The doors closed behind me with a hush that felt like the end of something I could never name. Cool night air wrapped me, sharp with the faint scent of snow. For a moment I stood still, letting it press against my skin, trying to breathe through the storm inside me. Halven was alive. He was here, walking with the others, and the relief of it nearly buckled my knees. Months of fear had clawed at me, whispering that we might never find him, then save him, that he was gone for good. And now he was back.

But the joy twisted with sorrow. Once it had been the three of us—me, Halven, and Veyn. Easy laughter, late hours, promises that felt unbreakable. Then Veyn left, and Halven had been the one to hold me steady, to ease the jagged edges of that loss. None of it would ever return to what it was. The balance we had once shared lived only in memory, and tonight, even with Halven saved, the space where Veyn and I had fallen apart ached more keenly than ever.

My steps carried me into the courtyard, stone dark beneath the thin gleam of moonlight. Shadows pooled at the edges, but the silver glow touched the frost-laced arches and spilled across the open square. Movement stirred at the far side. A great dire wolf stood at its edge, fur rippling white with streaks of silver and faint blue. Golden eyes met mine across the distance, bright as coals in the dark.

Neir. Rielle’s wolf.

His head dipped in a solemn bow before he turned his attention to the door I’d just exited from. A shiver tracked down my spine, not from the cold, but from the reminder of how much the world had shifted while we had been trapped in grief and searching. Everything moved forward. And yet here I was, chasing refuge the only way I knew.

The library waited for me.

I slipped in through a side door. The empty library breathed around me like an abandoned cathedral, quiet and hollow in the dead of night. Shelves towered, their spines a hundred silent voices staring back, but none of them spoke to me. I curled into the alcove that had always been mine, knees tucked close, a book spread open against them. Candlelight spilled weakly across the page, the wax guttering low in its holder. I had not turned a page in some time. The words blurred, too distant to matter. Hiding in stories should have dulled the ache, but tonight even fiction failed me.

A presence stirred the shadows. My head lifted before I could stop it. Veyn stepped into the faint light, shoulders taut, his stride slow but sure. He lingered at the edge of the alcove as though he did not belong here, yet his eyes carried a resolve I had not seen in months.

“No, Veyn,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He took a step forward, then stopped with his hands loose at his sides.

“You were right.” His voice rasped, soft enough the candle threatened to swallow it.

Of course he would know that would intrigue me, but I couldn’t allow it to persuade me. I couldn’t handle another heartache, and I was still hurting. “Does it really matter? Too much has been lost.”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

He took another step forward but again he stopped when I narrowed my eyes. “We’re done.”

“Yes, we are.”

His agreement stopped my heart. To hear him believe the words I kept trying to get my heart to accept hurt more than anything else. It took a moment for me to hold back my tears, but he spoke before I could say anything.

“We were children who experienced a love meant for fairytales. That version of us is done.” His eyes traced the lines of my face. “Now we have to grow up. I’ve made decisions in that effort, so that we could have a love that would continue.”

“Decisions that never asked for my input.” I snapped the words in my anger, unwilling to hold back any longer. Unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Relationships are about more than one person, and this love you speak of should have included me.”

“You’re right.” His brows drew down. “I have spent everything on protecting you. Every thought, every choice. But it was never what you needed. I didn’t even know what you needed because I never asked.”

My fingers pressed into the spine of the book, nails biting into leather.

“All I ever needed was you,” I said, the words trembling out before I could brace them. “Not your walls, not your distance. Just you, here, present, sharing your life with mine.”

“Again, you’re right.” His jaw tightened. “But may I tell you everything now that I couldn’t before?”

Again, he knew that piquing my interest in this mystery would allow him closer, and this time I couldn’t deny him. I wanted to know it all. I nodded.

He shifted closer.

“Rielle’s foretelling,” he whispered, breath uneven. “That was why I left, which you know already. But you’ve never known what was seen. Rielle dreamed again and again, always of you, always of me. Every path where I stayed ended with your death to the entities. The only way forward was if I left, if I learned what I needed to bind the entities in the lake.”

He rubbed his temple. “No matter what choice I made, I was to lose you, but at least you’d live if I left. So I took that chance.”

So far I had gathered as much about the foretelling, and could I really blame him for that choice?

“So you see that I never meant to abandon you. It was about your survival.”

The candle shuddered in its dish, throwing his shadow long across the stone. His words pressed into me, fierce and tender at once, a blade and a balm. My chest clenched so hard I could hardly breathe. Fury rose, sharp and searing, because he had stolen years from me, stolen choice, stolen truth. Yet beneath it, love curled stubborn as ivy, winding around each syllable he spoke.

My hand shook as I pressed the book closed, the sound echoing through the empty alcove. “Maybe it was that was the right choice, but I was not involved in it.”

His eyes glistened, the dark of them deeper than the night around us. “I was bound. By oath, by fear, by my own childish thinking to save you from a bleak future. I thought it was the only way.”

The ache split me clean through, leaving me torn between wanting to strike him and wanting to cling to him. He had left me because he loved me, and that truth was the cruelest comfort I had ever known.

But I couldn’t allow him to hurt me again.

“Veyshara, please.” He took another step, close enough to touch me and dropped to his knees before me, the stone unforgiving beneath him. His hands pressed into his thighs as though bracing himself against something heavier than his body could carry. His eyes shone in the candlelight, wet, unguarded.

“I’m not perfect, and I’ve made mistakes. My choices were always with you in my heart but never with you as my partner.” His voice broke, the words catching in his throat. “That was my failure. Deciding for you, again and again, and convincing myself it was love.”

The air thickened between us. My chest burned with all the words I had thrown at him over the months, all the pleas, all the anger. For the first time, he gave them back, naming them truth.

He bowed his head, strands of dark brown hair falling loose around his face, his vines almost wilting. “You never needed a protector. You needed someone beside you. And I placed you behind me, thinking I could bear the storms for you. I cannot undo that. I can only promise that I will try not do it again.”

He looked back up at me. “But know this, Veyshara I will make mistakes. I will stumble. But if you let me, I will make them with you, not apart from you.”

The candle wavered, casting his face in shifting gold and shadow. His shoulders trembled with the force of his own words. Nothing was shielded in his eyes or in his expression. “It has always been us. Since we were children, since the first time you made me laugh when I wanted to stay angry. Every memory I carry, you are there. There has never been anyone else. There never will be.”

My throat closed around the flood of emotions. He was not a professor in that moment, not the man bound by oath and vision. He was Veyn, the boy who had once chased me barefoot through the orchard, who had stolen apples just to share them with me, who had kissed me clumsy and earnest under summer skies. The boy who had always been mine, even when he had been gone.

His words pressed through me like roots breaking stone, steady and unstoppable. On his knees before me, he was stripped of every mask, only Veyn, flawed and unguarded, and the truth burned in my chest. He had broken me with his silence, yet even shattered, he was still mine.

My fingers trembled as I lowered the book onto the bench beside me. “I cannot forgive the years you left me with nothing. Maybe I never will.”

My voice cracked, raw but steady enough to hold. “But I’m willing to find if a new version of us will succeed.”

He reached toward me, uncertain, his hand hovering. I placed mine in his, my palm swallowed in his warmth, and the promise became mine as much as his. Partners. Always beside each other.