Phei finally relaxed.
Not the physical loosening of muscles, but something deeper — a small letting-go of the tension he'd been maintaining in his chest since Cassiopeia had confessed.
The storm had passed, he'd held it at the threshold and it had dispersed into something manageable, something he could think about rather than be consumed by.
But the thinking was worse.
Phei was the one who brought Cassiopeia in.
He had made the decision to mark Cassiopeia, to bind her soul to his, to grant her sanctuary in the one place that was meant to be inviolate against everything the Maxton family represented.
And in so doing, he'd introduced the ephemeral safety of his circle to a woman who carried the ineluctable weight of her family whether she'd wielded it or not.
The pain the Maxtons had inflicted on him was tenebrous, layered, a darkness that had threaded itself through his early years with such pervasive totality he'd assumed it was the default condition of existence.
