Chapter 125: Leather Bound - Callista's POV

My heart cracked clean down the middle at those words. They weren’t dramatic or performed. They came out quiet and raw, entirely without defence.

I kept my hands on his face and didn't move.

"I know," I said softly. "I know that's what you wanted."

"I should have been able to give it to you," he said, his voice cracking. "A normal bond. A normal ceremony. Not this." His jaw worked beneath my palms. "Not a curse, a demon, a biological father who cursed his own children to protect a throne, and a brother who wants us dead."

"Riven."

"You deserve—"

"Don't," I warned, and my voice came out firmer than I intended. "Don't tell me what I deserve. Don't stand there and decide for me what my life should look like and what I should want from it." I held his gaze, close enough that there was nowhere else for him to look. "I have been deciding things for myself my entire life. I decided to come back to you. I decided to stay. And I am deciding right now that I am not interested in the version of this where you use what your father just told us as a reason to push me away again."

His eyes searched mine.

"Once," I said quietly. "You did it once and it nearly broke both of us. I won’t survive it a second time and neither will you. So whatever you're building toward in that head of yours, stop."

Something in his expression fractured and reset. He reached up and covered my hands with his, still pressed against his face, and closed his eyes for a moment. Just one moment.  When he opened them again the tears were gone. What was left underneath was something steadier, though it cost him to get there.

"He said he found a way," I said, before he could speak. "He said he knew how to keep it from killing you. That's not nothing, Riven. That changes things, doesn’t it?”

"Or it's another thing he's using to keep me here," he admitted quietly. "Another piece of information he's controlling the timing of. Who knows what the truth is or what lies there are?”

I considered that and it wasn't wrong. Ronan dealt in information the way other people dealt in currency—carefully, strategically, never spending more than necessary and always keeping something in reserve.

"Maybe," I murmured. “But he also admitted the truth tonight, even the parts that made him look like a villain.”

Riven said nothing to that, which meant he was turning it over rather than dismissing it. That was something at least.

"He didn't have to tell us about your mother," I pressed gently. "He didn't have to tell us about his brother or the throne or any of it. He could have given us half the story and we wouldn't have known the difference. But he didn't." I searched his face, hoping he saw reason. "That has to mean something."

"It means he's run out of options," Riven admitted. "It doesn't mean he's suddenly honest or that he grew a heart.”

"It means both things," I added. "And you know it."

He exhaled slowly through his nose and looked away from me down the corridor. His profile in the afternoon light was tight with everything he was trying to process, and I didn't push him further. He needed a moment to let it settle without my pushing.

I waited.

Outside, somewhere beyond the mansion walls, the wind moved through whatever trees edged the grounds. The house was quiet in the way it had been all afternoon.

"He cursed us to protect us," Riven said finally, his voice low. "That's what he's telling himself. That this was protection."

"Yes."

"And somewhere in his mind, that justifies all of it. Every year I spent not knowing. Every time the demon pushed through and I thought it was just me. Every night I lay awake wondering if I was going to be the thing that destroyed everyone around me." His jaw tightened. "He decided that was preferable to telling the truth."

I didn't argue with that, because he wasn't wrong. Ronan had made a choice that wasn't his to make and had dressed it as protection when it was also, at least in part, control. Both things were true and neither cancelled the other out.

"You're allowed to be angry at him," I whispered.

"I am angry at him," he said simply.

"And you're allowed to also believe that he loves you."

He looked back at me at that. Something moved through his eyes that was complicated, unresolved, and probably going to take significantly longer than this hallway to work through.

"Both things," he whispered, echoing what I had said a moment ago.

"Both things," I confirmed.

He looked at me for a long moment, and then something in his shoulders dropped by a fraction.

"The demon said there's a record of the original summoning," he stated, his voice controlled and strained.

"Yes."

"And if the record exists, then there's a structure to it with rules and conditions. There has to be." His voice had changed. For once, he sounded hopeful. "Demons summoned by specific rituals are bound by specific conditions. My father said he's been looking for a way to reverse it for years. But he hasn't had a seer looking with him."

“He has seers, but I think this is why he wanted to train me. I could help you,” I said softly. “He has to let us see it.”

"Yes."

I held my breath for a moment, knowing that it might not go how we hoped. "He may not want to."

"No," Riven agreed. "But after tonight, I think he's done deciding what we're ready for."

I nodded slowly. "We’ll go back in."

"We’ll go back in," he echoed.

He took my hand, and we turned back the way we had come. The bond began to settle then.

The sitting room door was still open.

Ronan was exactly where we had left him, standing at the fireplace with one hand braced on the mantle and his gaze on the cold ash below. He looked up when we appeared in the doorway, and something in his expression shifted, as if he had expected us to come back.

"The record," Riven said without hesitating. "The one of the original summoning. I need to see it."

Ronan stared at him. "Riven—"

"Don't," he said, and his voice carried no anger now, only a flat, clear certainty. "You had your ten minutes. Don’t stop now because it’s inconvenient.”

There was a long pause before he sighed.

He huffed again, then started pulling out books from the shelves. I arched my brow in confusion.

“I moved it,” he said simply, before either of us could speak. “When the visitor came three days ago, I moved it because I was afraid of what might happen should someone find it.”

Riven and I both went still.

Ronan’s hand slipped deeper into the bookcase, and when it emerged, he had an old, worn leather book in his hand. He held it out.

Neither of us moved for a moment.

Then Riven looked at me, and I understood what he was asking without him saying it. I was the seer. If there was something in that book that a person with my ability could read differently than a person without it, then I was the one who should open it first.

I crossed the room and took it from Ronan's hands.

The moment my fingers closed around it, my seer sense moved through me the way it did before a vision arrived.

I looked at Ronan. "You said you know how to keep it from killing him.”

“Yes,” he said confidently, then lower, “I think.”

I nodded once. “Thinking and knowing are two different things.”

His face paled at that and I knew then that he had just lied to Riven. He said he knew just moments ago.