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“She never had a hold on you,” I murmur. “Not like me. Not like Lucien.”

Ambrose’s jaw ticks, a muscle feathering beneath his skin. He doesn’t deny it.

“She wanted to bind me,” he says after a moment. “Tried. But you know me, Vale—I don’t let anyone chain me.”

I laugh, bitter, rubbing the back of my neck. “Except Luna.”

His eyes flick to me, dark and knowing. “That’s not a chain. That’s a fucking noose.”

We fall quiet again, but there’s something heavier now between us. Something sharp-edged and unspoken.

“You think she’s done the same to Lucien?” I ask eventually, my voice barely above a whisper.

Ambrose doesn’t answer right away. He watches me like he’s weighing the truth, deciding how much I can survive.

“She’ll have broken him differently,” he says finally. “She knows how to tailor the ruin.”

The words settle like stones in my chest.

“I’m not strong enough for this,” I admit quietly, voice raw. “Not to face her. Not to face them.”

Ambrose snorts, dark and sharp. “Bullshit.”

I glance at him, brow raised.

“You’re Lust, Vale,” he says, voice like smoke and steel. “You were never supposed to be strong. You were supposed to make everyone else weak.”

That hits harder than it should.

He leans back, head tipped toward the sky, eyes half-lidded like he’s seeing something far away. “The worst thing she did to you wasn’t binding you. It was making you think you’re fragile.”

For a moment, I can’t breathe. Can’t move. And then he looks at me again, something dangerously close to real concern buried under all that cold calculation.

“Tomorrow, when we walk through those cathedral doors,” he says, voice low, “she’s going to try to pull you apart. She’s going to sink her claws into the cracks she left in you.”

He leans in, voice a rasp. “You don’t let her.”

I meet his gaze, throat tight, and nod once.

Because he’s right.

She can’t hollow me out again.

“How’s it going,” I say quietly, voice rasped around too many things I can’t quite say, “with her?”

His sigh comes slow, careful, like everything about him. A breath heavier than he’d want me to notice. He tips his head back against the edge of the bench, eyes on the hollow sky above.

“It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” he says, like it’s nothing.

But nothing with Ambrose is ever just nothing.

I scoff, turning my head toward him. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Ambrose’s mouth curves, but it isn’t a smile. It’s something older, heavier, something brittle at the edges. “Means I spent months preparing to hate every second of this. Of her.”

“And?”

He exhales again, shaking his head like the weight of it’s starting to settle in his bones. “And I don’t.”