Marguerite’s experiment worked better than any of them expected, and considerably worse than Seraphina wanted to admit.
With Lucien seated across the room rather than standing close at her side, the wild, overreaching surge that had burned Marguerite’s hand didn’t return — the mark’s response settling back into something closer to the contained warmth of the week’s earlier lessons.
But something in Seraphina’s chest ached at the distance in a way she hadn’t anticipated, a low, persistent pull toward him that had nothing to do with the mark’s magic and everything to do with simple, human want.
“Interesting,” Marguerite said, watching the dust rise and settle in a clean, controlled spiral for the fifth consecutive attempt.
“Considerably steadier, this far from him. Which confirms proximity accelerates the channel, though I confess I don’t yet understand whether that’s the bond’s natural behavior or something being deliberately encouraged from the other end of it.”
“Does that mean we should stay apart?” Seraphina asked, hating how much the question cost her to voice aloud.
Marguerite considered it with the same careful weighing she brought to every question in the lessons, unhurried despite the exhaustion visible in the lines of her face.
“Not entirely,” she said finally.
“But perhaps deliberately, at intervals — enough distance to practice control without the acceleration working against you, enough closeness to keep the bond itself healthy. It’s a balance, not an absolute. I’d rather teach you to modulate it than force either extreme.”
Across the room, Lucien had gone very quiet through the exchange, and when the lesson finally ended for the day, he didn’t move immediately to close the distance the way he usually did.
“You’re keeping away on purpose,” Seraphina said, once they’d stepped out into the narrow alley behind the shop, the evening air cool after the day’s exertions.
“I’m trying to be sensible,” Lucien said, though the strain in his voice suggested sensible cost him considerably more than he wanted to let on.
“If proximity accelerates something none of us fully understand, then perhaps the sensible choice is distance, until we do.”
“That’s not what Marguerite said. She said balance, not distance.”
“I know what she said.” Lucien’s jaw tightened, some old, familiar fear resurfacing beneath the careful composure.
“But I watched her hand burn today, Seraphina, and I keep thinking about what would have happened if that dust had been something considerably less forgiving. I don’t know how to simply trust balance, when the cost of miscalculating it might be your life.”
The fear in his voice landed differently than it had in the alley days before — quieter, more resigned, the particular ache of someone who’d already decided, on some deep level, to start pulling away before the choice could be made for him. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
“You’re doing it again,” Seraphina said, frustration and hurt tangling together in her chest.
“Deciding, alone, what’s safest for both of us, instead of actually talking to me about it.”
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“You’re explaining a decision you’ve already made,” Seraphina said.
“That’s not the same thing.” She crossed her arms, watching him carefully, some old, familiar ache settling in at the sight of him retreating behind careful walls she’d thought, until today, they’d already dismantled together.
“Lucien, I understand you’re afraid. I am too. But if the answer to every fear is putting distance between us, we’re not actually solving anything — we’re just finding a slower way to lose each other before the Hollow King even gets the chance.”
Something in his expression cracked at that, old grief and fresh fear warring visibly behind his gold eyes.
“I don’t know how else to protect you,” he admitted, low.
“Every instinct I have built across three centuries tells me that closeness is dangerous, that the people I love pay for my presence in their lives one way or another. I watched it happen to my mother. I watched it happen to Evelyne, in her own way. I am trying, Seraphina, truly trying, not to let that instinct win — but today, watching that burn, it won rather more easily than I wanted it to.”
Seraphina’s anger softened, aching sympathy rising in its place, though the hurt didn’t entirely fade.
“Then we need a better plan than you quietly deciding to pull away every time something frightens you,” she said.
“Not because your fear isn’t real. Because I can’t fight whatever’s coming for us if half my energy is spent convincing you not to protect me straight into being alone.”
Lucien was quiet for a long moment, the evening settling gray and cool around them, before he finally crossed the small distance he’d kept between them, reaching for her hand with visible effort against whatever old instinct still whispered caution.
“You’re right,” he said, quiet and honest.
“I keep promising not to decide things alone, and then finding new, quieter ways to do exactly that the moment fear resurfaces. That isn’t fair to either of us, and it isn’t the partnership I promised you in that study, the morning after the letter arrived.”
“No,” Seraphina agreed, though she squeezed his hand, some of her hurt easing at the visible effort behind the admission. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“It isn’t. But I’d rather you catch yourself doing it and say so, the way you just did, than keep pretending it isn’t happening at all.”
“I’ll try,” Lucien said.
“I can’t promise I’ll always catch it in time. Three hundred years of instinct doesn’t unlearn itself in a week, however much I wish it would. But I can promise to keep trying, and to trust you enough to tell you when I’m failing at it, rather than simply retreating and hoping you won’t notice.”
Seraphina managed a small, tired smile at that, some of the day’s exhaustion and fear settling into something gentler, more hopeful, beneath the honesty of the exchange.
“That’s all I’m asking,” she said.
“Not perfection. Just honesty, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
They stood together in the quiet alley a while longer, the evening deepening around them, neither quite ready to return to the small inn room Marguerite had arranged for their stay, both, Seraphina suspected, needing the simple reassurance of standing close without a lesson or a crisis demanding anything further of the moment.
“I do trust you,” Lucien said eventually, quiet, almost to himself as much as to her.
“More than I’ve trusted anyone in longer than I can properly measure. I think that’s precisely what frightens me most, if I’m honest. Trusting something this deeply again, after three centuries spent carefully avoiding exactly that risk.”
“I know,” Seraphina said softly, leaning into his side, feeling the tension in his shoulders ease slightly at the simple contact.
“I’m frightened too. Not just of the Hollow King. Of how much this — you, us, whatever we’ve built in less than two weeks — already means to me, when I know how badly it could still go wrong.”
“Then we’re frightened together,” Lucien said, pressing a soft kiss to the top of her head, “which strikes me, after everything Marguerite has taught us this week, as considerably safer than being frightened apart.”
Seraphina laughed, quiet and a little unsteady, some of the day’s fear finally loosening its grip.
“That’s almost poetic, for a man who spent the whole afternoon trying to convince himself distance was the answer.”
“I contain multitudes,” Lucien said dryly, and the small, familiar humor of it settled something warm and steady between them, carrying them, hand in hand, back toward the inn as the last of the evening light faded over the Veiled Market’s quiet streets.