Page 168

He’s still staring at me.

And I hear his voice—dry, soft, razor-edged in a way it always used to be when he was trying to save me from myself.

“Silas,” he calls quietly, without looking back toward the cathedral door behind him. “Is there a reason you’re impersonating a worm?”

I press my forehead to the ground.This is it. My legacy.

Luna,I whisper through the bond.Abort mission. The cargo’s alive but he’s seen me. I repeat: he’s seen me. Also, my hoodie is a traitor. If I die here, tell Elias he still owes me a drink and tell Riven I love him but he can’t have my stash.

There’s no answer from her except the ripple of her laughter, soft and warm inside me, and I close my eyes for half a second, breathing it in.

Lucien shifts on his feet, waiting.

I push up to my elbows, dirt sticking to my hands. “You look like shit,” I tell him, because if I don’t say something, if I don’t fill the cracks with noise, the hollowness will settle between us like it always does.

The scrape of boots on stone shatters the brittle quiet, and I glance back just in time to see the rest of them spilling over the ridge like chaos incarnate—Elias waving a hand like he’s trying to flag down death itself, Caspian already pulling something sharp from his belt, Ambrose looking far too collected despite the drunken brawl last night, and Riven stalking forward like this entire world has personally offended him.

Luna’s at the front, of course. Her mouth set in that determined line, power pulsing beneath her skin like a storm she’s holding back just barely. It rattles the threads of our bond, like she’s trying to smother the urge to tear this place apart brick by brick.

Lucien's eyes flick past me, toward them, toward her, and then over his shoulder to the cathedral doors.

“She’s coming,” he says flatly. No inflection, no heat. His voice sounds like it belongs to someone else entirely. Controlled. Claimed.

Something sharp coils in my gut.

I wipe dirt off my palms, straightening like I hadn’t just spent the last ten minutes crawling through gravel and shame. "Yeah, we figured," I say, and when his gaze cuts back to me, I grin because someone has to. “Could’ve sent a messenger pigeon, Lucien. Save me the cardio.”

But his stare is hollow. Tight at the edges. And he isn’t looking at me—not really. He’s looking past me, toward the inevitable.

Branwen.

It hits me, sudden and sharp, like a punch behind my ribs, how wrong this is. How Lucien stands like a soldier waiting for theaxe, not like the brother we’ve spent years bleeding beside. His bond to her isn’t a thread—it’s a leash.

The others reach us, fanning out behind me. Elias shoves me with a scowl, muttering something about how I never wait for backup. Caspian barely glances at me before his eyes lock on Lucien, sharp and worried. And Riven’s looking at Luna like she’s the only thing keeping him breathing.

“Lucien,” Ambrose says evenly, voice cool as frost. “Where is Orin?”

Lucien’s jaw flexes. A muscle jumps at the corner of his mouth. “Inside. She has him.”

Luna’s voice cuts through the space between us. Soft, lethal. “And you?”

He doesn’t answer. I know that look—the hollow of it, the way it gnaws at the corners of his expression. Branwen’s fingers are sunk deep into his soul, pulling strings. He’s a weapon pointed at us whether he wants to be or not.

I step forward, slow, deliberate. “You gonna let us in, or are we gonna have to fight you first?”

Lucien’s mouth twitches. Almost a smile.

“She said you’d come,” he murmurs. “That you’d throw yourselves at her altar.”

Rage hums under my skin. Not because he’s wrong—but because she’s in his head enough to say it. Luna shifts beside me, and I feel her fury, her grief, her goddamned resolve, thrumming down the bond like static.

“We didn’t come here to die,” I tell him quietly. “We came here to drag you and Orin back home.”

And to kill the bitch who won’t let us.

Lucien’s throat bobs. His eyes flick to Luna one last time before he steps back—just a single step—and the doors behind him begin to creak open.

The invitation is clear.