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She smiles, slow and sly. “Not as terribly as I thought it would.”
“You have two bound,” I remind her, voice velvet-soft. “And everything else just... settled around you. Did it not?”
Her smile falters. Not gone. Just thinking. She looks at me like I’ve just held up a mirror and she’s not sure if she likes the reflection.
“I didn’t ask for any of it,” she says.
“No one ever asks for power that matters.”
“I don’t feel powerful. I feel like the gods made me a fulcrum and forgot to tell me which way the world tips.”
“You are powerful,” I say, each word deliberate. “Because you were not made to hold power. You were made to balance it. That’s why the world tips toward you.”
She exhales through her nose, quiet. “And Layla?”
“She’s not your opposite, Luna. She’s your equal. A different kind of center. They’ll feel that. The Sub-Sins will sense what’s waiting in her. Even if they want to reject her, they won’t be able to.”
She frowns, uncertain. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll be kind.”
“No,” I say. “Kindness doesn’t birth loyalty. But the hunger to belong? That binds deeper than love.”
She blinks, and something sharp flickers through her. Something almost mournful.
“You say that like you know.”
“I do.”
I’ve seen it. Lived it. That feral need to anchor yourself to something, anything, just to stop floating into the dark.
Her.
She doesn’t know what she’s already done to me. And I won’t be the one to tell her.
Before she can say more, a rock crunches behind us.
Elias stumbles out from behind a pillar of charred stone, hair wild, shirt inside out, one boot on. He looks like he’s been fighting a demon in his sleep and lost. Badly.
“Am I interrupting?” he asks, grinning like a sin. “Or is this the part where you two finally kiss and doom us all?”
Luna gives him a look that would incinerate lesser men. Elias just beams wider.
“You look like you lost a fight with your dreams,” she mutters.
“Wrong,” he says, staggering over. “I won that fight. I just let the nightmare think it had a shot.”
I arch a brow. “You’ve got ash on your face.”
“Good,” he says, wiping at it with the inside of his shirt, making it worse. “Makes me look haunted. Women love haunted.”
Luna doesn’t even blink. “Do they?”
“I mean, maybe not all women. Probably not you. Not you.” He clears his throat, failing to hide the way his eyes flick to her mouth, then away again, like he’s trying not to drown in something he started himself. “You’re more into… brooding philosophers with centuries of brooding and, ancient facial expressions.”
I give him a look.
He throws up his hands. “No offense, Orin. You wear the brooding well. It’s like your thing.”
Luna suppresses a smile.