Stop Saving Me, I'm Going Home

The Blood Moon Festival ended the night Caelan Voss stood up in front of every faction in Aurevael and announced he only wanted one person.

Her name wasn't mine.

The other consorts took their gold and went home. The Ironpact warriors headed back to their barracks. The Sylvari delegation slipped out before the second toast. The Covenant scholars packed their notes. Reunions. Celebrations. The kind of night the holiday was made for.

I had nowhere to go.

The mark on my inner wrist had always been warm. Just a low, steady pulse—easy to ignore after a few years, like a clock you stop hearing. I pressed my fingers over it out of habit.

Cold.

The contract was over. Twenty-one years, four failed routes, and now this. The ancient binding that had pulled me into this world had made its verdict.

I went to find a rope.

The Ruin Tower gate wasn't very high. I stacked two empty crates beneath the lintel, looped the rope through the iron hook overhead, and stepped up.

I was almost home.

Somewhere past the city walls, Blood Moon fireworks kept going. Red and gold, same as every year. I could hear the crowds from here. They were having a fine night.

I kicked the crates away.

The pain was immediate—throat, air, everything compressing at once. My thoughts started going soft around the edges.

I'd been summoned into this world as a girl, dragged out of my own life and dropped into a kingdom of four factions that barely tolerated each other, bound to a contract I never agreed to. The terms were simple enough: earn a genuine bond from at least one of the four faction representatives, and I could go home. Time had frozen there the moment I left. My family was still waiting.

Four targets. Twenty-one years. Every single route had collapsed.

Tonight was the last one.

The contract had given me its verdict an hour ago, when Caelan stood up at the banquet and said Isolde's name.

So I'd done the math. There was only one way out.

I was giving it exactly that.

Through the pressure in my ears, I thought I heard someone shout my name.

The rope went slack.

Then a bucket of water hit me in the face.

I came down hard, coughing, hands scrabbling at the gate. When I could see again, I was on the ground with rope burns on my neck and someone standing over me, watching me the way you'd watch something unpleasant you'd stepped in.

Grey ceremonial robes. Prayer beads looped through his fingers. Empty bucket at his feet.

I knew that face.

"Caelan—"

The word was out before I could stop it.

"Don't." His expression didn't shift. "You're not in a position to call me that."

Of course.

Caelan Voss. Heir of the Dusk Court, the most feared name in Aurevael's vampire faction. Also the man I'd kept alive for three days in an abandoned mine, when every other faction was hunting his bloodline to extinction. I'd led the search party away from his hiding spot until they scattered. He'd been half-dead by the time I got back, running on nothing but spite and whatever blood I could spare.

He'd tried to mark me afterward. Protection, he'd said. A Blood Mark would let him sense me, keep me tethered to his awareness.

The mark had settled. The turning hadn't.

My body rejected the transformation—something about being summoned, about not belonging to this world the way the others did. The mark stayed behind, broken and incomplete, lodged in my wrist like a splinter that wouldn't come out.

From that point on, I was the Tainted Consort. Wrong blood, failed mark, a bad omen with a title.

He'd given me the consort position as a consolation. I'd told myself it meant something.

That was four years ago.

Four years ago on Blood Moon night, I'd stood next to him at the Accord assembly and thought—for one genuinely stupid moment—that the contract was going to close. Then Isolde arrived with a letter and a bruise on her cheek and a story about what I'd supposedly done to her. She could be turned. No failed mark, no splinter—she could become what I never would. And everything came apart in the span of a week. Corvin threw me out of the family workshop in one sentence. Caelan reassigned me to the Ruin Tower without discussion. Ruen sent the oath-brand back by messenger. Faeron dissolved our bond the same afternoon, quiet as a door closing.

Four years of hauling water and scrubbing linens, every word out of my mouth treated like evidence.

And now Isolde was back, Caelan had said her name in front of the whole assembly, and the mark on my wrist had gone cold, and I was sitting in the dirt outside the Ruin Tower with rope burns on my neck.

Caelan snapped his fingers. Two guards stepped forward and hauled me upright.

He looked at the marks on my throat. Something moved through his expression—not concern.

"The Ruin Tower gate isn't even a proper stage," he said. "And you're already performing."

My throat still burned. I talked through it anyway.

"Administrator Voss." I kept my voice level. "If the tower is so remote, why are you here? Did you come all this way just to see me?"

His jaw tightened. Just for a second.

"Isolde came back tonight. I won't have you making a scene on her reunion." He turned to the guards. "Get her things. Outside the gate."

They threw my bundle out first.

Then me.

I sat in the road outside the city wall and looked up at him, standing above the threshold with the festival light behind him. He looked down at me the way you look at something that's your problem until it isn't.

"Once you're outside," he said, "don't expect me to find you again."

I looked up at him and smiled.

That was fine.

I got up, picked up my bundle, and turned toward the outer road. The Accord Cliff was just past the wall. I'd seen it every morning from my tower window for four years.

Closer than the rope.