Chapter Text
Cassian had spent the last few hours listening to the two Smokeridge camp commanders argue over absolute and utter bullshit.
He had lost count of how many times he'd wanted to put his fist through the wall. Hours of petty grudges dressed up as strategic concerns. Old rank disputes that should have been settled years ago were dragged out and chewed over.
Two grown males circling the same issues for half the night while the fire in the hearth burned down to ash.
Cassian had long stopped trying to force the conversation forward.
That never worked with Illyrians. So he had fallen back on another method. A quiet question here, a carefully placed observation there. He’d spent centuries learning how to guide males toward reason without letting them realize they were being guided at all.
By the end, they’d agreed to the exact guard redistribution Cassian had wanted from the start and neither of them had noticed.
When the meeting finally broke, he turned down a glass of whiskey, and stepped outside without a word.
The cold air hit him first, clean and sharp after the smoke-thick air of the tent. Snow had been falling steadily through the night, piled deep on top of the blanket left by the previous day’s storm. The half mile walk back to his cabin stretched out ahead of him, half-lit by the scattered faelights, the rest swallowed by dark.
He flared his wings wide and a gust of wind shoved straight back into them, hard enough to make him plant his feet.
He held the stance for a beat, weighing it.
Flying almost always cleared his head. But he didn’t have patience for the sky tonight so he tucked his wings tight against his back and started walking.
He thought about home as he walked.
Nesta would be up still, more than likely wandering the library at the House of Wind. He pictured her there, curled into one of the chairs by the fire, a book open in her lap and her favorite woolen blanket over her legs. She would feign annoyance when he walked in tomorrow. Tell him he smelled like a fire and a wet dog and to please bathe before he came anywhere near her. And then she would let him pull her against her anyway.
That was the thought that carried him as he turned the corner toward the cabin and slowed.
A lone figure was making its way down the road ahead of him.
His first thought, quick and uneasy, was that they looked like a child. Stumbling, half-vanishing into the dark between the lanterns. They could barely walk. Each uneven step ended with the left leg threatening to give out entirely, buckling hard enough to drag them sideways through the snow before they forced another step forward. And then it hit him…
No wings.
This person had no wings, which was rare here, and unheard of for them to be alone at this hour.
He quickened his pace.
The scent reached him before he closed half the distance. Blood. Old and fresh, layered and thick. Beneath it, a body.
Female.
Cassian's gut went tight in the way it always did before something terrible.
"Hello," he called down the road.
The figure kept moving. Head down, her long, dark hair hiding her face from him.
He kept moving, faster now. "Hello?"
She was past the point of registering him, he’d seen that before, in war, in the camps. It was never a good sign.
He closed the last of the distance at a near run, slowing only when he was within arm's reach, hands lifting on instinct as he stepped around to put himself in her path.
"Excus—" he said, gently as he could manage.
She spun, or at least tried to, the motion came from pure animal panic. She nearly went down with it. Her left leg buckled under her before she caught herself at the same the moment Cassian's eyes caught the true sight of her.
She was so thin it stopped him cold.
Not slender. Not slight. Thin in the way that spoke of hunger gone on too long, of a body stripped down and kept there.
And then the rest of her hit him all at once. There wasn’t a single part of her that hadn’t been marked. Not one. Face, throat, arms, the hands clutched together at her chest all of it bruised or cut or scarred, some wounds older and silvered over, some still angry and red.
Her eyes were downcast, dark hair falling across a face that was all bruise and swelling. Her lip split in two places. A cut along her jaw still looked raw. The purple ringing her eyes was so deep at the centers it was nearly black.
And without ever lifting her head, she saw him fully. His size. His wings.
Her hands lifted to cover her neck, then both stalled uselessly, spasming at her throat. Her knees started to fold. She was trying to drop to the ground in front of him, an instinct so practiced it was already in motion before her body had decided to do it.
"Wait," Cassian said quickly, lifting both hands, palms open. "Wait. Please. It's okay."
She froze halfway down, swaying. Then her gaze flicked past him, in the direction she’d come from, and she lurched as if to run, but whatever the motion did to her sent a wave of agony over her face.
Cassian shifted his weight, stepping backwards, just enough to keep her in his reach, "I'm not going to hurt you."
She tried to speak. Her mouth opened, closed, then opened again, but whatever words she meant to say caught somewhere behind the ragged rattle of her breathing and the panic tightening her throat. Her eyes kept flicking to his wings, lingering there before darting away, then returning again, measuring what he could do to her.
But it was the sound of her breathing that settled like a rock in his stomach.
Not just the panic beneath it. Something worse.
Each inhale was shallow and wet, cutting off halfway through as if her chest could not fully expand. A faint hitch caught at the end of every breath.
The words finally tore out of her in a cracked, breathless rush.
"Please," she sobbed. "Please, I'll be... Please."
Her left leg gave out a heartbeat later. She went down hard into the snow, a sound tearing out of her throat that she swallowed before it fully escaped. She curled inward instantly, knees to chest, arm trying to cross over her head.
Cassian crouched slowly, throwing up a shield around them that would at least block the wind, and lowered himself so he was no taller than she was on the ground.
It was only then, this close, that he saw the rest.
A length of rope was still knotted tight around her left wrist, the skin beneath it weeping. Even so, she kept that hand wrapped protectively around her right, which was clearly broken, the angle of her fingers all wrong.
Red marks littered her throat, fresh rope burns layered over older ones gone purple and yellow. And lower, between her legs, blood ran down her thighs in slow, steady rivulets vivid against her battered skin.
He had to swallow against the rage rising in his throat.
"It's okay," he said keeping his voice low and steady. "My name is Cassian. I'm not going to touch you. I'm not going to hurt you."
Her arms locked tighter to her chest, her words barely audible, "I'll be good. I'll be— I'll go— I'll be good."
"It's okay. You're okay," Cassian said, slowly. "I can help you."
She pressed herself farther into the snow, as if it could swallow her, whispering pleads he couldn’t hear.
"What's your name?" he asked.
The moment the question left his lips, she tried to scramble backward, away from him, but she slipped in the snow, tried again, and went down. "No…I…no. I don't, I don’t have…please. Please don't tell him."
Cassian had lived long enough to recognize that kind of fear was built carefully into a person, piece by piece, until terror became instinct and silence became survival.
"No names," he said. "That's all right. No names."
For a moment, only the sound of her breathing filled the cold. Then, cracking open from somewhere deep inside her, she sobbed the words, "I needed a break."
"Just a break. I just... a break, I just..."
A cough tore out of her.
She doubled over so sharply her head nearly touched the snow and fresh blood trickled from her lips. Cassian had the sudden, overwhelming urge to reach for her—to steady her her through the coughs tearing through her chest—but he forced himself still and watched until the violent shuddering in her body begin to weaken.
He moved before he could think about it. Couldn’t have stopped himself if he tried.
He pulled off his fur-lined jacket, shaking the snow from it. The cold cut through his leathers the second he was out of it, biting hard against sweat-damp skin, and this girl—this emaciated, beaten girl—had nothing on her but the ripped slip of a dress.
He said, as gently as he could manage, "I'm going to put this on you now."
He kept his movements slow, deliberate. He lifted the jacket carefully enough that she could follow every inch of the movement. The second it came near her, her entire body reacted. her shoulders locked and sharp breath caught in her throat.
Cassian felt it like a knife between his ribs.
For one terrible second, he almost stopped.
But the cold was already taking pieces of her with it. If he did not get her warm now, it would finish the job before he could get her anywhere safe.
The instant the jacket settled around her shoulders, she froze.
For two long breaths, she did not move at all. Did not blink. Barely seemed to breathe.
Then, ever so slowly, she lifted her head.
Her gaze did not find his eyes. It found his hands first, and he made sure they stayed loose and low.
She stared at them like she was waiting for them to change.
Waiting for the softness to disappear.
He stayed perfectly still.
Tried to make his massive body seem smaller somehow. Safer. Less like the kind of thing that cornered prey.
Her gaze traveled upward in slow, halting pieces. Over the leather bracers on his forearms, to the wings folded behind him. Then it caught on the siphon glowing faintly against his chest.
Cassian felt the stone answer the attention instinctively, the power inside it stirring.
He shoved it back immediately.
Willed the light softer. Dimmer. Glowing instead of burning.
“I promise,” he said softly. The words came out almost rough with how badly he needed her to believe them. “I will not hurt you. I promise.”
She began to lift her gaze toward his chin, and her fingers spasmed hard against her chest, a small choked cry escaping her lips before she could smother it.
Her left hand jerked with the movement. He saw then how tightly the rope was wound around her wrist, how deeply it had bitten into the skin. In places the swollen flesh had risen around the hemp so badly it looked embedded there, as though it had been left long enough for her body to stop knowing the difference between rope and wound.
Something twisted low in Cassian’s chest.
He knew the sharp burn of that pain. He knew the numbness that followed the pain. Then the cold creeping into that numbness until every movement became its own kind of misery.
As slowly as he knew how, he reached one hand forward.
"I'm just going to get this rope off you," he said. "That's all."
The words felt wholly inadequate, completely incapable of bridging whatever labyss she had crawled through to end up in the snow before him.
He laid his fingers very lightly against the back of her left hand, the one she held so tightly to her chest. He could feel her trembling beneath his touch.
He let her feel the weight of his hand without asking anything of her. Let her learn it would not tighten. Would not grab. Would not force.
Seconds passed that way, slow and careful, until some small piece of the terror rippling through her shoulders eased.
Only then did he begin, inch by inch, to guide her hand away from her chest.
"That's right," he said quietly. "You’re safe. I've got you."
She did not resist as he gently guided her hand into the space between them. He tried to keep his eyes on the rope—
until he saw it.
Burned into the inside of her left forearm, in letters as wide as his thumb, dark and raised, the scar long since healed into the skin.
Whore.
For one terrible heartbeat, he could not breathe.
Something inside his chest cracked open so sharply it felt almost physical. It would have been so easy to let it show. To let his face do what every instinct wanted.
But she was still watching his hands. Still waiting for the softness to disappear.
He breathed it down, once, through his teeth, and made the choice that cost him: he gave her the stillness instead of the fury. If she felt him react, he would lose what little ground he had with her, and that was not going to happen tonight.
"Just taking this off," he said, of the rope. His voice was a little quieter than it had been. "I'm going to go slowly."
The rope had been bound hard.
"I have you," he murmured, swallowing against the burn rising in his throat. He kept working. Kept talking to her in the same low, steady cadence.
When he was done, the final knot eased apart, and he let the rope fall from her wrist.
It hit the snow with a heavy, wet thud.
For a moment he just stared at it lying there in the dark, the fibers darkened from melted snow and from whatever else had soaked into them over time.
Then he lifted his eyes to her face, and his breath caught.
She was staring directly at him.
Her eyes were green.
A deep, impossible green. Startling against the wreckage of her face. Fear lived in them. Exhaustion. Pain so old it had settled into her bones.
"Please," she whispered, and the word was thin and shaking. "Don't give me back to him."
He shook his head immediately.
"I won't," he said. The words came out rougher than he meant them to. "I swear to you. I will not."
She stared at him for one unguarded moment, as if the words had briefly cut through the terror. Then something shifted in her face and her eyes dropped fast back to the ground, her shoulders drawing in.
"I'm going to take you somewhere safe," he said softly. "All right? No one is going to hurt you."
It was too big a promise. He knew that. But he dipped his head anyway, trying to meet her eyes, and when he did, they were full of a exhaustion so raw it looked carved into her bones.
After a long moment, she gave the smallest, shaking nod. "Okay," she whispered.
Cassian didn't waste another heartbeat. He gathered her into his arms and immediately felt the way her entire body seized with pain. He moved as carefully as he knew how, one arm sliding behind her shoulders, the other beneath her knees.
A sharp, strangled sob punched out of her before she could stop it, and she bit down hard on her lip, so hard he worried she'd draw blood. Her breath hitched, shallow and fast. She didn't scream, didn't even fully whimper, just shuddered against him.
He had lifted soldiers from battlefields before, males twice her size with their insides spilling through their armor, and he had never once been this certain that gentle was not going to be enough.
The moment he brought her up from the snow, another sound tore out of her and she swallowed it back before it could become a cry. Her jaw locked hard against it. Her fingers found the front of his shirt and held there, trembling with the effort, and he could feel the pain in the grip even as she tightened it.
Bracing herself against him. Against what lifting her was doing to her, even knowing he was trying not to.
Cassian's throat tightened. "I know," he said quietly. "I know. I'm sorry."
He drew her carefully against his chest, but the shift of her weight still caught wrong at her hip. He felt her whole body seize around the pain, felt the terrible effort it took to keep still, to keep quiet, to make herself small through it.
She almost managed.
Almost.
"I— sorry," she whispered.
The words were barely there. An apology for the sounds she had made while he lifted her broken body out of the snow.
He adjusted his hold immediately, supporting her shattered hand more carefully, easing the angle of her hip as much as he could.
When he launched into the sky, he whispered steady reassurances against her temple. Her head rested against his chest, but he could feel the tension thrumming through her, every inch of her fighting not to make a sound.
And when she finally whispered, "Are you going to drop me?" her voice was cracked and hoarse, so ragged with fear, it nearly broke him.
"No," he said. "I'm going to keep you safe."
Bit by bit, he felt her trust him enough to lean her full weight into his chest.
He kept his voice low and steady as he flew, talking to her the way he'd once talked to soldiers in the dark between battles. Letting the sound of a calm voice be its own tether.
"I've got you," he murmured. "Just keep breathing for me."
He pressed his mind outward along the bond.
Rhys.
Silence. The distance between them was still too wide.
He pushed harder. Rhys. I need you.
Still nothing.
His whole attention was narrowed to the weight in his arms and the thin, shallow pull of her breathing. He adjusted his angle, climbing higher to catch a faster current, and felt her tense with the shift, fingers curling into the front of his shirt. “I know,” he said immediately. “We’re almost there. You’re okay.”
She wasn’t okay.
He knew that. He knew it with the part of him that had spent centuries learning how to read bodies in crisis, the part of him that could tell, with terrible accuracy, how much time someone had left.
“Stay with me,” he said quietly. “Just stay with me.”
Her breath stuttered.
He felt it before he heard it, the way her chest hitched mid-inhale, caught, and then did not rise again.
Rhys please.
The word tore through the bond like a blade.
Rhys, now—
She still wasn’t breathing.
Cassian made a decision in the space of a heartbeat. He shifted her weight sharply in his arms, angling her torso upright against his chest, the movement deliberately abrupt in a way he knew—knew—was going to hurt her.
The cry that tore out of her was small and broken and then, beneath it, a sharp, ragged inhale.
She was breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice sounded scared in his own ears. “I’m so sorry. But you have to breathe. You have to stay with me.”
Her fingers found his shirt again. Held on.
Rhys. He shoved the word down the bond with everything he had. RHYS. PLEASE.
And this time, his brother’s voice filled his head like a flare of dark light.
Cassian. Where are you?
Cassian exhaled. I just crossed the border. Hitting the ridge in a few minutes. There's a girl — I found her on the road, she needs Madja. Now.
A beat. One single beat.
Keep flying. I’m coming.
He kept flying.
Even though the girl had gone very quiet against his chest—she was still breathing. Still alive.
“Almost there,” he said. Whether to her or himself, he wasn’t entirely sure.
The ridge came into view through the dark below him but he kept his gaze at the sky ahead.
And then Rhys was there.
He simply appeared in the clearing ahead, wings snapping wide to catch a glide, his eyes cutting straight to Cassian without a single wasted second of searching.
Cassian didn't slow by much. He came in fast and low, and Rhys angled forward to meet him, hand already reaching, and the moment they touched Cassian felt the familiar lurch of the world folding—
The cold vanished.
The wind went silent.
And the warm faelights of the Moonstone Palace poured over them as the world unfolded again, solid and still, and Cassian tightened his arms around her and didn't let go.