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“I get it,” he says, and there’s a quiet there, not emptiness, but weight. “They’ve had your heart for three decades. And I show up, weeks into the worst part of your life, and fuck it all sideways.”

I stare at my hands. They don’t feel like mine right now. “It’s not that simple.”

“No,” he says, voice low. “It’s worse. Because you didn’t mean to want me.”

I lift my eyes. He’s not smiling anymore.

“You think this is easy for me?” he goes on, dragging one hand through his hair, still damp at the roots. “You think I don’t know what they’d do to me if they saw what I did to you last night? I’ve seen your past, Luna. I’vefeltit. I know what you mean to them.”

I shake my head, throat tight. “It’s not about what they’d do. It’s about what I did.”

He looks at me like he wants to reach across the table and drag the guilt out of my body with his teeth.

“I’m not a mistake,” he says, steady now. “I’m not a detour. I’m a Sin, just like the rest of them. You think I wouldn’t be bound to you already if they hadn’t imprisoned me before I could meet you in that life?”

Even now, with the taste of him still on my skin, I can’t say I don’t want him. I can’t say itwasn’t supposed to happen.Because itwas.The pull between us was never a mistake. It wasinevitable.

He leans back again, sighs. “You still full?”

I nod, slower this time. “Too full.”

“Good,” he mutters. “You’ll need your strength.”

“Why?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

He tilts his head toward the far end of the hall. Because the doors just opened.

No sound. No warning. No creak, no echo. Just a stillness parting, like the castle itself is granting us entry into something sacred. Or cursed. Maybe both.

We walk side by side through a corridor carved from living stone. The walls are dark, almost wet-looking, carved with swirling patterns that shift subtly the longer I stare. The light is dim, but steady, coming from sconces along the wall that flicker with cold blue flame, burning without smoke, without scent. The air here hums. Not from magic. Frompresence.

I feel it before I see him.

The room we enter is impossibly large. A hall of columns thick as tree trunks, rising up into shadow and vanishing into a vaulted ceiling that bends like the inside of a beast’s ribcage. The walls shimmer with what looks like stars, as though the night sky has been swallowed and imprisoned within them.

But it’s the throne that captures me. Thatownsme the second my eyes land on it.

Set into the far wall, raised on a dais of black stone slick with something that might be obsidian or might be old blood, the throne is carved from bone and crystal, enormous and brutal. It looks less like it was made, and more like it wasgrownfrom the carcass of something divine and long-dead.

And Brashir sits on it like he never left.

Massive. Immovable.

His presence is suffocating, not in a physical way but in the way gravity works, like if I take another step, I’ll fall forward and keep falling, straight into him, until there’s nothing left of me.

He’s dressed differently than before. Gone is the tattered drape of bone-colored cloth. Today he wears a robe of woven black and silver, etched with symbols that hurt to look at. It hangs off his body like armor pretending to be silk, and it doesn't move with the air. Nothing about him moves.

Except his eyes. They burn gold in the light of the sconces, fixed on us as we approach.

And then, hesmiles. Slow. Measured.

“Did you get enough to eat?” His voice is a low rumble. Velvet dragged over stone.

I nod once, careful. “Yes. Thank you.”

Theo doesn’t say anything, but he’s rigid beside me, ready to unsheathe whatever blade he’s hiding if this turns.

I look up again, into the eyes of the being who pulled me out of the world and dropped me into this twisted place like a coin into a well.