Chapter 80: The Weight of Feelings
Alden sat on top of a dead beast and stared at nothing.
His palm was still pressed against its hide out of habit. The black smoke came, did its thing, and the notification floated up in front of him.
He didn’t read it.
I like you.
He clicked his tongue and stood up. Kept moving. Found the next target in the dark between the trees and pushed himself toward it, because moving was better than sitting still and sitting still was the problem.
That had been five hours ago.
Now the forest was getting light in that slow, grey way it does before the sun actually commits. Birds somewhere. Mist hanging low between the roots. The corpse under him from the latest hunt was still warm.
Alden pressed his palm against it. Extracted Moved on.
It hadn’t worked. Not even a little.
He’d killed enough tonight to fill two weeks of normal hunting, and his head was still exactly where it had been when he walked away from that fountain — back in the garden, watching Seris wipe a tear off her face like she was erasing evidence of something she’d accidentally let out.
He exhaled hard through his nose and rubbed his forehead.
"Get out of my head." His voice was flat in the quiet. It didn’t help.
He’d tried the logical approach first. What Seris was feeling made sense in context — she’d told him tonight about years of isolation, a family that treated her like a mistake, an engagement that had been built on cruelty. He was one of the only people she’d genuinely connected with. Of course her feelings were going to be complicated. Of course proximity and trust were going to get tangled up in something that felt stronger than it was.
That explanation had held for maybe forty minutes.
Then he’d started thinking about the specific things.
The way she teased him. The one where she was actually entertained by him and not just running a calculation about how to use him. The way she showed up unexpectedly when he needed it and then pretended she’d just been in the area. The way her smile changed sometimes, going from the composed one she kept ready for everyone into something smaller and more real that he wasn’t entirely sure she knew she was doing.
He’d gotten used to expecting it. That was the part that bothered him.
At some point he’d started looking forward to seeing her. Not because it was useful or because she was part of his plan for surviving this world. Just expecting her voice to appear somewhere nearby. Wondering what she’d say. Wanting to see that actual smile again.
When had that started. He genuinely couldn’t point to the moment.
He stopped walking and pressed his back against a tree, sliding down until he was sitting in the roots, looking up through the canopy at the pale early sky.
The Vincent memory surfaced without him inviting it.
He had been reckless that day. He pushed himself so far beyond his limits that the word limit no longer mattered. And then Vincent’s blade had been there, and Seris had stepped into it. She had stepped between him and a sword, taken the hit across her back, and then gotten back up and fought beside him.
He’d filed it at the time as a vampire protecting her food supply.
He’d known that wasn’t right even when he was filing it.
And the reverse was also true. Alden had stepped right into Augustus’s path when the prince grabbed her wrist. He did not even stop to think. Something inside him said ’don’t.’ Before his mind could even process a plan, his body was already moving to protect her.
And when he realized Augustus would keep abusing his power over her as long as he stayed at the academy, Alden stepped into an arena. He let himself get beaten bloody without hitting back, all just to win her one year of peace.
He looked at the forest floor.
’Why did I go that far.’
The question had an answer. He’d known it all night and had been walking very fast in the opposite direction from it.
He dropped his head back against the bark and stared up.
He remembered the look in Seris’s eyes when she said it. She went completely still, but it was not her usual calm composure. She was trying really hard to stay composed. Her voice was steady, even though saying those words was clearly painful and difficult for her. Afterwards, her smile slipped right back into place, not because she wanted to smile, but because she felt she had to.
That single tear she’d erased.
His chest did the thing it had been doing all night.
He pressed his palm flat against the tree root beside him and made himself think it clearly.
’Do I like Seris?’
The thought formed without resistance. Slid into place like it had been waiting.
Alden’s eyes came open.
"Wait—"
He sat up and immediately dragged both hands down his face. "Why am I entertaining this. She’s a vill—"
The word stopped in his throat.
He put his hands down.
"...She’s not," he said, quieter.
Not anymore. Not in the way he’d written her. The villain he created in his manuscript was cold, ruthless, and distant for reasons he had never bothered to look into, mostly because he did not need to. She was just the antagonist, and her role in the story had been enough for him.
But the person he actually knew was someone who had spent her childhood being told she shouldn’t have been born. Who had been handed to a man who hit her and told she should be grateful for it. Who had learned to smile through everything because no one was interested in her being anything else.
And who had spent this last year choosing, slowly and apparently against her own better judgment, to be real around one person.
Which was him.
Alden sat in the tree roots and let that settle.
She was still a vampire. Still bound to plans he didn’t fully understand yet. Still connected to a father whose goals were something he intended to dismantle. None of that was simple.
But she was real. The warmth he’d felt from her was real. The thing that had happened between them over the course of this year was real.
He looked up at the light coming through the canopy.
’What am I supposed to do? I’m still an Extra.’
He didn’t have an answer. He’d spent the whole night running from the question and he’d arrived at the question anyway, which was apparently how these things worked.
He stayed there a while longer.
Then he pulled up the Soul Library to give his brain somewhere else to be for a minute.
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SOUL LIBRARY
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Beast: Dragon
Fragments: ×20
Blueprint: 38%
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