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It’s a slow thing, the realization. Something sour curling in the back of my throat. I can feel it, the bond. Faint and sharp and threaded under my skin like a leash I didn’t ask for. Like a hook buried too deep to pull out.

Luna’s at the other end of it.

And if I didn’t already know I was bound, I wouldn’t have to be told—because I can feel her. The pulse of her magic humming beneath my bones like a second heartbeat, steady and relentless.

But there’s a wall between us.

A thick, cemented thing, built high and smooth and sealed shut. I can feel her there, but she’s locked me out. Bricked herself away so neatly I can’t even get a whisper of her unless she wants me to.

I tried.

While she slept, when no one could see me unraveling like this—I tried. I prodded at the bond, tested it, poked and pulled and bled for it, trying to find a crack in the stone she’d built around herself.

She never stirred.

And it’s fucking killing me. Because that wall is still there. I can feel it like a bruise in my chest. And it pisses me off more than anything else has in centuries.nBecause if there’s one thing Ambrose Dalmar has always been able to do—it’s get inside.

And she’s the only one who’s ever locked me out.

I’m Greed.

It’s not just a name. It’s not something stamped on me like a title—I am the living embodiment of it, written into the marrow of this world before it had a name. When I want something, I take it. When I hunger, the world burns to satisfy me.

And now I want in.

That wall she built—cemented over so clean, so precise—I can feel it humming at the back of my skull like an insult, like a fucking dare. Like she thinks she can keep me on the outside when we’re bound.

I glance down at the petals in my hands, slow, deliberate, because I know exactly what’s coming next. If she wants to lock me out—I’ll tear the damn door off its hinges.

I shift the bond inside me, letting it unravel slow and deadly like silk through my fingers. It pulses, buried deep beneath the others, heavier than theirs, older, rough around the edges because it wasn’t supposed to exist.

She doesn’t know how to feel me yet. Not the way I want her to. She’s closed it off, tucked it away like she can keep me there, like I won’t fucking claw through her walls.

So I push.

Not hard. Not the way I do with the others when I want something and I make the world bend beneath me.

No.

I slide inside soft, subtle, like gold slipping through cracks in the stone, decadent and corrosive all at once. My power knows how to seduce, how to tempt, how to slip under skin and make you crave things you shouldn’t.

And I whisper to her through the bond, the way only I can.

Let me in.

It’s not a question.

It’s not a plea.

It’s a promise. A demand. A quiet, inevitable undoing.

You don’t want to keep me out, Luna. You never did. You built the wall because you knew I’d break it. Because you want to watch me try.

I can feel her hesitation like a tremor in the space between us, the bond vibrating faintly under my words, her pulse fluttering against me.

Let me in, pretty thing. If I have to carry this, you’re going to carry it too.

The wall shifts—barely. A crack forming, something in her exhale softening, breaking open at the edges.