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Her expression fractures then—just a breath, but I catch it. The crack. The exhaustion.

“I will have what’s mine,” she says, voice razor-thin.

“You already lost it,” I say quietly, and when I glance back, I know the others are there. I can feel Luna’s gaze on me, steady, anchoring. I say it for her. “You lost me.”

Branwen’s mouth opens, her retort poised— And the cathedral groans beneath us, the magic fraying like it’s been waiting for someone to finally say the words.

Branwen stands.

Or at least she tries to. It isn’t graceful, not like she used to be, when she’d sweep into a room and make everyone in it kneel without ever saying a word. Now she rises like something brittle, something that’s been hollowed out and sewn back together wrong. The hem of her dress scrapes the stone beneath her, black fabric frayed at the edges like she’s been burning from the inside out.

Her smile is a ghost of itself, painted too wide across her face.

I drag my gaze away from her and glance at Orin.

He’s still as stone, but his focus is razor-sharp, like every muscle in him is wound too tight. Those veins—those damn vein tattoos of his—are lit up under his skin, pulsing like something alive, threading black-blue through his throat, his jaw, down to his fingertips. His eyes are fixed on Branwen, not in hatred, not in hunger, but in something darker.

It doesn’t look right. It looks like something eating him from the inside.

But Branwen breathes in, drawing the room back to her like she’s the axis of this crumbling world, and when she speaks, it’s all sugar and sharpened knives.

“You could’ve had it all,” she croons, gaze flicking between me, Ambrose, Riven, all of us. “You could’ve knelt at my feet, and this wouldn’t have ended here.”

Silas’s slow clap is a thunder crack in the cathedral, echoing off the cracked stone and hollow arches. He steps forward, grin sharp and vicious.

“We really don’t need to hear your backstory, Branwen,” he drawls, dragging out her name like it’s a curse and a joke at once. “No one cares about your villain monologue.”

She turns her eyes to him like she might set him on fire. But even that spark isn’t what it once was. It’s dulled. Dying. I drag my eyes back to Orin, pulse pounding louder now, because his veins aren’t fading. They’re flaring brighter.

Branwen’s fingers curl around the arm of her throne, knuckles whitening, like she can’t quite bear the weight of herself. “You think this is a performance?” she says quietly, her voice sliding sharp as broken glass. “You think I’m standing here for theatrics?”

Silas laughs, broad and loud, like he’s daring her to do something about it. “Oh, sweetheart,” he says. “I think you’re standing here because we walked into your cathedral, and you don’t know how to stop bleeding.”

Ambrose folds his arms beside me, cold as stone. “This isn’t a performance,” he murmurs, voice like ice sliding under skin. “It’s a death march.”

Branwen's smile breaks then, shattering at the edges. But her eyes dart back to Orin—and that’s when something cold curls deep in my stomach.

Orin’s feeding her something. Draining, bleeding, siphoning whatever piece of himself she’s still leeching off of. His jaw is locked. His gaze hollow.

But I don’t understand what. I drag a breath into my lungs and meet Branwen’s gaze again, her monologue cracking at the seams.

“You’re weaker,” I say softly, stepping forward, voice pitched low enough to slice between us. “But not because of us.”

Branwen’s smile is a fissure—spreading, splitting, something hungry behind it. And when her gaze hooks back to me, it isn’t soft. It’s surgical.

"You always were the weakest link, Caspian," she murmurs, like it’s a secret meant just for me, though the entire cathedral could hear it. "You wore it well, though. All that charm. That pretty mouth." She tilts her head, voice dipping to something softer, almost pitying. "But you fold every time."

I want to sneer at her, spit something vicious, something cutting—but my throat’s locked. Because it’s true. I folded once. Over and over. And she knows how to dig the knife right there, beneath the rib.

Riven cuts through it.

His voice is low, sharp, slicing clean through the rot she’s spinning.

"Enough."

It isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. There’s something in that word, the way it snaps through the cathedral like iron slamming shut.

Branwen shifts her gaze to him like it’s a weight, but there’s a flicker in her eyes. Recognition. That look she always gave Riven, like she was the storm that wanted to devour him and hated that he’d never flinch when she struck.