Caelan didn't return to Ravenshade.
Not fully.
His body crossed the wards at dawn, bruised and silent, but his mind stayed behind—back in the ravine, back in the moment Aerin's eyes filled with betrayal and terror.
He couldn't erase that look.
So he did the only thing left.
He rebelled.
Lucien's men believed Caelan was broken.
That was their mistake.
They didn't see the way his hands shook not from fear, but from restraint. They didn't hear the way he whispered counter-incantations beneath his breath when they thought he slept. They didn't recognize the subtle wrongness in the wards around Aerin's cell—the tiny fractures that looked like natural decay.
Lucien had taught him precision.
Caelan used it against him.
The place they kept Aerin was carved from old stone and older cruelty. No windows. No mirrors. Wards layered so tightly they hummed like living things. Yet even caged, Aerin was dangerous—her presence warped the air, her magic pressing outward like a tide denied the shore.
She didn't scream.
She waited.
That scared Lucien's men more than rage ever could.
Caelan moved through the corridors like a ghost with permission.
He altered sigils by degrees so small they went unnoticed. Reversed polarity here. Softened a binding rune there. He seeded the walls with echoes—tiny stored pulses of light and shadow that responded only to her magic.
Each change hurt.
The dark magic resisted him now. Punished hesitation. Punished mercy.
Blood ran from his nose more than once.
He wiped it away and kept going.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the stones. "I'm so sorry."
Aerin felt it.
Not freedom—but possibility.
The pressure around her magic eased in fractions, like a lock slowly remembering how to open. She pressed her palm to the wall and felt something respond—not the prison, but within it.
Someone was undoing the cage.
Someone who knew how she breathed.
Her jaw tightened.
"Caelan," she murmured, fury and confusion tangling in her chest.
Lucien noticed the change three nights later.
Not the broken wards—those still stood—but the tone of the magic. The way it hesitated. The way it bent instead of snapped.
He smiled thinly.
"So," Lucien said into the dark, "you've chosen pain."
His gaze shifted, sharpening.
"Let's see how much you're willing to endure."
That night, Caelan collapsed in a service corridor, vision swimming, hands burned raw from spellwork meant to counter a master far stronger than himself. He laughed weakly at the irony.
"I broke her world," he whispered. "I'll break myself fixing it."
And somewhere beyond stone and shadow, Aerin stood straighter, magic gathering—not wild, not desperate.
Focused.
Because whoever had trapped her had made one fatal mistake:
They had underestimated how fiercely love—betrayed or not—could fight back.