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He stepped closer, until there was no space between us and I had to tilt my head back to keep his gaze.

I did not respond to his statement but instead asked, “What do you prefer? The dark or the light?”

“Neither,” he said. “Evil basks in it all.”

His words sent a trickle of unease through me and I shivered.

Adrian often seemed so carefree. In the few months I had known him, he had approached me with a smile on his face and a light in his eyes, but now and then, I sensed something darker beneath.

“We should go,” he said. “You wish to see the stars.”

He led me through the corridor and into the castle, and I found myself smiling and giggling as we navigated the halls, avoiding members of the court and servants, as if what we were doing was truly scandalous.

“There are a lot of stairs,” Adrian warned when we came to the east tower. “If you get tired…”

“I am not like the women in your court,” I said, because it was true. I had grown up in Aroth, where we had worshipped the earth—digging deep into the dirt with our hands to grow our food, hunting and trapping and gathering fruit. To these people, I was wild and untamed.

But when Adrian looked at me, I felt…like myself.

He chuckled quietly. “Noted, sorceress.”

I took the steps first, and Adrian followed behind. He kept pace with me, and I wondered how quickly he would scale them if I was not holding him back.

“Will you not be missed at your post?” I asked. I knew Adrian was part of Dragos’s Elite Guard. They had a reputation for ruthlessness, carrying out his most personal orders, including, it was rumored, assassination.

“I do not have a post,” he said.

At some point, we stopped climbing and came to a short corridor. Adrian secured his torch in the sconce on the wall before leading me through the door onto the roof of the castle tower.

He had been right.

As I stepped outside, I did not even need to turn my head up to the sky because we were already surrounded by stars. They stretched on for miles in clusters of colors, shining so bright, there hardly seemed to be any darkness in the sky.

Adrian took a few steps forward before he sat and lay on this back, hands behind his head.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“How else do you stargaze?”

I tried not to smile and lingered on my feet for a few seconds longer before joining him. We were quiet, and while I tried to focus on the sky, it was hard with Adrian lying beside me. A warm tension grew between us, and I fought to keep myself from touching him. If I did, it wouldn’t be fair.

I was not going to live for long.

“I know what you want,” I whispered.

“What do I want?” he asked.

I took a breath, intending to tell him that nothing could happen between us—that it would end far faster than it began. I never fought the future, but I fought it with him because I knew that if we came together, we would only ruin the world.

But when I looked at him, no words left my mouth, and I understood that we were inevitable. Slowly, he kissed me.

For Adrian, that was our first night together, the start of something wild and passionate—the promise of a future he might build separate from the horror of his work as Dragos’s guard.

For me, I knew I had taken the first step toward my impending death.

Two hundred years later, he had brought me here for the first time as Isolde to witness the fires lit across Revekka.

The night High Coven was murdered, the world looked just like this, he’d said. Then, those words had hardly fazed me. Now, they twisted through me, a thousand knives in my skin.