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She looks atme.

And in that moment, I know—I will never own her.

She will ownall of us.

Branwen’s scream splits the cathedral like a blade, ragged and raw, dragging nails down the inside of my skull. She stumbles forward, staggered, her body twisted beneath the weight of Luna’s strike, the splintered pillar crumbling behind her like the bones of a dying god.

And then—Caspian. The man who was always Lust—the tease, the problem, the one who laughed while he unraveled us all—there’s nothing playful left in him now. He’s feral and carved from grief, eyes wild, the shadows of what she did to him still stitched into every line of his face.

He moves like smoke and sin, slipping behind her, his magic crawling across the stone like vines laced with venom. Lust, when wielded properly, doesn’t seduce—itdevours.

Branwen doesn’t even see him until he’s already there, until the dagger—no, not a dagger, something ancient, something dark, laced with the same magic she used to bind him—is buried in her chest.

He doesn’t stab her like a man killing a woman.

He drives it in like a god rewriting fate.

The dagger doesn’t slice—it sinks, the hilt pulsing with red-gold light, veins of magic cracking out from the wound, spreading across her skin like molten lightning. Her scream turns to something deeper, something not human, not even Sin Binder anymore—just void, just ruin.

Caspian leans in, voice like silk dipped in poison. “You don’t get to keep me.”

And then he twists.

The magic explodes outward, a shockwave that rattles through the marrow of the cathedral, rattling stone and soul alike. Branwen’s body convulses, her power fracturing into nothing, a thousand shards of what she thought she could control, and Caspian doesn’t flinch.

He watches her fall. There’s no satisfaction in his eyes—no peace. Just the echo of what she took from him and the brutal, irreversible fact that she can’t take anything else.

The pillar behind her collapses with a groan that sounds like the end of the world. And Caspian turns away before her body even hits the floor, like she’s already ash to him. Like she never mattered.

Branwen doesn’t scream again. The sound she makes isn’t even human. It’s the sound of something unraveling—of centuries collapsing in on themselves, a void being sucked dry from the inside out.

The second Caspian’s dagger drives home, the cathedral shifts, the pulse of magic inside its bones fracturing like a cracked mirror. The tether binding her to this realm—this entire grotesque kingdom she’s ruled over like a rotting queen—starts to decay in real time.

I watch her.

Because I want to see. I want to watch her lose every illusion of beauty, every manipulative thread she wove around all of us, pulled apart one by one like string from a corpse.

Her skin peels first. A thousand cracks spidering up her throat, across her cheeks. That too-perfect face crumbling under the weight of what she stole from us—our lives, our power, our choices. Her hair, once silk, frays like brittle straw, color draining until it's gray, then white, then ash.

And the years hit her all at once.

Wrinkles slash across her skin like claw marks, her bones caving beneath the weight of her own greed. It’s not slow. It’s not dignified. It’s grotesque. It’s deserved.

She gasps, wheezing for breath that won’t come, and her eyes—the last thing she has left—flick to me.

Because she knows. She knows I’ve been waiting for this moment since she touched Caspian. Since she dared to bind Lucien. Since she tried to make me hers.

I step forward, slow and deliberate, each footfall echoing through the hollowed-out cathedral like a verdict.

I don’t speak. There’s nothing left to say. I raise my hand, fingers curling lazily, like I’m plucking a coin from the air.

And with the lightest flick of my fingers—I blow.

The ash that used to be Branwen scatters on the breath of my magic, carried into the void like dust on a dying wind. The last thing she’ll ever feel is me destroying her, and she can’t stop it. The cathedral groans beneath us, like it’s breathing for the first time in centuries, and the weight of her hold snaps off the world like a shackle finally broken.

She’s gone.

And I don’t even spare the pile of ash another look.