Morning came with sunlight straight in my eyes and the distinct feeling that the world had decided sleep was a luxury I had not earned.
I woke in the narrow bed the druids had given me, stiff from too little rest and too many thoughts, with my arm flung over my face and my temper already halfway back from where I had left it in the dark. The guest house was quiet. Too quiet. For one hopeful, stupid second, I assumed the others had collapsed wherever they were—probably near the druid circle, keeping watch over Mira until exhaustion finally dragged them under.
I was wrong.
Violently wrong.
My greeting that morning was Mira’s fist smashing straight into my nose.
Pain burst white behind my eyes. I lurched halfway upright on pure instinct, one hand going to my face as warmth spilled over my mouth.
Behind her, Seraphine laughed.
Not politely. Not delicately. She actually fucking laughed.
Darian was trying and failing to hide a grin. Ilyon, the sanctimonious bastard, looked almost serene as he stepped forward and handed me a rag.
“You have something coming out of your nose,” he said, making a vague motion at his own face as if that clarification were in any way necessary.
“What the fuck, Mira?”
She looked radiant.
That might have been the most infuriating part.
After a night of healing rites that should have left her weak, she stood there bright-eyed and loose-limbed, black hair tied back badly, boots muddy, expression smug as sin. There was still some lingering pallor under her skin if you knew what to look for, but otherwise she seemed full of energy in that dangerous way people sometimes are right after surviving something that nearly killed them.
One good near-death experience and suddenly they all think they’re immortal again.
“Well,” I muttered, pressing the rag to my nose, “this is one way to greet me.”
Mira clicked her tongue, utterly unimpressed. Then she skipped past me like she hadn’t just assaulted a god in borrowed walls and patted my shoulder on the way by.
“You deserved it,” she said lightly. “Threatening my man because he was roughing you up a little after I nearly died? Dramatic.”
Darian made a quiet choking sound behind her, either from embarrassment or delight. Hard to tell with him.
Mira threw herself down onto the edge of the bed and kicked her boots toward him without looking. He caught them on reflex, still smiling like an idiot.
“I’ve already set him straight,” she went on, waving one hand dismissively. “It was my choice to go after the suicidal freak instead of his dumb sister and her pretty little mirror maze.”
“That is not exactly how I would describe the encounter,” Ilyon said.
Mira pointed at him. “And that is why no one lets you tell stories.”
He actually inclined his head, as if conceding the point.
I stared at all of them for a second, blood still dripping into the rag, and felt something in my chest loosen despite myself. After the dread of the night before, after the fear, the waiting, the possibility that Mira might not wake at all, this—the laughter, the bruised affection, the easy cruelty of old friends—landed like a breath I had not realized I’d been holding.
Gods, I had missed them.
That did not stop me from being irritated.
“Are you all serious?” I asked, lowering the rag long enough to glare properly. “We need to move. We have the locations of the other lairs. Why are you making yourselves comfortable?”
Because that was the other thing sitting under my skin, sharp as a hooked blade: urgency. Every hour we wasted was another hour for Liliana’s bloodline to move captives, burn records, fortify chambers, or vanish into the cracks. We had already seen what one branch of that family could do when given time. I had no intention of giving the rest more of it.
Darian leaned against the doorway, Mira’s boots hanging from one hand, and gave me the sort of look usually reserved for stubborn animals and beloved fools.
“We’re not relaxing,” he said. “We’re making sure Mira can stand without falling over because someone”—his eyes flicked to me with enough accusation to keep it personal—“would rather sprint from one nightmare to the next without stopping to think.”
“I did stand without falling over,” Mira said.
“You punched him first thing in the morning.”
“That took balance.”
Seraphine laughed again, softer this time, and came to sit in the chair by the wall like this was a council meeting instead of the aftermath of a massacre. Golden morning light caught in her dark auburn hair, threaded with gold beads, and for all her warmth there was still steel in her face from the night before.
“She’s right,” she said. “About the standing. Not the punching. Though I admit I understand the sentiment.”
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“You encourage her far too much,” I muttered.
“I encourage all of you exactly as much as you deserve.”
“Which is not reassuring,” Ilyon said.
He had taken up position near the window, long black hair tied back, the sort of composed he only wore when he was either exhausted or one thought away from drawing steel again. With him, the difference was often academic.
I pressed the rag harder to my nose and glared at the lot of them. “We know where at least one of the next branches is. Liliana’s line won’t sit still once word reaches them.”
“Word may already have reached them,” Ilyon said.
That cut through the room quickly enough.
Mira’s smile faded first. Darian’s hand tightened around her boots. Seraphine folded her arms.
Ilyon went on, calm as ever. “Vesperyx was already in communication when we found them. If the brood is as coordinated as we suspect, then they will not assume Caelovar simply misplaced himself.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Mira said dryly.
I let out a slow breath through my mouth, because breathing through my nose had become an unpleasant memory. “Then we leave now.”
“No,” Seraphine said.
I turned to look at her.
She met my stare without flinching. “We leave soon. Not now.”
That tone from her always made men think they were being gently corrected. They rarely noticed it was the exact same tone she used right before doing something immovable.
“She needs another few hours,” Seraphine said, nodding toward Mira. “Not because she is fragile. Because the rites repaired damage, they did not erase strain. If we force the pace too quickly, her body will pay for it later.”
Mira opened her mouth.
Seraphine lifted one brow.
Mira closed it again.
I looked to Darian, hoping for reason and getting devotion instead.
“If she says Mira rests, Mira rests.”
“Gods, you’re tedious.”
“And yet right.”
Mira grinned at me from the bed. “Besides, I’m not the one who threatened my boyfriend, got punched for it, and then woke up acting like I’m the difficult one.”
I pointed at her with the bloody rag. “He was on top of me.”
“You let him.”
“I was being generous.”
“You looked stupid.”
That got a sharp, helpless laugh out of Darian before he could stop it.
Ilyon sighed like a man cursed to walk among children. “Please tell me we are not doing this for the next ten minutes.”
“We might,” Mira said.
“We absolutely are not,” Seraphine replied.
Then she stood, crossed the room, and put one warm hand briefly over the rag still pressed to my face. Healing magic moved through me in a clean gold thread, not enough to do more than mend the break and stop the blood, but enough.
“There,” she said. “Now you can brood properly.”
I pulled the rag away and found myself glaring at a room full of people trying not to smile.
Bastards.
Still, beneath the irritation, beneath the ache in my bones and the pressure of the hunt, there was something steadier than I had expected to feel after the night we’d had.
Relief, yes.
But also trust.
Not the easy kind. Not the bright, innocent kind mortals sing about.
The hard-earned kind. The kind built in blood, in arguments, in letting someone hit you because you know what grief is doing to them. The kind built by surviving the same horror and still choosing, come morning, to stay in the same room.
I hated how much it softened me.
I hated even more that it worked.
So I exhaled, finally, and dragged a hand through my hair. “Fine. A few hours.”
Mira leaned back on her hands, victorious. “See? Growth.”
“Say that again and I’ll break your other side just to keep things symmetrical.”
She laughed.
Darian moved in then, quieter than the rest, and passed her boots back to her before looking at me with something less raw than the night before. Not forgiveness. Not quite. But not murder either.
It was enough.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I was going to hit you again later.”
“I assumed.”
“But Mira told me if I did, she’d hit me.”
“She would,” Mira said.
“I know,” Darian replied, with the weary affection of a man who had long since accepted the terms of his own ruin. “So congratulations. You’ve been spared by her mercy.”
That word snagged somewhere ugly in me.
Mercy.
Tamara again, by another mouth.
I did not let it show.
Instead I gave Darian a flat look and said, “I am overwhelmed by the honor.”
“That’s the spirit,” Mira said.
Ilyon pushed off the wall at last. “Since we are, apparently, resting whether you approve or not, perhaps we use the time well. We need to decide whether we go for Liliana’s other branches or try to intercept the routes between lairs.”
“There’s also Aelthir,” Seraphine said quietly.
I looked at her.
She did not elaborate, but she did not need to. Aelthir. Tamara. The revelation. The warning. The holy trace in Caelovar’s lair that did not belong to Tiamat no matter what those diseased little monsters believed.
Even after a night without answers, that question still sat under everything.
Mira must have seen the shift in my face, because some of the humor went out of her expression. “You’re thinking about the white-haired woman again.”
I met her eyes.
“Yes.”
No one spoke for a moment after that.
The room seemed to settle around the silence. Morning light. The smell of herbs still clinging to Seraphine’s sleeves. Damp earth from Darian’s boots. Smoke from the banked hearth. All of it painfully ordinary beside the shape of the thing waiting behind my thoughts.
Then Mira stood and jammed her boots back on with sharp, decisive motions.
“Good,” she said. “Then while we wait, you can tell us exactly why she has you looking like you want to throttle a ghost.”
And there it was.
No more comfort. No more pretending the morning had arrived empty.
Just the next truth, waiting to be dragged into the light.