Chapter 371: Touch

The cold in the garden was absolute, but the heat radiating from Caelen’s body as he pinned Eris against him felt like a different kind of winter. He heard her words, “You already did”, and they felt like a jagged blade dragged across his throat. But inside the dark, crowded theater of his mind, a voice roared in denial. She’s lying, he thought, his pulse thundering in his ears. She has to be lying. Years of obsessive, suffocating, all-consuming love didn’t just vanish in the span of a few months. He remembered the way she used to look at him back in Solmire, with a hunger so sharp it was frightening, a devotion that bordered on madness. That kind of fire didn’t just burn out; it merely went underground. But as he looked down at her face, he saw nothing but a terrifying, hollow vacancy. There was no flicker of the old flame, no trace of the woman who had once ruined her own life just to stand beside him. There was only a cold, imperial distance that made him feel like a stranger in his own history.

“You’re lying,” Caelen rasped, his voice cracking like dry parchment. He felt her struggle against his grip, her hands pushing against his chest with a strength that was far more grounded than the frantic desperation of her past.

“I’m not,” Eris hissed, her eyes flashing with a dangerous amber light. “Now let go, Caelen. I won’t tell you again.”

“No,” he whispered, and as he said it, he felt the weight of the ring on his middle finger. It was pressed into the soft wool of her robe at her waist, but even through the fabric, he could feel it pulsing. It was warm, unnervingly so, vibrating with the dark, dormant magic Vetra had woven into its silver band. All you need to do is touch her skin, the witch’s voice echoed in his skull, slithering through his thoughts like a snake. Tell her what you want her to hear most. What is in your heart. The spell will do the rest. It was so simple. A small adjustment of his hand. A slide of his palm upward to the exposed skin of her throat. A few words, and the nightmare of the last few months would dissolve. She would look at him with those wide, adoring eyes again. She would be his. But as his fingers twitched against her, a sickening question rose: was a stolen heart worth the weight of the theft?

“Caelen,” Eris said, her voice dropping into a low, lethal register. “I’m warning you. Let go or I will hurt you.” Small, jagged sparks of fire began to dance at her fingertips, the air between them smelling of ozone and singed wool. She didn’t want to burn him, some vestige of shared history stayed her hand, but he could see the resolve hardening in her gaze. If he pushed further, she would strike.

“Then hurt me,” Caelen said, his voice breaking as he tightened his hold, pulling her so close that their heartbeats seemed to clash. Eris froze, her eyes widening in genuine shock at the raw, suicidal honesty in his tone. “Go ahead, Eris. Burn me. At least then I’d feel something from you. Even if it’s pain, it’s better than this… this nothingness.”

The dam inside him finally burst. The words poured out of him in an accusatory torrent, fueled by months of suppressed resentment and agonizing confusion. “You want to know why I tried to hate you?” he shouted, the sound swallowed by the howling wind. “Because loving you was torture! Do you understand that? You were cruel. You were violent. You were so unpredictable that I woke up every morning wondering if it was the day you’d finally snap and burn the world down.” Eris went still, the fire at her fingertips flickering out as she listened, trapped by the sheer weight of his grief.

“I had to fight my own feelings every single day,” Caelen continued, his grip on her waist tightening unconsciously, his knuckles white. “Do you know what that’s like? To love someone who is actively destroying everything you value? You weren’t exactly the best person to claim love with, Eris. You were a tyrant. A monster. Everyone in Solmire feared the ground you walked on. And I was supposed to just accept that? To love you openly when you gave me no reason to believe you were anything but a nightmare?”

His words hit Eris like physical blows. The truth of them was a bitter, stinging poison. She looked away, her eyes burning with a sudden, unwanted heat.

He was right. She remembered the person she had been, the woman who used fear as a currency and violence as a language.

She had tried to bury that Eris beneath the snow of Nevareth, tried to pretend that the crown of an Empress had washed her hands clean.

But Caelen was dragging her past back into the light, and it made her feel like a coward. She was running from the ghost of herself, and here he was, demanding she look it in the eye.

“You forced me to marry you,” Caelen’s voice cracked, a single tear escaping and freezing on his cheek. “You threatened my friends.

You made me a prisoner in my own palace. And then you acted shocked when I didn’t love you back? When I resented the very air you breathed?”

He laughed, a jagged, hollow sound. “I tried to show you many times back then… That you couldn’t force love, Eris.”

As he saw the tears finally begin to spill down her cheeks, a surge of guilt warred with his anger.

But the dark voice in his mind, the one fueled by the ring’s pulse, grew louder.

But you CAN force it, it whispered. The ring is right there. Just touch her. She’ll be the tyrant again, but she’ll be YOUR tyrant. She’ll love you so much she’ll forget the Emperor even exists. And this time, you can love her back without the shame.

He thought of Ophelia for a fleeting, painful second, her kindness, her safety, but it was a candle flame compared to the forest fire that was Eris. His love for her had always been the bigger, more destructive force. He just hadn’t been brave enough to admit it until he lost her.

Stolen love isn’t real love, his conscience screamed.

But it’s SOMETHING, his desire countered. It’s better than this silence.

His hand began to tremble. It moved, sliding upward from the emerald wool of her waist, inching toward the pale, exposed skin of her neck just above the collar of her robe. He just needed to touch her. One contact. One sentence.

Suddenly, Eris stopped struggling. She didn’t surrender; it was something far more profound. She stopped running. She went limp in his arms, her head tilting back as she looked at him with a steady, quiet clarity that silenced the storm in his head.

“You’re right,” she said, her voice small but unwavering.

Caelen stopped mid-breath, his hand hovering an inch from her skin. “What?”

“I was a tyrant,” Eris said, her eyes meeting his with a brutal honesty that made him want to flinch. “I was cruel. I hurt you, I hurt Rael, and I hurt so many people whose names I don’t even remember. I can’t take any of that back, Caelen. I can’t undo the monster I was.” She took a breath, her voice growing firmer. “But I am not that person anymore. I am trying, every single day, not to be. And you trying to trap me in that version of myself, trying to make me feel guilty for moving forward… it won’t change the truth.”

Caelen stared at her, his heart sinking. She wasn’t running from him anymore. She was facing him, and in her eyes, he saw a strength that was far more terrifying than her old madness. She was stronger than she had ever been because she had accepted her own darkness.

“You want me to be that obsessive, broken woman again,” Eris whispered, her voice tinged with a devastating pity. “Because that version of me needed you. She was a void that only you could fill. But I don’t need you anymore, Caelen. And that terrifies you.”

The truth of her words struck the ring like a hammer. It burned against his finger, the magic screaming for release. DO IT, the voice inside him shrieked. TOUCH HER. SAY THE WORDS. MAKE HER YOURS BEFORE SHE WALKS AWAY FOREVER.

Caelen’s hand moved. His fingers brushed the warmth of her neck, the contact sending a jolt of dark electricity through his arm. Eris tensed, her eyes widening as she felt the unnatural hum of the jewelry. “Caelen? What are you, ?”

His voice was hoarse, tortured, the sound of a man drowning in his own desperation. He opened his mouth to speak the words, the ones that would bind her soul back to his, the ones he wanted her to hear most in the world.

“Eris,” he choked out, the magic of the ring flaring into a blinding silver light between them.

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