Chapter 99: I like you a lot

Azura’s POV

It had been a week.

Seven days since we left Crescent Moon, since we arrived at Hollowcrown, and have been living at Torin’s place.

Seven days and I still did not know what I was doing or where any of this was going.

Liona had left that morning with a basket over her arm and the focused energy of someone who had decided that cooking something good was the most useful contribution she could make to the current situation.

She wanted things from the market. Specific things. She had a list. She had left Torin and me with instructions about what time the meal needed to be ready and the confidence of someone who expected those instructions to be followed.

The yard was quiet without her.

Torin was on the bench with his knife across his knees, running a sharpening stone along the blade in long slow strokes. The sound of it was steady and rhythmic in the afternoon quiet. Back and forth. Back and forth. He was not rushing. He never rushed anything.

I was sitting nearby, but I wasn’t really there.

I was somewhere else entirely, turning the same things over that I had been turning over for days. My old life kept coming back to me in pieces. The version of myself that woke up every morning with one single problem to solve. Do not get caught. That was it. Find food. Do not get caught doing either. It was hard, it was cold, it was lonely but I had never once felt lost inside it because the edges of it were so clear.

Now there were no edges, just unwanted bonds, curses, and weird things in between.

I did not know what my life was anymore.

I was not sure it was mine in the way it used to be mine.

"What are you thinking about?"

Torin’s voice broke through everything without warning. I looked up. He had stopped sharpening. He was watching me with the knife resting still across his knee.

"You have been sitting there going nowhere for a long time," he said. "I have been watching you think about nothing for a while now. What is it?"

I looked at him. The question landed at exactly the right moment, the way questions sometimes did when the person asking them had no idea they were opening exactly the right door.

I made a decision.

"Do you remember the book you told me about?" I asked. "The one your mother hid."

Something shifted in his expression. "The Aegis."

"Yes." I turned toward him slightly. "Do you know anyone your mother was close to? Someone she trusted enough to tell where she kept it?"

He studied me for a moment trying to follow where I was going.

"Think about it," I continued before he could ask. "If she knew she was not going to live forever and she hid something that important, it does not make sense that she would not tell at least one person. Just in case it was ever needed." I paused. "I am sorry to say it that way. But that is what I mean."

He was quiet. Something crossed his face at the way I had said it, something that acknowledged the weight of the words without collapsing under it. Then he nodded slowly.

"That actually makes sense," he said.

He set the sharpening stone down on the bench beside him and looked at the ground in front of his feet. Thinking. I watched him and said nothing and hoped something was surfacing.

"There was a man," he said slowly. "Someone she was close to. Someone she trusted more than most people in her life." He stopped. "But he is also dead."

My shoulders dropped before I could stop them.

Then he looked up.

"He had a son though," he said. "Someone I think would know things his father knew. They were close, and I believe his father might have told him."

Something lifted in my chest immediately. "Can you take me to him?"

"I can." He picked up the knife again, turned it over in his hand once. "But he is not nearby. It is quite a distance from here."

"I do not care how far," I said. "Torin I need answers. I need to understand what is happening to me and that book might be the only thing that can give me that. Whatever it takes."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded once.

"Okay," he said. "I will take you."

The quiet that settled after that was the comfortable kind. The kind that did not need filling. Torin picked up the sharpening stone again but he did not go back to the blade. He just held both of them and looked at the ground in front of him like something was sitting at the edges of his thoughts that he was deciding whether to say.

I looked out at the yard. The afternoon light was sitting warm and golden across the grass. Somewhere in the trees at the far edge of the property, a bird was going through the same four notes over and over with complete commitment.

Torin set the knife and stone down again.

I looked at him.

He was looking at me. Not the easy version of him, not the one that smiled at everything and made the world feel lighter just by being in it.

The other one. The version that came out in quiet moments when the performance of being Torin had stepped aside and left just the person underneath.

"I don’t think I can hold it anymore," he muttered

"Huh?"

"Can I say something?" he asked. "That might sound strange afterward."

Something in my stomach tightened slightly. "That depends on what it is."

He exhaled. Long and slow, like he had been holding it for a while.

"Since we have been here even before," he said, "I have seen a version of you that I do not think many people get to see." He looked at the ground briefly then back at me. "The one that exists when nobody is watching and nothing is expected of you. When you are not being a Luna or a mate or the girl the prophecy talks about. Just you." A pause. "I like her. A lot."

I said nothing.

I already knew where this was going and I sat very still inside it and let him finish.

"I am not asking you for anything," he said. "I know what you are to Rhydor and what he is to you, even if neither of you has figured out what to do about each other yet. I am not asking you to choose anything or change anything." He held my gaze steadily. "I just want you to know that if you ever want something that does not feel like a constant battle, I would give you that. Without hesitation."

"Torin." His name came out quietly.

"I know." The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile but something close to it. Something that was accepting something it had already made peace with. "You do not have to say it. I just needed to say mine."

I sat with it.

With him and the afternoon light and the bird in the trees going through its four notes and everything he had just said sitting in the space between us.

I liked Torin. That was real and I was not going to pretend otherwise. He was warm and honest and funny and he had carried me through a dark forest and brought me food and made me feel safe in ways that mattered.

But what I felt for him was not what he felt for me, and I had known that from the beginning, even when I had not put words to it.

And underneath all of that, deeper and more complicated, was Liona.

My best friend who had cried herself to sleep on my shoulder over this exact man. Who had sat in a bathing room and whispered I think he is my mate about someone else entirely but whose heart still carried the weight of Torin in it when she said his name. I could not do that to her. I would not do that to her. Not for anything.

I opened my mouth to find the right words. The ones that were honest without being cruel. The ones that said everything I needed to say without taking anything from him that he deserved to keep.

I never got to say them.

The sound came first. Not much of one. Just a brief displacement of air, the kind that happened when something large moved very fast through a space that had been completely still in a second before.

Then the black wolf hit Torin like a wall.

The impact lifted him completely off the bench. I was on my feet before I understood what I was seeing, my bench toppled behind me, my heart slamming into the front of my chest. Torin flew backward and hit the tree at the far edge of the yard, the force of it shaking the branches above him, leaves raining down around him as he landed at the base of it.

The black wolf stood in the middle of the yard.

Massive. Still. Its chest rising and falling with controlled even breaths like the attack had cost it nothing at all.

Torin was pushing himself up from the ground. Both arms working, head dropping then coming back up, trying to find his breath and his feet at the same time. There was a cut above his eyebrow already dark with blood.

The black wolf did not move toward him again.

It turned its head.

And looked at me.

My breath left my body completely.

Those eyes.

Amber. Deep and clear and completely unmistakable, looking at me across the yard with a directness that had no uncertainty in it.

What is he doing here? Nobody said he was coming. Why is he here?

Torin was bleeding at the base of a tree, and those amber eyes were looking at me, and already, at the very edges of them, the gold was beginning to bleed.

Darkening.

Slowly and steadily, the way water darkened when something moved beneath it, the amber pulling toward red at the edges, spreading inward from the outside of the iris like something being lit from within.

Behind him, I heard Torin get to his feet. I heard the change in his breathing. The particular shift that happened in a wolf’s body when it was reading a threat and preparing to answer it was the only way wolves answered threats.

He was going to shift.

If he shifted this was going to become something I could not stop with words.

I looked at Logan’s eyes.

Darker now. The red moves further in, eating at the amber from every edge at once.

I had stopped him before. In the Wraithfen, when every other person had failed, and the red had owned everything I had walked up to him and put my hand on his face, and something in him had recognized something in me and come back. But that was then. That was in a forest with nothing at stake except a wound he was refusing to acknowledge.

This was different.

He had been in those trees the whole time, and he had heard every word of it, and those eyes were telling me clearly and without any room for interpretation that what he had heard had already moved him somewhere very close to the place he did not come back from easily.

I needed to get between them.

Right now.

Before the red finished what it was starting.