You love like a mosquito bite. Small at first, barely noticeable. A whisper of need against my neck when you think I’m sleeping. Then the itch begins.

The tavern reeks of soured wine and desperation. Pine Mire always smells like endings—empires crumbling into their own shadows, magic bleeding out through cracks in reality. You sit across from me, fingers drumming against wood scarred by a thousand forgotten conversations, and I watch the red welts bloom across your knuckles where you’ve been scratching.

“The Binding’s working,” you say, voice careful as a fish filleted.

I know. I can feel it threading through my veins like fever, like poison, like love. The spell you cast three moons ago when I tried to leave. When I packed my traveling cloak and kissed you goodbye and meant it to be final. You couldn’t let me go clean. Had to make it messy, infectious.

“It hurts,” I tell you, because honesty is all we have left in this rotting place.

You lean forward, candlelight catching the hollow of your throat. Beautiful, even now. Even with the madness creeping through your irises like frost across glass. “Good,” you whisper. “It should hurt. Love should always hurt.”

The itch spreads. Behind my eyes, under my fingernails, in the spaces between my thoughts where you’ve made yourself at home. I scratch until I bleed, and you watch with the satisfaction of someone who’s finally gotten what they wanted.

Outside, the lamplighters are making their rounds through Pine Mire’s twisted streets. Each flame they kindle burns a little dimmer than the night before. The city’s magic is dying, same as everything else. Same as us.

“You could lift it,” I say. We both know you won’t.

You smile—that terrible, tender thing that made me fall for you in the first place. “Why would I cure what makes you mine?”

The welts on your hands are spreading up your arms now. Because here’s what you never understood about Binding spells, love. They work both ways. You made yourself the mosquito, but that makes you the parasite too. And parasites die with their hosts.

I watch you scratch until your nails come away bloody. Watch the fever take hold behind your eyes. The magic you used to leash me to you is eating you alive from the inside out, and you’re too proud or too mad to stop it.

“I tried to warn you,” I say, standing. My legs shake, but they hold.

Your scratching grows frantic. Desperate. The spell demands I stay, pulls at me like gravity, like drowning. But binding magic has rules, even in a world as lawless as Gentricus. The caster has to be alive to maintain the connection.

“Don’t,” you gasp, blood under your fingernails now. “Don’t leave me.”

But I’m already walking toward the door. The itch follows me, clawing at my skin, my sanity. Each step away from you makes it worse, makes me want to turn back and beg forgiveness for whatever crime loving you became.

I don’t turn back.

Behind me, you’re screaming now. I can hear your flesh tearing as you claw at yourself, trying to scratch out the spell that’s burning through you like acid. The Binding demands a living anchor, and you’re killing yourself to keep me.

The tavern door swings shut on your agony.

I make it three blocks before the sensation stops. Just stops, sudden as a snapped string. The itch vanishes. The pull dies. The fever breaks.

In the distance, I hear the lamplighters calling to each other in the dark. Another light has gone out in Pine Mire. Another small death in a city full of them.

I touch my neck where this started—your whisper of need, your first small bite. The skin is smooth now. Clean.

Free.

I stand beneath a lamppost, its flame guttering in the night wind. The road to the city gates stretches ahead, dark and uncertain. Behind me, the tavern sits quiet as an urn.

But then a buzz dives past my ear. Then the other. Both ears are now buzzing. Something brushes my neck. Light as a lover’s breath, sharp as a needle.

I slap at it instinctively, but my palm comes away empty. Just a small red welt blooming where something bit me. Something small. Something hungry.

The itch begins again.

My feet turn before my mind catches up. Three blocks back toward the tavern, toward the candlelight spilling through grimy windows, toward the sound of your voice calling my name like a prayer, like a curse.

The door swings open to welcome me home.