Chapter 276: Chapter 276 – But if Voren is the person who...

"There’s nothing there. It was our wolves, and that’s it. We both came back to our senses after."

The words came out so fast, stacked so tightly on top of each other, that Corvine didn’t even need to analyze them. Speed like that only happened when a person was outrunning something.

He looked at Seraphine’s pink cheeks and said nothing for a moment. Just reached across her desk and picked up a blank A4 sheet and a pencil.

"Hmmm." The sound came out low and thoughtful, the kind that wasn’t really agreement or disagreement, just acknowledgment that he had heard her and had formed his own opinion about what she said.

He started drawing.

"You know what, Sera." His eyes stayed on the paper, pencil moving in easy strokes. "The lies you keep telling? They work exactly like a hole."

She looked up from her screen.

He was already sketching it out, a wide, deep well, the kind with no obvious bottom. Then, with a few simple lines, a small figure began to take shape at the top edge of it. The proportions were rough and completely unbothered about being rough.

"Every time you say something you don’t mean, the hole gets a little bigger." He kept drawing, shading the walls of the well with quick back and forth strokes. "And one day it becomes so deep, so wide—" he added the figure leaning slightly toward the edge— "that when you finally fall in, nobody’s going to be able to reach down far enough to get you out."

He lifted the paper.

The sketch showed a small, clearly female stick figure at the bottom of an enormous well, arms up, surrounded by nothing. It was objectively terrible art and also somehow completely recognizable as Seraphine.

The laugh that came out of her was real and sudden and she grabbed the nearest pen and sent it flying across the desk at him. Corvine caught it without looking up, completely unbothered.

"I’m being serious." He set the paper down and pointed at it with the pencil. "We should frame this actually. Put a date on it."

"Stop."

"For documentation purposes."

"Corvine."

He set the pencil down and leaned back in his chair, and the playfulness in his face altered into something more honest. He observed her the way he always did when he had decided to stop dancing around something.

Seraphine looked away first.

She thought about it, instead of just swatting it away. Voren. Of all the men that could have ended up in the orbit of her life, she had never once put Voren in any category that involved feelings.

He was complicated and sharp, and he got under her skin in a way that felt different from anything she had a name for. Even Ravyn, back when things between them were still soft and she had believed in what they had, never made her feel quite like that.

Which was a thought she immediately picked up and put back down.

"Marsha was putting things in my head," she said, more quietly this time. "That’s really all it was."

Corvine looked at her.

He had been there during the training session for the Santiago saga. He had watched Voren and Seraphine train together, then everything that happened when Seraphine through that Voren was dead.

There was a lot to say but something in her face stopped him from going there right now.

Instead, she went somewhere else first.

"You have feelings for me." It came out quiet and direct, the way she said the things she had already made her peace with. "So tell me honestly, would you actually be okay if something happened with Voren?"

The question settled between them.

Corvine was quiet for a moment, long enough that she started to wonder if she had pushed too far. Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at her with an expression she had only seen on him a handful of times, stripped of everything extra, just the truth of what he actually felt sitting right on the surface of his face. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"Sera." His voice came out low and careful, like he was handling something that mattered. "I have watched you for years, close enough to know what you look like when you’re actually hurting versus when you’re just performing strength for everyone around you." He paused. "And you do it so well that most people never see the difference. But I do."

She didn’t move.

"You’re one of the strongest people I know. But underneath all of that—" Corvine’s eyes moved over her face. "You want what every woman wants. To be loved properly. To love someone back and not have it used against you."

He reached across and put his hand over hers, and she let him. "That’s not weakness, Sera. That’s just being human. Or as close to it as we get."

A tear moved down her cheek before she had the chance to stop it but Corvine kept going.

"You’re twenty-six years old and you have never once been loved the way you actually deserve." His jaw tightened slightly, something moving through him that he kept controlled.

"And yes, I love you. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t." His thumb moved once across the back of her hand. "But I also know you. And I know that what you feel for me has never been that kind of love and it never will be, and I’ve made peace with that for a while now.

Seraphine pulled her hand away slowly. She pressed the back of her wrist against her cheek, catching the tears before they could get any further, and took a slow breath in through her nose.

Corvine watched her and his voice dropped to something quieter. "This is genuinely hard for me to say out loud. But if Voren is the person who finally gives you the kind of happiness you’ve been carrying the absence of this whole time—" he stopped, steadied himself— "then I want that for you."

The tears came faster than Seraphine could manage them.

She was out of her chair before either of them planned it, and she wrapped her arms around him from the side, holding on, and he brought one arm up around her without hesitation and let her stay there.

Then the door opened and the air in the room changed immediately, like a weather system walking through the doorframe. Talk of the devil, and he would appear.

Voren stood in the entrance of the executive office, one hand still on the door handle, his expression carved into something flat and unreadable. But his eyes moved straight to where Seraphine’s arms were wrapped around Corvine’s shoulders, and something in them went very, very still.