“You not being next me woke me,” I informed him. I pressed my lips to his muscled back and to a panel of membrane of one section of his wings, feeling him shudder. Sensitive? I wondered, fighting a smile. “I still can’t believe you’re here. It feels like a dream.”

When these last two weeks have felt like a nightmare, I added silently. But I left like I could finally wake up with him beside me.

Azur guided me from his back, shuffling me to his front. It was a chilled, misty, quiet morning. There was a fog rolling off of Mount Hara—the sight of the mountain accompanied by a sharp pang of sadness—descending into the pine forests in the valley beneath it, crawling over the land. It was beautiful. A beautiful morning in the Collis as the season began to change.

“I hardly ever come out here,” I admitted softly, feeling his arms drape around my front, warming me better than the blanket could.

Azur shifted. “Because of the lake?” he asked.

My rooms looked toward Mount Hara. But to the right of us, I could just make out the edge of the large, oval-shaped lake toward the back of the house. If I craned my head around to the left, I might’ve been able to make out the front entrance gates.

Strangely, it was silent. I couldn’t even hear voices or sounds coming from around the house. There were always people at the gates. With Azur’s appearance last night, sending them into a speculative frenzy, I thought there would be even more this morning.

“Yes,” I answered him, even now avoiding looking in that direction. I kept my eyes on the foggy forest and turned my head the opposite way, brushing my lips across his arm.

“I shouldn’t have left the bed,” he told me. “But I couldn’t resist this view. It’s beautiful here, Gemma.”

My chest ached.

“It is,” I agreed quietly. “And yet…I think I would be all too happy to never lay eyes on the Collis again. On this house. On this estate.”

Azur pressed his lips to the top of my head, breathing me in as I sank deeper into him.

“There’s so much pain here. In these walls. It feels haunted but not with souls. With memory. With grief. With lies,” I said, voice soft in the quiet morning. “But my mother will always be here. I didn’t even want her buried on the estate, especially next to where she died. Neither did my grandparents. But my father was so…so broken. He was adamant about it. Now she’ll always be here.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked me. “What do you and your sisters want to do with the estate?”

My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if we have authority over it to decide. I would assume the estate is in my father’s name, but given the laws of the High Quadrant Council, it would have been forfeit the moment he turned himself over to them. And we can’t find the deed. No traces that he had ever owned it in the first place.”

I felt Azur’s long inhale.

“I own the estate, Gemma.”

Shock made me freeze before I slowly turned in his arms to meet his eyes. “What?”

“I should have told you long before this moment,” Azur said, his gaze shamed. An emotion I never thought I’d see etched on his expression. “For that I’m sorry.”

“Just tell me,” I said. “You…you negotiated the deed into the marriage contract? But Mr. Cross never said anything about that.”

“It was your father,” Azur told him, his lips twisting briefly. “He made contact with the stipulation that I recover the deed to the estate before he would agree to the marriage.”

I reared back. “What? Recover it how?”

His lips pressed. He didn’t enjoy telling me this, I realized. “Your father put up the deed as collateral for a gambling debt he couldn’t repay. Last year.”

When the world seemed to sway beneath my feet, Azur’s arm tightened around me, not letting me fall.

“The house…the house wasn’t ours? Someone else, a collector, had ownership? Who…who was it?”

“A Binshay male on the Qapot’a colony,” Azur told me. I froze. “I told your father that I would reclaim the deed, that I would buy out his debt to the Binshay, but that it would belong to me. To my House. He agreed. The agreement was finalized a couple weeks after our marriage. The deed is in my family’s vault on Krynn.”

“My gods,” I breathed.

“Your father, however, still owned a section of land here in the Collis,” Azur told me. “A section of the estate he refused to give up. Not to anyone. Not even to me.”

Azur gestured to our right. To the lake.

Of course, I thought, feeling conflicting feelings stab me in my chest at the realization.

“He wouldn’t give up the lake,” Azur told me. “At least until he was arrested. That deed went to an open auction two days ago.”

“Someone bought it?” I whispered.

“Yes,” he said, his arm tightening. “Us, Gemma.”

“You…you bought it?”

“For you,” he told me. “We already own the estate. Now we own it in full, and I’ll let you decide what you wish to do with it. Whether you want to sell it, destroy it, or keep it. Whatever you want, whatever you and your sisters decide, I’ll make it happen. You don’t have to worry about that.”

My throat went tight. Maybe he’d bought and kept the deed to the estate out of malice for my father…but he’d bought the lake for me, knowing that my mother was buried there. And now he was giving me the agency to decide. He didn’t care about the estate. He only cared about me and what I wanted.

“We can bring your mother back to Krynn if you’d like,” Azur told me hesitantly, softly, when I didn’t answer him right away. “She doesn’t have to remain here. We can make her a soul gem, just like how we will make Aina’s. Maybe…maybe she’ll find her way to Alara.”

Soul gems were vessels. Azur had told me they lit up when their soul was near, especially on a night of the moon winds.

“It might break my heart if hers never came to life,” I told him honestly, wiping at my cheeks when a stray tear fell. “I—I’ll need to ask my grandparents. But I think they might want her to return home. I think they might want her to return to New Inverness, where she grew up. They wanted that from the beginning, but my father denied them their wishes. She was their daughter. They just wanted her back home, to the place where I think she was always happiest.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Azur told me, pressing his lips to my temple.

“And then I want…” I began, frightened to say the words but knowing that it was the right thing to do. “I never want to return here.”

“You wish to sell it?” he asked.

“No,” I said firmly. “My father… This estate was a reward for my father’s silence after the Pe’ji War.”

Azur’s jaw clenched.

“A reward for Aina,” I told him, and it broke my heart to do so. “He profited from her death, and I don’t want to take a single credit more for it. I want to leave this place and let it crumble to the earth with time. I want it to age and crack and fall. To let all of New Everton know, let all of the Collis know what he did. What the United Alliance did.”

“You’re certain?” he asked, his voice a rumble.

“Yes,” I said, my spine steeling. “I know my sisters will feel the same. We’ll return my mother to New Inverness. And then I want to go home. To Laras. With you.”

He embraced me tight. His horns tangled in my hair when he crouched down.

That was all I wanted. The answer seemed so simple.

“Your sisters, Fran, even Sorj,” Azur started, murmuring in my ear, “they are all welcome to live in Laras. I’ll extend them all citizenship. They can come home with us. Or come and go as they please, if they prefer to live with your grandparents and remain within the New Earth colonies. They can even live in the keep with us, if that would please you.”

I love him, I thought, my chest aching with the sharp bite of the emotion. “You would do that?”