Page 167

This is your brave soldier reporting in. I have scaled the unscalable, risked life and limb—and my very expensive hair—to reach the precipice of our doom.

A beat, and when she doesn’t immediately reply, I double down.

No enemies in sight, but clearly, they fear me. I’d fear me too if I were them. I’ve ascended Mount Doom, Mount Everest, and the very peaks of your standards, darling. All for you.

Another pause.

Then, just to be an ass, I add:Tell the plebs at the bottom of the hill that the hero requests snacks upon his triumphant descent.

Her response hits my head sharp, dry,You’re ridiculous.

But underneath it, there’s that thread of warmth I was looking for. That little spark of her amusement, stitched tight around her worry, and I want to unravel every knot of it.

I tap the bond again lazily, dragging the words across her mind like a promise.For you, baby, I’d climb every mountain, crawl through every pit, die in every tragic backstory. All so I can make you roll your eyes at me later.

I drop to my stomach again, slowly, like the ground is lava and I’m the world’s sexiest sacrifice. Dirt cakes into the seams of my hoodie—myhoodie, the one that’s absolutely still cursed and now whispering things about Elias’s thighs. Not helping.

But I press on.

Luna,I whisper through the bond,this is your hero reporting live from the warfront. The target—cathedral of doom, spire of nightmares, probably haunted—is approximately forty slithers away. Terrain is rocky. Danger: extremely high. Risk to ego: minimal.

I wait for her snark, the inevitablegods, Silas,but all I get is a flicker of warmth—like she’s trying not to laugh. Encouragement. Fuel.

So I keep going, crawling, ducking behind a log like there are snipers in the trees. There aren’t. Unless Ambrose sent them, which wouldn’t shock me. Man’s playing a long game of who’s-the-most-impressive, and Iam notlosing to a guy who barrel rolls without irony.

I inch closer to the cathedral's shadow, and the closer I get, the colder the ground feels. Not temperature-wise. Soul-wise. Like the earth here remembers blood. Screams. Things no one wrotedown. The grass dies under my fingers, each blade curling in on itself like it doesn’t want to touch me.

Good. I don’t want to be touched.

Except by Luna. She can touch me. Any time. Preferably when I survive this and demand celebratory snuggles.

Update,I tell her, voice hushed and serious now.I’m five feet from the gate. Still no movement. This place is… weird. I don’t like it. And that’s saying something, because I like haunted stuff. I once made out with a banshee for the aesthetic, but this? This isn’t just dead. It’s waiting.

There’s a shadow in the stained glass. Could be a trick of the light. Could be Branwen. Could be worse.

And because I’m me—because I haveto—I throw a glance over my shoulder toward the hill where the others are dots in the distance, and I mutter,Suck it, Ambrose. Your broody ass wouldn’t even crawl, would you? No. You’d just teleport inside and call it efficiency. This is drama. This is style.

A breeze snakes past me, and I freeze. Something old whispers through it—not a voice, not a word, just… permission. A door in the cathedral shudders. Opens a crack. My heart lodges in my throat.

Luna… I think it just opened for me.

I flatten myself against the cold, dead grass like I’m part of the scenery, like I can somehow blend into the earth if I just breathe shallow enough. My hoodie scrapes over the stone, and I ignore the bite of rock cutting into my ribs because this is strategy—this is war—and I’m halfway through mentally drafting the chapter I’m going to write about myself later when the figure steps out.

Lucien.

He looks the same and nothing like himself, all in one breath—a shadow of the man who once shoved me into a fountain because I swapped his tea with holy water. His hair’s longer, tangled like he stopped caring. His expression is wrong,hollowed out and carved sharp at the edges like something’s eaten through him. And still, even from here, I see how his shoulders sag when he spots me.

Because he’s spotted me. Of course he has. His sigh is long. Drawn out. Exhausted in a way I haven’t heard in weeks.

And that’s when it happens.

My hoodie—my cursed, treacherous hoodie—murmurs like a drunken oracle, the sound crackling against the bone-dry air. Loud enough that even the dead probably heard it.

"I once got drunk and tried to make out with a gargoyle because it looked lonely."

I freeze, mouth open, crawling half off the hillside like the dumbest predator alive. Lucien’s sigh shifts—less exhausted now, more resigned—and I swear on every shred of chaos in me, I hear the faintest, smallesthuffof a laugh from him.

I inch forward, craning my neck like maybe if I lower my body enough to the dirt, I can somehow rewind time. No dice.