Page 119 of The Vespertine Treaty
I looked down at the pillow where his head had rested.
There was something there.
In his haste to leave, in his frantic need to escape his own vulnerability, he had left the book he had been reading.
TheCenitus Lex.
But as I reached out and touched the leather cover, I felt a pulse. Faint. Warm. It didn't feel like a law book. It didn't feel cold or rigid.
I opened it.
The pages weren't filled with legal jargon or dark spells. They were filled with handwritten notes. Stories.
“For my son, the bravest knight I know.”
The handwriting was elegant, feminine. Lady Brianne.
It wasn't a law book at all. He had wrapped his mother's storybook in the dust jacket of theLexto hide it. To hide his comfort.
I clutched the book to my chest, tears blurring my vision. He kept it by his bed. Maybe he read it when the nightmares got too loud. It was his anchor. And he had left it with me.
"Oh, Cain," I whispered into the silence, my heart aching with a fierce, terrible weight.
"Don't start swooning,"Poppy grumbled sleepily from the foot of the bed, though her tone lacked its usual bite."He still choked you."
"He didn't mean to," I defended him, the words tasting like truth. "He was fighting ghosts, Poppy. And for a moment... I think he won."
I traced the spine of the book, a tear slipping down my cheek.
I didn't just understand him. I didn't just pity him.
The realisation washed over me, cold and terrifying and absolute.
I loved him.
I loved the broken boy in the memory, and I loved the terrified male who had fled this room to protect me from his own darkness.
"The monster isn't the one sleeping in this bed," I whispered to the empty room, clutching his mother's legacy against my heart. "The monster is the memory that sleeps between us."
But monsters could be slain.
CHAPTER 40
CAIN
Ifled the private quarters, my legs moving on instinct, carrying me away from the pristine bed and the female who now held the map to my annihilation. I didn't stop until I reached the vast, cold emptiness of the Conservatory—the place where the Vespertine Lilies used to bloom, a constant, terrible reminder of the beauty I was forbidden to touch.
I stood amidst the crystalline foliage, the humid, stale scent of the dead flowers a cloying poison. The silence, my most prized weapon, failed entirely.
“You left the book, Cain. You left the only evidence that you ever had a heart exposed on that pillow.”Rhana’s voice was a low, disgusted snarl in my mind.
"It was a strategic withdrawal," I told her, forcing cold logic into the thought like trying to stem a flood with a sieve. "It occupies her. If she is reading that sentimental drivel, she isn't looking for me. And besides, you're one to judge softness. You stood there like a domesticated kitten, letting her pet you. She breached your defences as easily as mine."
Rhana let out a soundless, furious growl—a noise of pure indignity that vibrated painfully against my core. With that, the connection snapped. She physically flowed out of the room, leaving me utterly alone with my thoughts and the escalating internal noise.
The silence was immediate and terrifying. Without my familiar’s stabilising presence or Ophelia's constant hum, the dam holding back the collective suffering of the world—which I had consumed throughout the day—failed entirely.
It began not with external noise, but with a silent, catastrophic fracture of my mental shields. The screams of the consumed pain were amplified, raw and unfiltered. I was instantly annihilated by the cacophony. I was inundated with every agony: the despair of the defeated Valerius, the hate of that Cenite rival, the deep shame of my father's strikes, and the ambient, crushing futility of the human realm.
