Chapter 10: Love Never Wins
She told Lex at dawn.
He listened without interrupting, which was how she knew he was actually afraid—the more frightened Lex was, the more still he became, like a flame drawn down in high wind. By the time she finished, he had the stillness of something that had fully retreated into itself.
"She's using black moon magic," he said. Not a question.
"Yes. I felt it."
"She's been building it for years. There are reports—" He stopped. "I thought she was gone. I wanted her to be gone, because the alternative meant she was still suffering, and I couldn't—" A muscle jumped in his jaw. "I was eleven when they sent her away. I watched from my window. She looked up, once."
Ava reached across the table between them and covered his hand with hers. He turned it over immediately, fingers closing around hers with a precision that suggested he'd wanted to do it all morning.
"She said your father chose the throne," Ava said quietly.
"He did."
"And you think you'll do the same."
He looked at her sharply. "No."
"Then why does it terrify you when I say it?"
He was quiet for a moment. The morning light through the window caught the planes of his face—the same face that had looked at her from a cave wall, raw with effort, the same face that had kissed her like the world was ending. She felt him clearly: the fear of replication. The cold, specific horror of seeing yourself in a pattern you grew up watching destroy someone.
"Because I know what I am," he said. "I know the pack. I know the politics. I know what happens when the king dies and the succession is contested. There will come a moment where the only way through is a choice that costs—" He stopped. "And I don't trust myself."
"I do," she said simply.
He looked at her for a long time.
"You shouldn't," he said. But she felt, beneath the words, that part of him had needed to hear it more than he wanted to admit.
She held his hand until the morning attendant knocked at the door, and then she let go.
She walked to her own quarters thinking about Selene's words. It never wins against power.
It would have been more comforting if the woman had looked unhappy when she said it.
