Across the courtyard, standing in the shadow of a column that no longer held a roof, Lucian Moon watched.
His hand was pressed flat against his sternum. The gesture was involuntary, the physical response to a grief that was pouring into him through a channel he had never asked for and could never close. Her grief. Her tears. Her devastation, transmitted through a fated matebond she didn't know existed, flooding his chest with a pain that belonged to her and lived in him.
His eyes were red.
He didn't wipe them. There was nobody watching. Everyone was inside, or at the altar, or in the corridors processing the catastrophe they had witnessed. Lucian Moon was alone with a column and a view of the sea and the knowledge that the woman crying in that library was his, had always been his, and was being comforted by the two men she belonged to while the man she was fated to stood outside and absorbed her grief through a connection she would never know about.
