Chapter 60: The Love Of His Life

A day passed in the plain room, measured only by the changing quality of light under the door and the twice-daily appearance of a guard with a tray Asher refused to touch.

He did not sleep. Exhaustion sat behind his eyes like grit, but every time his body tried to tip into unconsciousness, a vision of Marcel under silver and the dark ring on the bedside table yanked him back. He drank a little water when his throat threatened to close. The food—bread, stewed meat, fruit that looked almost ceremonial—went cold and was taken away untouched. The cuff on his left wrist had rubbed the skin raw. He had tested the bedpost until his free hand ached, but it did not give. It was times like this Asher wished he wasn’t an ordinary human.

When the door opened again, it was Aaron.

The Crown Prince carried no tray, but his expression was arranged into concern so precise it looked practiced. He dismissed the guard with a glance and crossed to the bedside, stopping close enough that Asher could smell clean soap and whatever pale scent the palace preferred on its royalty.

"You’re worrying me," Aaron said softly. "At least eat something. You won’t help anyone by collapsing."

Asher turned his head on the pillow and looked at him with eyes that felt scraped hollow.

"Burn in hell."

Aaron’s mouth curved. Not anger—delight, faint and genuine, as if Asher had performed a trick.

"Feisty," he murmured. "I didn’t know you had that side. I like it. I’ll like it less if you make yourself ill before the important work, but still. There’s steel under all that fortune-teller softness."

He was still speaking when the door opened a second time.

The man who entered was old in a way that had nothing to do with ordinary years. A heavy cloak covered most of his body, the hood thrown back just enough to show a face like crumpled parchment and eyes the color of dirty ice. Something about the way he occupied the threshold made Asher’s skin try to crawl off his bones. The man before him wasn’t a vampire, he wasn’t a wolf either. He was human, but it didn’t look or feel like that to Asher. What he felt from the man before him was an aura that smelt like it came from another world.

Aaron’s smile widened a fraction.

"The mage is ready," he said. "We’ll start the process now."

Asher surged against the cuff hard enough to make the bed scream. "No. Aaron—don’t you dare—Marcel—"

"Marcel remains alive," Aaron said, already stepping aside to give the old man room. "Whether that continues depends on how gracefully you accept what’s coming. I told you this already."

The mage did not speak to Asher. He set a worn leather case on the foot of the bed and opened it with fingers that were stained dark in the creases, as if ink or old blood had settled there permanently. Inside lay instruments Asher did not want to name: a slender silver needle, a shallow bowl, vials of liquid that caught the light wrong, and a brush with bristles too fine for ordinary paint.

Asher fought back. He kicked, twisted, and tried to drag the bedpost free with the raw strength of panic, but the cuff held. The guard who had been outside came in at Aaron’s gesture and pinned Asher’s free arm and both legs with efficient, impersonal weight. The mage took Asher’s cuffed hand, pricked the tip of the middle finger, and collected the welling blood in the shallow bowl as if harvesting something routine.

Then the runes began. The mage dipped the brush into Asher’s blood and drew on exposed skin—forehead, throat, the center of his chest where the shirt was pulled aside, the inside of both forearms. The marks were not any script Asher recognized. They seemed to move at the edge of his vision, geometry that refused to stay fixed. Each line stung as it dried, then sank into a deeper, colder burn.

When the last mark was in place, the mage uncorked a vial and gripped Asher’s jaw.

"Swallow," Aaron said quietly from the wall. "If you choke, he will only pour more."

Asher clenched his teeth. The guard’s fingers dug into the hinges of his jaw until pain forced them apart. The liquid hit his tongue, bitter, floral, and wrong, like flowers grown in a grave. The mage stroked his throat with a clinical thumb until the reflex to swallow betrayed him.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then Asher’s gift detonated.

It did not open like a door. It tore. Visions slammed through him in broken shards without sequence or mercy: a throne room running with water that might have been blood. Marcel’s face behind silver, mouth moving around a promise. Adrian on a dark road with wolves. The Matriarch’s fire-bright eyes. Aaron’s smile from a dozen angles, some tender, some empty. None of it felt completed.

He might have screamed, he could not hear it over the roar inside his skull. Time lost its shape to Asher, all he could feel was something moving inside him, and his visions threatening to explode out of his brain.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the violence stopped, and the fragments collapsed into dark.

Asher’s breathing slowed. The cuff was still there—he could feel the metal—but the frantic need to tear it out of the wood had gone distant, like a story about someone else.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was plain plaster. The room was quiet. A man stood near the bed, watching him with careful attention, and the sight of that face sent a warm, uncomplicated wave through Asher’s chest.

Aaron. Of course it was Aaron.

Asher’s mouth tried to form a smile and only half succeeded, clumsy with residual exhaustion. The love of his life was here. That fact sat in the center of his mind like a stone that had always been there. Why, then, was there metal on his wrist? Why was he in this unfamiliar bed instead of the palace?

He frowned slightly, turning his head on the pillow to look at the cuff, then back at Aaron’s face.

"...Why," he asked, voice rough and genuinely puzzled, "has the love of my life chained me to the bed?"