The world outside Rowan’s window hummed with the familiar drone of a Brooklyn morning, a sound so aggressively normal it felt like a lie.
Sunlight, thin and pale, filtered through the blinds, striping the hardwood floor and the tangled sheets on her bed.
Beside her, Kael stirred, the slow, deep breath of sleep shifting the planes of his back.
His skin, usually luminous with Seelie grace, was marred by a latticework of healing cuts and deep purple bruises—a visceral map of the battle they had barely survived.
Every muscle in Rowan’s body ached with a profound weariness that went deeper than exhaustion.
It was the ache of a soul stretched to its breaking point and then, miraculously, stitched back together. Last night, in the wounded heart of her garden, they had done more than just declare a truce.
They had forged a new beginning from the wreckage of lies and duty, their passion a desperate, healing balm on wounds both magical and mortal.
She traced the edge of a fading glamour on his shoulder, a shimmer of silver-green beneath his skin.
He was still a prince, still a creature of a world she couldn’t comprehend, but in the quiet of her bedroom, he was just Kael.
The man who had taken a fatal blow for her. The man whose confession had shattered her, and whose sacrifice had begun to mend the break.
He woke as if sensing her touch, his eyes opening slowly.
They were the color of moss after a rain, and for the first time, they held no shadows, no veiled purpose. There was only a raw, unguarded affection that made her chest tighten.
“Good morning,” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep.
“Is it?” she whispered back, a faint smile touching her lips. “The garden…”
“Is resting,” he said, his fingers finding hers and lacing them together. “As are we. It held. You held it. That is a victory.”
The memory of their combined power—his steady, radiant light and her wild, untamed earth magic—surged through her.
It had felt less like fighting and more like becoming.
They were quiet for a long moment, the unsaid things hanging in the air, no longer secrets but shared weights. His duty. His dying world. The impossible choice that now rested on both their shoulders.
A sharp, insistent knock on her apartment door shattered the fragile peace.
Rowan stiffened. Kael was instantly alert, sitting up, his posture shifting from lover to warrior. “You’re not expecting anyone?”
“Only the one person who would knock like he’s trying to break it down,” she sighed, pulling on a robe. “Liam.”
Kael’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. The confrontation with Liam—the book of lore, the cold, hard proof of Kael’s betrayal—was a wound that had not yet scarred over.
She opened the door to find Liam looking exactly as she expected: haggard, wired on caffeine, and clutching his laptop like a shield.
His eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep, flicked from her face to Kael, who now stood in the doorway of the bedroom, dressed in a borrowed pair of her sweatpants that were ridiculously short on him.
Liam’s expression soured.
“I’m not here for him,” Liam said, his voice clipped. “I’m here for you, Ro. We need to talk.”
“Come in, Liam,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. She closed the door behind him. “And he’s part of this now. So we all need to talk.”
Liam’s gaze swept over Kael’s bruised form, a flicker of something—grudging respect? pity?—crossing his face before being buried under a fresh layer of suspicion. “Fine. But if he starts talking about his ‘estate,’ I’m leaving.”
“I have no intention of it,” Kael said, his voice even. “Your friend is right. We have far more pressing concerns.”
Rowan led them to her small kitchen table, the epicenter of so many late-night talks and early-morning coffees. This time, however, the air was thick with the ozone crackle of impending war. She made coffee while Liam booted up his laptop, his fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced speed.
“After you… kicked him out,” Liam began, deliberately not looking at Kael, “I didn’t stop digging. I knew Vex wasn’t just about real estate. Morwen’s play was too aggressive, too personal. So I went back to the data. All of it.”
He turned the laptop around. The screen was filled with maps of New York City overlaid with complex data points and color-coded timelines.
“These are every Vex acquisition over the last five years,” Liam explained, pointing to a series of glowing red dots. “Not just in Brooklyn. All five boroughs. At first, it looked random. A warehouse in the Bronx, a brownstone in Harlem, a vacant lot in Queens. But it wasn’t. I cross-referenced the acquisitions with financial data, looking for patterns in their shell corporations. And I found one.”
He clicked a key, and lines began to connect the dots. “They weren’t buying property. They were buying locations. And the final payments, the moments the deeds officially transferred, all coincided with minor, seemingly insignificant astronomical events. A meteor shower here, a specific lunar phase there.”
Rowan leaned closer, her brow furrowed. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“I didn’t know,” Liam admitted. “It felt like tinfoil-hat territory. Until I started running projections. There’s a pattern, a mathematical progression to the timing. And it’s all leading to one date. Three days from now.” He looked up, his eyes grave. “There’s a celestial alignment. A planetary syzygy. It’s rare. The kind of thing astronomers get excited about.”
He turned his intense gaze on Kael. “And I’m betting your kind gets excited about it, too.”
Kael had gone completely still.
The color drained from his face, leaving his bruises in stark relief. He stared at the screen, at the constellation of properties Liam had mapped, and a look of dawning horror washed over him.
“He’s right,” Kael breathed, his voice barely a whisper. “Gods, he’s right.”
He stood and walked to the window, looking out at the city as if seeing it for the first time. “You can’t see them, not with mortal eyes. But they are there. Veins of magic running through the earth’s stone and soil. You call them ley lines.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Rowan said. “New Age stuff, mostly.”
“It is not ‘stuff,’” Kael said, turning back, his eyes burning with a new, terrifying urgency. “It is the planet’s circulatory system. A network of immense power that crisscrosses the globe. Most are dormant or faint. But in a place like this city, with so much life, so much history, they run strong and deep. And where they intersect, they create a nexus. A place of concentrated, volatile power.”
He looked at Rowan, his meaning clear. “Your garden. It didn’t just grow from a vacant lot, Rowan. It grew there because the Heartseed found the most fertile ground on the island—a major nexus of ley lines.”
The pieces began to slot into place in Rowan’s mind, forming a picture far more monstrous than she had imagined.
Liam, ever the journalist, pressed for the conclusion. “So what does Morwen want with them? And what’s the alignment got to do with it?”
“The alignment acts like a key,” Kael explained, his voice low and grim. “During the peak of the syzygy, the barriers between worlds thin, and the ley lines… they open. The magical pressure equalizes. For a few short moments, the entire network is vulnerable, receptive. Anything poured into one nexus point will spread through the whole system like dye in water.”
Rowan felt a cold dread seep into her bones.
She voiced the horrifying conclusion herself. “So she doesn’t just want to steal the Heartseed for its power… she wants to corrupt it. To use my garden to poison everything.”
“Everything,” Kael confirmed, his expression bleak. “She will pour her Unseelie magic, her blight and decay, into the Heartseed at the precise moment of the alignment. It will surge through the ley lines, tainting the magical bedrock of this city. It would give her control over every flicker of magic in the five boroughs, twisting it to her will. But it wouldn’t stop there. The network connects our realms. It would spread back to the Fae, a poison that would cripple her enemies in the Seelie court and grant her dominion over what little power remains.”
He sank onto a chair, the weight of the revelation seeming to crush him. “She isn’t trying to save her people. She’s trying to build an empire on the ashes of both our worlds.”
The room was silent, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator.
Liam stared at Kael, his ingrained skepticism finally, completely, obliterated by the sheer, terrifying scope of the Fae prince’s explanation.
He had uncovered the ‘what’ and the ‘when,’ but Kael had provided the soul-destroying ‘why.’
Finally, Liam closed his laptop with a decisive snap. He looked at Rowan, his protective instincts warring with the cosmic horror of their situation. Then, he turned to Kael.
“Okay,” Liam said, the single word carrying the weight of his full acceptance. “I still think you’re a manipulative, otherworldly pain in the ass, Princey. But I hate her more.” He extended a hand across the table. “So what do we do?”
Kael looked at Liam’s outstretched hand, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. He took it, their handshake firm and startlingly human. An alliance forged in a cramped Brooklyn kitchen against a backdrop of unimaginable threat.
Rowan felt a surge of strength, cutting through the fear. The confusion was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
She was no longer just a botanist fighting a developer. She was a guardian, standing between her world and a ravenous darkness.
The men at her table, one of human logic and one of ancient magic, were looking to her.
She placed her hand over theirs, her touch connecting them.
“We fight,” she said, her voice steady and clear. “We use everything we have. Your tech, his magic…” She met Kael’s gaze, then Liam’s, a fierce determination hardening her own. “And my garden.”