Chapter 6

Wren's POV

The healing house always felt like two worlds stitched together the old, half-remembered warmth of Ember magic layered over the sharper, colder logic of modern medicine. Odette led me through the corridors without slowing, all the way to the last exam room at the far end of the hall, and clicked the door shut behind us with a finality that made my nerves jump.

She turned to face me, arms crossed, expression already braced for whatever I was about to say.

"Talk. Everything that happened."

I tried for a careless shrug, and my ribs punished me for it instantly. Odette's eyes sharpened.

"A shrug isn't an answer, child."

"Does it matter?" My voice came out flatter than I meant. I lowered myself onto the exam table's edge, careful of my arm. "Can you fix this in a way that means I'm not back here in a week? Because we both know I will be."

She didn't argue. There was something tired and resigned in the way she looked at me that told me she already knew I was right.

"Garrick again?"

It didn't need to be a real question. Plenty of people in this Court left bruises out of casual meanness, but this kind of methodical damage had his signature all over it. The last time he'd decided I needed "correcting," I'd spent four days sedated just to keep my body from going into shock. Tonight was, by comparison, almost gentle.

I gave her a thin smile that didn't reach anywhere close to my eyes. "I exist, Odette. Apparently that's grounds enough. Breathing near his daughter is a provocation now. You got a cure for that, or is it fatal?"

She didn't answer right away. Instead she started laying out a tray gauze, disinfectant, a small burn kit and, in a gesture that caught me completely off guard, reached over and smoothed a piece of hair off my forehead.

"I'd like to tell you it gets easier. I won't lie to you and say that."

I stared at my knees, her honesty landing heavier than any comfort would have.

"I know." I meant to sound steady. It came out thinner than I wanted.

"Here." She pulled a small box from her coat pocket, the fabric worn soft at the corners. "Your birthday's tomorrow. I wanted you to have this before the day got swallowed up by everything else."

"My birthday." I blinked. I genuinely hadn't tracked it. Birthdays belonged to children someone had actually wanted; mine had always just been the anniversary of being left on a step in a cardboard box. My existence had never once felt like something worth marking.

Odette snapped on a pair of gloves and nudged the box across the tray toward me. "Well? Open it. I didn't carry it over here for decoration."

I eyed her, suspicion and a fragile, unfamiliar hope tangled together. "You've never given me anything before."

"Coming of age means something in this Court, whatever else it fails to get right." Her voice softened at the edges. "Don't get excited, it's not jewels. It was my mother's. She gave it to me the year I turned twenty-three. I never had a daughter of my own to hand it to, so."

I opened the lid with unsteady fingers. Inside sat a small silver ring, plain, a little worn at the band, and in that moment it was the single most beautiful object I'd ever held. In the Court, a piece passed down from an elder woman on a girl's coming-of-age day meant something specific a quiet acknowledgment that you were, at last, considered a woman of standing rather than a ward.

I didn't cry. I'd trained that out of myself years ago. But something thick and tight lodged in my throat regardless.

"It's perfect. Thank you."

She nodded once and got to work, unwinding the borrowed handkerchief from my arm. Her mouth went hard and flat the second she saw the burn underneath.

"Garrick did this."

"With a fire iron," I said quietly. "I don't understand why it's spreading like this. I thought I kept it clean."

"I'll handle it," she said, and there was a controlled fury under the words that told me not to ask more.

I expected the sting of antiseptic. Instead she closed her eyes, laid her palm flat over the wound, and gold warmth flooded up my arm like sunlight after a long stretch of winter. The throb dulled into something almost pleasant, a tingling calm that spread all the way to my shoulder.

While the magic worked, my mind drifted, unbidden, toward tomorrow. Coming of age changed a person's standing under Court law. No longer property of the orphan house or bound to Court oversight the right to leave, to build a life among humans, the right to choose who you wanted, if anyone.

I could actually go. Leave the estate, the cruelty, the whole architecture of it behind. No Ember meant no real reason to stay tethered to a hierarchy that had never once claimed me as its own.

I could find some small human city, take a kitchen job under a different name, and let nobody know what I used to be. The idea of a match, of someone choosing me the way fated bonds were supposed to work, felt like a fairy tale meant for somebody else's childhood. I'd spent twenty-three years being told, in a hundred small and large ways, that I was a mistake wearing a person's shape. Why would anyone look at that and see something worth keeping.

Fated bonds ran on fire a matching pull between two Embers. Without one of my own, I didn't even register on that map. A woman with no counterpart built into the system at all. As a kid I used to wish for someone who'd see past the missing piece to whatever was underneath it. That particular prayer had gone quiet a long time ago, buried under the more practical business of staying alive.

But freedom that was real, tangible, close enough to touch. Somewhere the hierarchy didn't reach. Somewhere worth wasn't measured by whether fire lived under your skin.

"What's that look for?" Odette's voice pulled me back into the room.

The warmth had faded. She was lifting her hand away, and I looked down to find the infection gone entirely, replaced by a thin, silver-pale scar.

I frowned, running a thumb over it. "Why'd it scar? Your work never leaves marks."

Something flickered across her face discomfort, quick and uncharacteristic, gone almost before I caught it. She busied herself with the tray instead of answering.

"Odette? What is it?"

The door banged open before she had to. A second shifter blew into the room like weather, filling the small space instantly. Tobias's cousin no, not Tobias, someone else entirely, dark curls bouncing at her jaw, warm brown eyes wide with alarm. Odette gestured her back before I could think too hard about it.

"Wren!" She lunged toward me, and Odette caught her by the back of the collar before she could crash into my ribs.

"Careful, girl. She's holding together on stitches and goodwill right now."

The newcomer winced, sheepish. "Sorry! I just saw your texts I was buried in a shift with a Third. Are you okay? Wait, don't answer, you look like you went through a wood chipper. I mean, still gorgeous, obviously, but"

Odette cut in dryly. "Breathe. I've stabilized her. The surface bruising is yours to manage. And consider thinking before speaking you're making even less sense than usual."

The girl flushed pink to her ears. "Thank you for patching her up, Odette."

Odette didn't soften an inch. "Don't thank me for doing my job." She swept out without a backward glance.

Her brusqueness never bothered me. I knew what sat underneath it the only person in this Court who'd ever handed me a gift instead of a bruise, the closest thing I had to a mother, her quiet, gruff protection the one steady thing keeping me upright.

I don't get a chance to answer before he kisses me slow, careful, full of something that feels dangerously close to certainty. Whatever's unfurling in my chest right now, it's warm enough to scare me a little. When he finally pulls back, his grin is close to blinding.

"I've got business up in Millbrook next week," he says, thumb brushing my jaw. "Gives you room to think it over properly. But I meant it, Wren. I'll wait as long as it takes for your answer."

One more quick kiss, and then he's helping me down off the hood, steadying me when my leg protests the movement.