He paused, surprised by how his voice wavered. Adaira raised her hand and laid it against the arch of his cheek, and he knew she was beginning to see him as he saw her. The threads that held them together.

“My father was the Keeper of the Aithwood. It was he who brought you into the east, where he knew you would be safe and loved,” said Jack. It was liberating to speak those forbidden words aloud. The weight slipped from his chest like a stone, and he shivered to feel the space it left behind, waiting to be filled. “From your life came mine. I would not exist if you had been born in the east. I am but a verse inspired by your chorus, and I will follow you until the end, when the isle takes my bones and my name is nothing more than a remembrance on a headstone, next to yours.”

Adaira smiled, tears shining in her eyes. Jack waited for her to break the silence that welled, a bright and heady moment that could morph into anything. He waited, knowing they could claim this day as their own. Fully and unapologetically, with all of its blood, agony, and windswept secrets. The wounds and the scars and the uncertainty of the future.

“Jack,” she said at last, drawing him into her embrace.

Jack breathed her in, hiding his face in the soft, quicksilver waves of her hair.

Adaira invited him to remain with her that night. She sensed no expectations within Jack, only his contentment. Contentment to be in her company, shut away from the spinning world beyond the chamber, if only for a span of a few starlit hours.

She still marveled over his words, words that bound them closer than spoken vows had done.

She opened one of the windows, welcoming a warm summer night into the chamber. For a moment, she could fool herself. Gazing out over the darkened isle, she believed her father still lived, that he could be found in the library by the fire, her mother close beside him with her harp, plucking a waterfall of notes. For a moment, she was Adaira Tamerlaine and she had always belonged to the east.

But the imagining faded into ash when she realized she didn’t want such a life anymore. She wanted the truth. She wanted to feel it brush against her skin, wanted to claim it with her hands. She wanted honesty, even if it felt like claws raking across her soul.

When she turned around, Jack was watching her. A sultry breeze slipped into the chamber, stirring Adaira’s long, unbound hair.

“It feels strange,” she whispered. “To not know which side I belong to.”

“You belong to both,” he replied. “You are the east as you are the west. You are mine as I am yours.”

She walked to meet him in the heart of the room, where the shadows danced on the floor.