a beast trapped too long in a cage that no longer fit its shape, driven not by reason but by the unbearable pull of her absence, her scent fading from his skin, her warmth gone from his hands.
And beneath all of it, beneath the fury, beneath the shame, beneath the sharp ache where her words had lodged too deep, there was something colder still. Something quieter. Something more dangerous. A clarity that only came when he had been pushed too far, too fast, for too long.
The mirror caught his eye as he turned too sharply. The tall one in the corner, the one he usually ignored. Framed in tarnished silver, its edges warped by time and salt air, the glass dulled not only by age but by something deeper, something that seemed to seep through the very bones of the house, as though the walls had breathed through it too many nights and left their ghosts behind. He stopped moving. Breath hitching. Pulse thudding against the fragile cage of his ribs.
He stared across the room. Watched himself watching. And for a moment, the sight of his own face should have grounded him, should have reminded him who he was beneath the wreck of this day, beneath the ruin of her words still echoing in his skull. But something was wrong.
Not subtly wrong. Not the kind of trick light plays when the storm rolls in and shadows dance on old glass. This was wrong in a way that felt personal. In a way that felt deliberate.
He was shaking. He could feel it in his bones, in the raw tension coiled beneath his skin, in the way his hands refused to still even when he forced them down by his sides. But the man in the mirror was not. The man in the mirror stood calm. Straight. Breathing slow and even as though nothing at all had happened. As though the storm outside, the blood beneath Theo's nails, the burn of her rejection had never existed.
His heart hammered harder. Fast enough now that the blood roared in his ears and drowned out the flicker of the lights. He swallowed against the rising pulse in his throat and lifted one hand slowly, fingers trembling so violently he could barely thread them through the matted strands of his hair. The reflection moved, but not with him. A beat too late. A fraction too smooth. The motion replayed like a memory trying to pass as truth, the image lagging as though the glass itself had grown tired of reflecting him honestly and decided instead to lie.
He stepped closer. Bare feet whispering across warped floorboards, cold now beneath his skin, the air around him too still, too charged. His breath grew ragged, caught high in his chest, sharp enough that it hurt to pull in each inhale. Closer still, until he could almost feel the chill bleeding from the glass. He stared without blinking, forcing himself not to look away, forcing himself to confront whatever had twisted behind that surface. Forcing himself to see.
And then it happened.
The reflection smiled.
Not a twitch of his own mouth. Not a shadow of expression crossing his face. His body stood locked, every muscle tight with grief and fury and the sick, spiraling ache that had been building since she walked away. But in the glass, that other version of him smiled. Slow. Wide. Cruel. The kind of smile that knew too much and cared too little. The kind of smile that stripped something vital from the air between them and left it cold.
Theo's breath caught hard enough to hurt. His throat closed around it, his chest heaving as though he had been punched. He could not move. Could not speak. Could only watch as the reflection held that terrible expression with impossible patience. It was not him. It could not be him. And yet it was. His face. His body. His eyes, but hollow. Mocking. Waiting. As though the house had trapped some other version of him behind the glass and now, in his weakest moment, had chosen to show it.
He stared, unblinking, pulse thundering. The mirror smiled. And deep inside, something cracked.
Theo's pulse spiked, sharp and furious, an ache blooming hot beneath his ribs and spreading out through his veins in waves that felt too big for his body to contain. His throat was dry. His mouth tasted like copper.
The lights overhead flickered again, a long stuttering pulse that made the shadows in the corners shiver and stretch like things with limbs, like things that had been waiting for the dark. The wards beneath his bare feet hummed louder now, no longer even or soft but jagged and wrong, almost a warning, almost a song, almost a voice of their own.
His reflection tilted its head with slow, eerie calm, a gesture far too deliberate, watching him with the patience of a predator who had already won the game before the prey had even known it was hunted.
"You are not me," he whispered, voice raw, cracked open, broken in the thick, sick silence of the room.
The reflection blinked, again too late, again too smooth, again as though the mirror itself had grown tired of pretending it could mimic him properly. The air around Theo felt thin. His chest burned with the effort of each ragged breath. Sweat prickled cold beneath his skin. And then, just beneath the static rush in his ears, beneath the hammering of his pulse, beneath the trembling weight of his own fury, he heard it.
So soft at first that for one disorienting moment he almost thought it real.
Her voice. Her voice speaking his name. The voice that had once pulled him out of the darkest rooms inside himself, the voice that had steadied his hand when he could not trust his own mind, the voice that he would have followed into fire without question. Her voice, spoken in that quiet, steady way she used when she wanted to drag him back from the edge and remind him of who he was beneath the wreckage.
But this was not her.
He knew it. Gods, he knew it. The house had learned her tone too well. The house had been watching them both too long. The house was speaking now, speaking through her, wearing her voice like a borrowed coat.
"Theo," it breathed, her name twisting through the hollow of his skull, soft as silk, sharp as a blade. "You cannot protect me."
He flinched back as though struck, as though the words themselves had teeth. His shoulder hit the edge of the wardrobe behind him. His hands gripped the air as though trying to hold onto something that was not there.
"Stop," he whispered, barely sound, more plea than command. "Stop it."
"You will fail," the not-her voice breathed, softer now, deeper now, curling through him like smoke that would not be exhaled, threading itself between every beat of his heart.
"No," he gasped, breath hitching hard, throat burning with the effort of forcing the word out, of denying what some dark part of him already feared might be true. "No."
The mirror smiled wider. Its teeth showed now. Too white. Too knowing.
He moved before thought could catch him, fists rising of their own accord, body coiling like a spring wound too tight, ready to shatter the glass, to tear through the thing that dared to wear his face, dared to speak in her voice, dared to twist what he loved into something hollow and cruel. His muscles screamed for release, knuckles already whitening as he drew back to strike.
But at the last possible moment, he stopped. Frozen mid-motion, breath locked in his throat, chest heaving. His fists hovered inches from the glass, trembling violently, caught between fury and despair. If he shattered it, if he tore the thing apart, it would not undo what had already been said, would not silence the echo of her voice lodged deep in his head, would not erase the truth of what he had done or the weight of what he could not control. It would not bring her back to him. It would not make her forgive him. It would not stop the burning in his chest where she had once fit so perfectly and now left nothing but ruin.
His breath came hard and fast, teeth clenched so tight his jaw ached, every inch of him shaking with the effort of holding himself together when every piece inside him screamed to be broken instead.
And in that trembling moment, voice raw and too thin, he whispered into the empty room, into the cold reflection staring back at him, into the house that watched and listened and would not let him go.
"I will not leave you."
Again.
"I will not leave you."
Until his voice broke apart and the words faded into silence.
His arms dropped, the last of the fight bleeding out of them, and his shoulders sagged beneath the crush of helplessness that pressed down with a weight so suffocating he could barely draw breath. It felt like the whole room had shrunk, like the walls had leaned in to watch him fall apart, to bear witness to the breaking of something they had already long suspected would not hold.
His knees hit the floor hard enough to bruise, bone against old wood, a crack of impact that rattled through him, but he barely felt it. Pain was distant now. Pain was irrelevant.
He knelt there beneath the cold gaze of his own reflection, beneath that smiling false face that stared down at him with the patience of the dead, and whispered into the emptiness of the room, into the stale air that seemed too thick to swallow, into the dark that swallowed every word before it could find a place to land.
"I will not leave you," he said, voice raw and thin, shredded at the edges.
Again, quieter this time, more broken.
"I will not leave you."
Again, so soft it barely counted as sound anymore, more breath than words.
"I will never leave you."
And the house listened. He felt it in the bones of the floor beneath his palms, in the low, greedy hum of the wards, in the walls that seemed to lean closer still, as if they wanted to drink in every last drop of him. The air trembled faintly, almost expectant. Almost pleased. As though the house had been waiting for this. As though it had known all along that this moment would come.
And the mirror smiled, wide and cruel and endless, as if it had finally caught something it would never let go.
And he broke.
Not in the way people imagined strong men broke, with rage or fury or some grand act of defiance. No. He broke in the small ways. In the quiet, ugly ways. In the way his shoulders began to shake uncontrollably, in the way his hands fisted helplessly against his thighs, nails biting skin, in the way his breath hitched into something closer to a sob than he would ever willingly name.
The words choked out of him now, falling apart on his tongue, thick with grief and shame and the unbearable truth that he could not protect her, could not even hold himself together long enough to stand.
And still he whispered, again and again, voice hollow, voice wrecked, voice stripped bare.
"I will not leave you."
Because to stop saying it was to admit that it might already be a lie.
And still the house listened.
And still the mirror smiled.
And Theo stayed there, on his knees in the dark, unable to stop shaking, unable to stop speaking, a man unraveling thread by fragile thread beneath the gaze of something that no longer wore his face at all.
~~~
The morning had not so much arrived as it had seeped through the bones of the house, gray and heavy and without edge or promise, the kind of morning that made breath feel like an effort and thought feel like a weight too great to lift.
The sky outside sagged beneath the threat of rain that hovered but refused to fall, a bruise stretched across the horizon that seemed to press against the old glass of the windows, turning every room dim and strange. Inside, the house felt muted and close, as though it, too, had not slept, as though it was waiting for something neither it nor its occupants dared to name.
Theo had not slept. Not truly. He had drifted in and out of something thinner than rest, a state that left his body aching and his mind raw. He had spent most of the long hours on the floor, back pressed to the cold wood, knees drawn up to his chest until they burned with the pressure.
His hands had trembled too much to be still, and somewhere between the empty hours he had lost track of time entirely, watching the faint play of shadows against the ceiling as though they might rearrange themselves into something he could understand.
When dawn came, or what passed for it beneath the bruised sky, he had only felt colder. His knees ached with the deep, dull throb of stone pressed too long against flesh. His throat burned from the words he had whispered into the dark, words meant for no one but the empty space that had swallowed them whole. "I will not leave you," he had said, again and again, as though repetition could make it truth. As though it could undo the sharp weight of her voice telling him to go, to die, to be gone from the life he had wrapped so tightly around his own heart.
But he had not left. He had not even moved. Not until the house shifted around him, its breath stirring faintly through the halls, its wards thrumming with subtle changes that only he, attuned as he was now, could feel. She was awake. She was moving.
He tracked the soft, telltale ripples in the boundary lines with something close to hunger, every inch of him aching toward the knowledge of her presence. The pulse of the wards told him more than words could have. She had gone outside. Toward the garden, perhaps. Or the cliffs. The restless boundary line that pulled at her like the tide.
And as soon as he knew she was no longer within the house, no longer behind the thin shield of a locked door he dared not breach, he moved. Slowly at first, body stiff with exhaustion and the lingering bite of the night, but soon with purpose. With the narrow, driving focus of a man who no longer trusted himself to think too long, because thought would lead to despair, and despair would lead to ruin.
He needed to do something. Anything. His hands could still move. His hands could still make. And perhaps, if he left a piece of himself where she could find it, if he offered some small fragment of care unspoken, the thread between them would not fray to nothing. Perhaps she would see. Perhaps she would understand, even if she would not listen.
He rose, breath shallow, legs unsteady, and crossed to the door of his room. The house hummed faintly beneath his feet, a sound like the echo of a heartbeat caught in stone. He listened for her again, waited until the wards told him she had not yet returned, and then he stepped into the hall.
Toward the workroom. Toward the only thing left to him now.
Toward the hope that some part of her might still choose not to let him go.
He moved without thought, without plan, driven only by the dull, blunt instinct that had always risen in him when the things he loved were slipping from his grasp. He had no words left that were safe, no language soft enough to bridge what had torn open between them.
Every sentence he had tried to form since the night before had collapsed under the weight of too much rage, too much shame, too much wanting that refused to be tamed, and he had already failed her with words. Words had teeth. Words had weight. Words had made her walk away.
He could not trust himself to speak again, not yet, not when the storm inside him had not settled and her face haunted every corner of it. But his hands, his hands still knew how to make things. His hands could move without trembling. His hands could speak in ways his mouth could not.
So he went to the corner of the workroom where the old supplies lay half-buried beneath forgotten books and crumbling leaves and bits of iron and bone that no longer belonged to any clear purpose. His fingers moved of their own accord, brushing aside layers of dust and paper until they found what they needed.
He did not think about beauty, did not think about softness or romance or any of the things he had seen in the books other men might have read for this moment. He did not know how to offer those things. He did not know how to be gentle. What he knew was how to protect. What he knew was how to build wards, how to thread magic through the bones of the earth and twist it until it stood against the dark.
The herbs he chose came without conscious thought, pulled from old bundles and brittle jars with movements so practiced they might have been ritual. Not the sweet ones she would have picked. Not the pale blossoms she wove through her hair or the lavender she brewed into tea. No. These were the strong ones. The bitter ones. The ones that burned faint beneath the skin and turned away what was not meant to be near.
Mugwort for the sight, to keep her clear of false visions. Vervain to guard the body, to strengthen the will. Ironwort, twisted hard between his fingers, for warding against the dark, even when the dark wore the face of someone she thought she knew.
This was not an apology. He did not know how to give her that. Not when every part of him still burned with the need to pull her back, to hold her too close, to demand her forgiveness in ways that would only drive her further away. No. This was not apology. This was protection. This was all he had left to give, the only language he trusted now. The rough bundle he tied with thin black cord, his knuckles white as he knotted it three times for strength, not for beauty.
And still it was not enough.
He stared at it, chest tight, throat raw, as if the herbs alone might carry some piece of what he could not say. But it was too small. Too thin. Too brittle. It needed more. She deserved more. His gaze flicked toward the shelf where stray bits of wire and stone lay in tangled piles, remnants of old wards and half-built charms.
His fingers found a length of simple iron chain, rough and cold against his skin. He bent over it, breath shallow, weaving the iron with a thick red thread that had once bound the edge of a protection circle. His hands moved faster now, desperate, the knots too tight, the pattern uneven. It was ugly. It was too rough. But it was his. And when it was done, when the iron and thread and bone beads sat heavy in his palm, it hummed faintly beneath his touch. A charm. A ward. Something to keep her safe when he could not.
He stared at it, pulse racing. Then he rose.
The bracelet took longer than it should have, longer than any simple charm ever had beneath his hands, but his fingers would not still, shaking with a restless, broken rhythm that refused to be calmed. The silver wire bent too easily, slipping out of alignment with every twist, coils warping beneath his touch as though they too could feel the unraveling inside him. Where there should have been smooth weaving, there were rough knots, uneven and unsightly, marks of a hand too tense, too desperate, too full of things it could not release.
The beads he chose without thought, without care for pattern or polish, pulling them from scattered jars with trembling fingers. Mismatched, cracked, some no more than old bits of glass or stone that had long lost their shine, but each one spoke in a language older than craft. Each one was chosen with meaning. Not for beauty. Not for pride. For hope. For need. For all the words caught behind his teeth.
Stay safe. One bead. Stay whole. Another. Do not hate me. A third, darker, heavier in the palm. I love you. I love you. Over and over, the silent chant weaving through each knot, through each trembling pass of wire and thread, through each bead pressed hard between his fingers like a prayer. The words pounded beneath his ribs with each turn of the charm, pulsing through him until his throat burned with everything he could not say aloud. By the time it was done, the offering looked crude, rough, more the work of a frightened child than of a man who had trained for years in the precision of the old arts. But perhaps that was fitting. Perhaps that was the only truth he had left to give her now. Beneath the weight of her voice, beneath the ghost of her eyes, beneath the echo of her words that still rang hollow through his chest, he was no more than that. No more than a boy kneeling before a force he could not control, begging to be forgiven for things he did not know how to undo.
With slow, shaking breath, he wrapped the herbs in soft cloth, the bundle small but heavy in his palm, tying it carefully with a strand of hair-twine. His fingers brushed the charm once more, lingering over the knots, as if touch alone could will them into something more worthy. It could not. But he lifted both offerings anyway, throat raw, chest aching, and rose.
Crossing the house felt like walking through a dream half-turned nightmare. The air hung thick around him, each step down the corridor dragging him deeper toward something vast and unknowable. His pulse hammered hard enough to shake the edges of his vision, heart racing with a fear that had nothing to do with death, nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with her. Every footfall felt too loud, too slow. The walls breathed around him, the house watching in its strange, patient way, as if it knew what he carried and what it cost him to carry it.
When he reached her door, the wards stirred faintly beneath his skin. They knew him. They did not reject him. They allowed him through, soft threads of magic parting just enough to let him near. He stood there for a moment, the bundle trembling in his grasp, unsure if he had the right to leave them at all, unsure if it would be a mercy or another wound. But in the end, he laid them down. Carefully, gently, as though the smallest shift might break what fragile hope remained. The herbs. The bracelet. A silent offering. A plea without words.
Her bed was unmade, sheets rumpled and half-kicked toward the edge, the pillow faintly indented with the ghost of where her head had rested before the storm, before the fight, before her voice had torn through him with the precision of a blade honed on grief. The room smelled faintly of dried herbs and salt and rain-soaked air, the curtains half-drawn against a window that still rattled softly in its frame. He stood there for a long moment just inside the threshold, fingers tightening around the bundle until they ached, breath caught sharp in his throat as though entering this space was a trespass he could not justify and could not stop.
The house breathed slow around him, the wards low and watchful beneath his skin, neither welcoming nor rejecting him, merely observing, and that quiet scrutiny only made the ache worse. He had come here like a thief in the pale hours of morning, armed with nothing but a clumsy scrap of hope and a heart too raw to bear its own weight, and now that he stood here, now that he could see the emptiness where she should have been, he found that his legs wanted to collapse and his throat wanted to shatter.
But he forced himself forward.
One step.
Another.
Until he reached the side of the bed. Until he stood over the pillow where her breath had still warmed the fabric hours before. Slowly, as if handling something sacred, as if the slightest wrong movement might tear open every wound he had tried to stitch closed, he set the bundle down. The cloth first, herbs pressed flat beneath his palm as though they might still shield her even now, as though the frail power of his hands could weave a protection stronger than the fury he had left her with. The bracelet beside it, coiled small and imperfect like a promise he did not know how to keep, a hope he did not know how to voice.
He wanted to speak. Gods, he wanted to speak. To leave some scrap of himself in the air that might tell her what his hands could not. I am sorry. I am lost without you. Please let me stay. But the words locked hard in his throat, stone and ice and iron choking the breath from him until he could only stand there, fists clenched at his sides, chest heaving with the effort of silence.
And after a moment, after a lifetime carved into the space of a few heartbeats, he fled. Back through the house, back through its crooked halls and restless shadows, back to the thin, hollow dark of his own room where he could not see the things he had left behind, where he could lie to himself and say it had been enough.
The day passed in silence. He waited. He heard her return, the faint sound of boots thudding soft against the floor, the rustle of her coat sliding from her shoulders, the slow, careful creak of her door opening. His heart slammed once against his ribs so hard he thought it might split apart. He waited. The house felt thick with tension, air stretched tight like the skin of a drum about to break.
Hours passed. He counted them by the uneven rise and fall of his breath. By the flicker of the candle that burned low and guttered beside him. By the cold that seeped through the floor and into his bones until he could no longer tell where he ended and the house began.
Night came. And still he waited. And when the waiting became too sharp, when the silence began to claw beneath his skin until he thought he might tear himself apart, he rose. Stepped out into the corridor, slow, sick with dread that tasted like iron on his tongue, heart shaking through his chest with a rhythm that was not quite fear and not quite hope.
And there it was.
Hanging from the handle of his door. Swaying faintly in the draft that whispered down the hallway like a breath drawn too long. The bracelet. Untouched. Returned. No note. No word. Just that small, perfect refusal, quiet as snowfall, sharp as a blade.
Theo stood frozen, staring at it, and the world seemed to tilt beneath him, the floor rolling like the deck of a ship caught in a storm, something deep inside pulling tighter and tighter until it felt like the thread of him might snap. His lungs burned. His vision blurred. His hands trembled so hard he thought they might never be steady again.
And the house, ancient and watching, listened. Its wards thrummed low with the echo of what it had witnessed.
But this time, the house did not smile. And neither did he.
~~~
It was late. The shadows stretched longer here, not gentle or soft, but heavy, distorted things that blurred the edges of thought until only raw need remained. The kind of late where even the house seemed to forget the shape of its own silence, where each creak of wood sounded too loud and too alive, as though the walls themselves had begun to listen too closely.
And still, no word from her. Not since the fight. Not a glance. Not a sound. Not even the faint echo of her footsteps crossing the floor above, the light sweep of her skirts past the threshold, the soft pulse of her magic brushing against the wards they both breathed like the pulse beneath their skin. She had vanished from his world in all but name, and that absence was no longer absence. It had shape now. It had teeth. It had a voice that spoke in the quiet of her refusal, in the deliberate severing of her presence from his orbit. The silence was not emptiness anymore. It was punishment. A blade drawn slow and deep across the fault lines of his ribs, a wound that refused to clot.
Theo could not bear it anymore.
At first, it was only a thought. A small, sharp impulse that scraped at the inside of his skull like a shard of glass. Go. Just go. Leave before you shatter entirely in her presence. Leave before this hunger, this unbearable thrum beneath your skin, devours what little of you remains. He had ignored it at first. Pushed it aside. Paced the room until his feet ached and the carpet lay worn beneath his path. But the thought grew louder, sharper, until it sang beneath his ribs, until it snarled against the cage of his breath, until it became the only thing that made sense anymore.
Move. Now. Go.
He moved before he was aware of moving, as though some deeper, older part of him had taken control. His hands shot forward, dragging the battered old travel bag from beneath the bed with jerking, uneven motions that rattled the frame and made the floorboards groan beneath him. He tossed it to the floor where it landed open, mouth yawning wide and empty, a hollow space waiting to devour whatever pieces of him he was about to surrender.
The sight of it made his throat tighten.
A bag.
Just a bag.
But it looked like the end of something. The end of this. The end of them. The end of whatever fragile, impossible thread had kept him tethered to this place, to her. And yet his body kept moving as though caught in the tide of some ritual that could no longer be stopped.
He crouched beside it, knees aching beneath his weight, and stared down at the empty space with a hollowness in his chest that swallowed reason. One hand hovered above the floor as if uncertain where to begin, and then with a breathless shake of his head, he reached for the first thing within arm's reach. Not because it mattered. Because something had to go in first, or he would never move again.
And so the slow, brutal unmaking began.
He packed slowly at first. Mechanically. Fingers moving as though detached from thought, as though if he simply performed the motions of leaving, the rest of him would follow in time. A shirt first, worn soft with age. The one she had once touched without thinking, her hand brushing against the sleeve in some forgotten moment when she reached past him for a jar of dried lavender. He could still see it clearly. The tilt of her head. The faint smile that ghosted her mouth. The way her fingers had lingered a second too long. It had never been worn again after that.
Just folded carefully into the bottom of a drawer where the faintest trace of her skin had remained, mingled with the dusty scent of herbs and the ghost of something that had felt, at the time, dangerously close to hope. It went into the bag first. Laid too carefully for something he would never wear again. Laid as though it mattered, when none of this should have mattered at all.
The charm knife came next. Its handle worn smooth beneath his palm, the runes along its spine chipped from too many nights tracing protective circles around a house that had never fully welcomed him. He hesitated before setting it beside the shirt, as though the blade might carve through the fragile resolve holding him upright.
Then the last piece of ward chalk. Cracked and worn thin at one end, the kind of chalk you only keep because throwing it away feels like surrender. He gripped it too tightly for a moment, breath shaking in his throat, and forced himself to let go. Forced it into the bag with fingers that did not feel like his own.
A handful of coins followed. Useless weight. He would never need them. He knew this even as he slid them into the side pocket, hands trembling more with each object that passed through them. Everything he touched felt heavier than it should, as though each one had been stitched to the walls of this place, to her voice, to the line of her shoulders when she had walked away from him without a second glance, to the curve of her mouth when she had told him to die.
The more he packed, the faster his movements grew. Rushed now, clumsy. As if speed alone could dull the edges of this, as if throwing the last of himself into the bag would somehow prevent the ache in his chest from splitting him open entirely. His hands shook as he grabbed the next item, and the next, and the next, each one more frantic than the last, each one laced with a desperation that had nowhere left to go.
And then, by the time the bag was half full, the lie unraveled.
His breath caught hard in his throat. A sharp, brutal hitch that lodged there like glass. The air in the room tasted thin, sour, wrong, as though the house itself had turned against him now, as though even the walls disapproved of this coward's retreat. His vision swam. Blurred at the edges by something he refused to name. Something he refused to feel. His heart began to pound sideways against the cage of his ribs, each beat frantic, uneven, a raw stutter that seemed to echo the unraveling truth beneath his skin.
He could not do this.
He could not walk out.
Not from this house. Not from her.
His whole body knew it.
His whole fucking soul knew it.
He stood there, frozen, rooted to the spot with one fist still clutching a crumpled shirt as though strangling fabric could somehow tether him to the moment, to her, to the world he could feel slipping sideways beneath his feet. His heart was a hammer against bone, breath trapped somewhere deep in his chest, useless now, more ragged with every second that passed.
And then the sound came. Soft. Too soft. The whisper of footsteps outside his door, light as breath, deliberate in the way only hers ever were, like she had never learned how to hurry because the world would always wait for her. He knew those steps. Knew them better than the sound of his own pulse. He knew the rhythm of them even in sleep.
She passed. Not even stopping. Not even hesitating. Not even glancing in. Just moving past as if he were already gone, as if the empty space he left behind had already begun to fill in without him.
Something inside him shattered. Clean and merciless.
The door flew open without grace, without thought, banging against the wall with a force that made the wards along the frame hum in startled warning, ancient lines of magic flickering faint and jagged against the wood as though even they had not been prepared to witness this collapse. He was already moving before thought could catch him, before pride could chain him to the image of the man he pretended to be, the man he was supposed to be. His body had outpaced his mind entirely now, running on instinct alone, the raw and terrible instinct that screamed at him that she was leaving, and that if he did not stop her now he would never survive what came after.
He caught sight of her halfway down the corridor, moving toward the stairwell in that maddening, effortless way she always did, as if the air parted to let her pass, as if the house itself would not dare stand in her way. The distance between them was unbearable. Infinite. The kind of distance no steps could close unless she chose to stop.
"Luna." His voice cracked. Too raw, too loud, fracturing against the breathless dark that had swallowed the house. The name came out like a prayer, or a curse, or something that no longer knew the difference.
She did not turn.
"Luna, please."
Still she did not turn.
And then it happened. The worst thing he had ever done. The lowest he had ever allowed himself to fall.
His knees hit the floor hard enough to bruise, the sharp crack of bone on wood echoing down the corridor, cutting through the silence with a violence that made the house itself seem to flinch. His palms pressed against the boards, fists curling until his knuckles burned, his head bowed so low it felt as though gravity itself had claimed him entirely. He was shaking, visibly, violently, the wreck of his breath dragging through his throat like barbed wire. His body no longer his own. His voice no longer recognizable.
"Please." The word tore from him like flesh from bone, hoarse and broken open, the voice of a man who had been stripped of every last defense and had nothing left but this, this begging, this ruin. "I will leave if you want me to. I swear to you." The words stuttered out through the shaking, fractured by the weight of the ache pressing against his ribs. "But I am begging you. Please, just tell me to stay. Just tell me to stay and I will never leave this house. I will never leave you. I will die here if you ask it. Please."
Each word bled from him, dragged across the blade of his own ribs, raw and desperate and laid bare in a way he could never have imagined himself capable of. He had nothing left to give but this. No more strength to fight with. No more walls to hide behind. Just the wreck of his voice and the hollow shell of his body, bowed in the corridor like a broken thing, hands trembling against the cold boards beneath him where even the house seemed to watch in stunned, brittle silence.
She stopped then.
Turned slowly.
Her eyes found him, wide and bright with something unreadable, something cold and terrible in its clarity, a light that seemed to cut through the dark between them like a blade. She stood frozen, breath shallow, gaze locked onto him as though seeing both a stranger and something far too familiar. Her expression did not soften. Her mouth did not open. She only looked at him.
And in that silence, more brutal than any words she could have spoken, Theo stayed kneeling, trembling, watching her as though watching the only light left in the world begin to flicker. The only thing that mattered. The only thing he could not let go. The only thing that, if it walked away now, would take whatever was left of him with it.
She did not speak.
She turned.
And walked away.
And he did not move. Not even when the sound of her footsteps faded back into the dark. Not even when the weight in his chest became something so vast it could no longer be contained by breath or bone.
Not even when the house sighed around him like it too understood that something had just broken beyond repair.
He stayed kneeling. Trembling. Hands pressed flat against the cold boards, fists curling now and again without thought, as though they could claw their way into the wood, as though anchoring himself to the floor could somehow anchor him to her, to this house, to something that still mattered. His breath came uneven, sharp bursts of air that scraped against his throat, each one a fight he was losing.
His entire body shook with the effort of staying upright. But he did not move. Not yet. Not when her figure still lingered in his sight, a silhouette against the dim stretch of the corridor, and not when his mind, fevered and desperate, still tried to pull some meaning from her stillness, from the wide, unreadable eyes that had found him for that single unbearable moment.
He watched her as though she were the last light left in a world gone dark, the only tether holding him to a place where he had any name, any meaning. Without her, he would vanish. He already felt it starting, pieces of himself slipping loose beneath the weight of the silence. His chest felt hollowed, scraped raw, his ribs struggling to contain the force of something that refused to be caged. There were no more words. None left that would matter. None left that would reach her through the ruin he had made of this fragile thing between them.
And when she finally turned again, silent as the grave, her shoulders lifting in that small, deliberate way that always preceded her retreat, when she began to walk back into the dark with the same unhurried grace that had undone him from the start, as though the world could collapse behind her and she would simply glide onward untouched, he stayed there, unmoving. Watching her disappear. Counting each step in the hollow beats of his pulse. His throat burned to call out again, to plead, to say anything that might tether her back to him. But no sound came. Only the wreck of breath caught somewhere deep in his chest.
He stayed there long after the sound of her footsteps had faded. Long after the faint creak of the stair settled back into stillness. Long after the house, which had seemed to watch with its own quiet grief, finally let out a sigh low and mournful, the old bones of its frame groaning in a way that felt almost like pity.
He did not move. Not when the chill seeped deep into his bones, climbing up from the cold boards to wrap around his spine, tightening until every joint in his body ached with the weight of the posture he could not abandon. Not when the ache in his knees became agony, sharp and grinding, a constant throb that blurred into the larger pain pressing against his chest. Not when his fingers went numb, nails scraping faintly against the floor as though they might tear it open to find some other layer beneath where this nightmare was not true.
Not even when the house itself seemed to breathe slower around him, the flickering wards dimming as though they, too, were bracing for the shape of what had just been lost.
The bag remained half packed on the floor of his room, its mouth gaping wide like some cruel joke, a reminder that leaving had been the lie all along. The door behind him still stood open, the dim light from within spilling uselessly into the corridor where no one would see it.
And Theo knelt alone in the dark, his body broken beneath the weight of a love he could no longer carry, and could never, ever set down.
Not now. Not ever.
And when he finally broke again, when the first ragged sound tore loose from his throat, it was too soft for the house to answer, too small for the night to notice. Just the sound of a man crumbling in silence, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the trembling shape of him still kneeling there, waiting for a mercy that would never come.
Time stopped meaning anything. It stretched and warped, folding in on itself like a shroud. The darkness of the corridor grew heavier around him, dense and soft at the edges, the way fog creeps into a valley and smothers sound, smothers thought. He could not tell how long he had been kneeling. A minute, an hour, the better part of the night. It no longer mattered. The ache in his body had passed from pain to numbness and back again in endless cycles, but he barely felt it anymore.
What he felt was the silence. The absence of her. The shape of her footfalls that would not return. The hollow ring of her words still echoing in his ribs, each one sharp enough to cut if he let it rise too close to the surface.
His eyes burned from staring too long at the empty space where she had last stood, the pale shape of her hair and the slight lift of her shoulders still imprinted in the dark. His chest ached in long, slow waves, a grief too large for breath to contain. He could not breathe. Not truly. The air in his lungs tasted thin and cold and laced with the scent of the house's old dust and old magic, and when he finally blinked, the darkness seemed to shift around him, tilting ever so slightly, the way the sea tilts before it swallows a ship.
Somewhere far off, a wall creaked softly. A door eased itself half-shut with no touch. The house was listening. The house had always been listening. And now, in the void of her absence, it seemed to lean closer, its breath damp and cold against his neck, its bones humming low with the same grief that trapped him here.
"I will not leave you," he whispered again, the words barely a thread of sound this time, no louder than breath, as if speaking louder would tear what remained of him apart.
The house gave no answer. Only the long, slow groan of its timbers in the dark, the mournful creak of floorboards that seemed to pulse beneath his knees, as though even the ancient wood beneath him had begun to weep.
A flicker of movement caught the edge of his vision. He turned his head too fast and the world spun, swimming gray and black at the edges. The tall mirror down the hall stood half in shadow, half in the sickly glow of the nearest wardlight, its glass dark and empty, but not empty enough. A shape moved there, not quite his reflection, not quite a trick of the eye. He could not look too long. He would not. If he did, he feared what he would see. What was left of him would not survive the truth of that glass.
And so he stayed still. Knelt with his hands shaking faintly now where they pressed into the floor. Mouth dry. Throat raw. Heart trapped between too many broken beats. And though some dim, half-buried voice in the back of his skull urged him to move, to get up, to finish packing, to run, another part, deeper, older, rooted in bone and blood and the thread that still burned at his wrist no matter how he had tried to ignore it, whispered one truth he could no longer deny.
He would not leave. Not even if it killed him. Not even if she never looked at him again. He would kneel here until the world crumbled to dust if it meant staying close to her.
He lowered his head at last, eyes closing as though in prayer, as though he could shut out the ruin of this night and the ruin of himself. But the dark behind his lids was worse than the corridor. It was full of her. Full of the shape of her mouth when she said "leave," full of the soft brush of her fingertips he would never feel again, full of the sound of her walking away from him for the last time.
A dry sob broke in his chest, silent and sharp, shaking him so hard he thought for a moment he might actually fracture, might finally split open right there on the floor.
But still he knelt. Still he whispered.
"I will not leave you," he mouthed now, voiceless, as the draft passed cold fingers through his hair, as the mirror down the hall watched in silence.
And when the candle finally guttered out behind him and the last light bled from the corridor, the house seemed to sigh once more, long and low and tired.
And Theo, wrecked beyond pride or reason, stayed exactly where he was.