Chapter 124 — What Love Leaves Behind

Chapter 124 — What Love Leaves Behind
His blood was hot against her hands.

Cass pressed both palms to the wound in Alder’s stomach, but she already knew. She could feel it in the slowing of his breath, the way his body shuddered, struggling to cling to life.

“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here, Alder.”

His eyes flickered open, glassy with pain but locked on her like she was the last thing holding him to this world. “Cass...”

“Shh. Don’t talk.”

He shook his head, coughed—blood flecking his lips. “Let me say it... please.”

Cass nodded, her vision swimming.

“I loved you,” he rasped. “Not the way he does... not the way you needed. But I did. From the beginning. When no one else saw you—I did.”

Her throat tightened. “I know.”

“I tried to be enough... tried to be... worthy.”

“You didn’t have to be anything but you,” she said, her voice cracking. “You didn’t have to fight for me like I was a prize to win.”

Alder coughed again, a tremor running through him. “I didn’t know how else to hold on to something that mattered.”

“You held on too tight,” she whispered. “And it broke us.”

His eyes filled with something raw and childlike—an ache that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with being unloved for too long. “Was there ever a version of this... where you could’ve loved me?”

Cass sobbed, her body collapsing forward, forehead to his shoulder. “Maybe. If things had been different. If you’d given me the chance to choose. Maybe then.”

He closed his eyes, a tear leaking from the corner.

Cass cupped his cheek with shaking fingers. “You made me hate you for taking away my voice. But I never stopped seeing the boy you were before all this. The boy who reached out when no one else did.”

His lips quivered with a bittersweet smile. “That’s the part of me I hoped you’d remember.”

She leaned in, heart pounding with grief and conflicted tenderness, and brushed a kiss against his lips—soft and sorrowful, a goodbye sealed in blood and salt.

Alder’s breath caught, and for a heartbeat, the tension in his body eased. His fingers ghosted across her cheek, barely there. “Thank you,” he whispered. “For that.”

Cass pressed her forehead to his. “I forgive you, Alder. Not because you earned it. But because I need to let go.”

His next breath rattled. “I wish I could’ve been your peace.”

She kissed his brow. “You were once. Before the war. Before the lies.”

His breath shuddered, shallower now. “It’s okay. It was always going to end this way. Just... remember me as more than the monster I became.”

“I will,” she promised. “I will.”

He smiled faintly. “You were always fire... I was just too foolish to let myself be warmed instead of burned.”

And then he exhaled.

Long. Final.

Cass stayed there, unmoving, her fingers still pressed to a wound no longer bleeding. Her cries were quiet at first. Then they cracked open, raw and unrestrained.

Caius knelt beside her, his hand reaching for her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Just give me a moment.”

And so he did.

The war was over. But her heart was still bleeding.

When Cass finally rose from Alder's side, her hands were stained red and her expression unreadable. She didn’t look at Caius. Didn’t speak to him. Just wiped her cheeks with the back of her trembling hand and walked past him toward the shattered window.

Caius rose slowly. “Cass—”

She turned on him, voice brittle. “Don’t. Just don’t.”

He flinched at the cold edge in her tone. “He would’ve killed me. He was going to strike.”

“And you think I didn’t know that?” Her eyes burned, not with fire—but with fury. “You think I didn’t see it in his eyes? But you didn’t have to kill him, Caius. You didn’t.”

“I did what I had to—”

“No,” she cut him off. “You did what you wanted to do. You hated him. And when the moment came, you chose vengeance over mercy.”

Caius’s jaw tensed, but he said nothing.

Cass took a shaking breath. “You didn’t see the look on his face. The regret. The pain. He was already dying the moment you took me back. You didn’t have to twist the knife.”

“I had to protect you.”

She stepped closer, voice trembling. “Then why don’t I feel safe?”

Caius looked gutted. “Cass...”

She turned away again, the space between them suddenly cavernous.

“He didn’t deserve my love,” she whispered. “But he died wanting it. That should mean something. Even to you.”

Her voice cracked at the end, and then—she shattered.

A sob tore from her chest, unrestrained and primal. She sank to her knees where blood had dried in smears across the stone floor, her hands trembling as they covered her face. The storm she’d kept locked inside came pouring out in gasps and choked cries, her body folding in on itself with grief she could no longer contain.

Caius took a step forward, his heart slamming against his ribs. He could feel it—through the bond now wide open—the ache in her chest, the anguish that raked through every nerve of her body. It was unbearable.

She was breaking.

And he felt every fracture.

“Cass...” he murmured, kneeling beside her but not daring to touch her yet.

Her sobs didn’t quiet. If anything, they deepened. “Why did it have to be like this?” she cried. “Why is love always a battlefield?”