Page 186

My limbs shake when I push up onto my elbows, and gods, everything inside me feels wrong, off-kilter. The poison is still clinging to me, thick and heavy, like oil coating my veins. It's not fatal. I made sure of that—I know the limits of how much my body can hold before it folds in on itself—but it's enough to make me weak. Enough to drag me under if I let it.

I can feel it threading through my system, and I know what I have to do.

I close my eyes, steadying my breath, and start pulling. Siphoning the black rot out of my bloodstream the same way I used to leech sickness from mortals long before any of them learned to fear me. I draw the poison into the hollow of my palm, spinning it tight until it feels like a blade pressed against my skin.

I draw it out slower now—deliberate. Because there’s more at stake than my body buckling beneath this weight. I have to make sure I can stand when this is over. That when we walk out of this cathedral, I’ll be the one steady enough to carry the others if I have to.

The last coil of poison seeps out of my fingers like ink in water, and I let it fade into the stone floor beneath us.

Only then do I glance at her again.

Her eyes are wide, too knowing, too soft.

I can’t let her see me like this.

So I smirk, lazy and hollow, like I haven’t just gutted myself. “Don’t look at me like that, Little Light. You’re going to make me think you care.”

Her brow pulls tight, her mouth parting like she’s going to say something that’ll split me open.

But footsteps echo in the distance.

The others. The aftermath.

“We should go,” I say, voice quieter now, roughened around the edges. “It’s done.” But nothing about this feels done. Not when her magic still lingers on my skin like a brand.

Lucien rolls his neck like he’s shaking off a long nap instead of weeks chained under a witch’s leash. His eyes—clearer now, haunted but sharp—flick over all of us like he’s counting pieces on a board. Then he says it. Like it’s simple. Like the weight of it isn’t gouging all of us from the inside out.

“It’s time to go home.”

The words hang there, heavy, hollow, like something cracked in the marrow of this cathedral.

I scrub a hand over my face, swallowing the iron taste still coating the back of my tongue. There’s nothing left of Branwen but ash, and yet somehow the shadows in this place feel heavier without her.

Lucien acts like slipping back into leadership is effortless, like he didn’t just have his will stripped and hollowed out for weeks. But that’s always been his way—wrap grief in authority and call it duty. He looks at us like we’re soldiers who followed him here, not the ones who dragged him back.

And I know why. It’s easier to lead than to feel.

Caspian’s still hovering near the ashes, the hilt of his dagger twitching in his hand like he’s fighting the urge to cut the memory of her out of his skin.

Elias and Silas are bickering over something in the background, their voices sharp and grating, which means they’re shaken but still breathing.

But Lucien’s words settle wrong in my gut.

Because he’s right.

We need to go home.

But there’s nowhere to go.

“The pillar’s gone,” I say quietly, voice rasped from everything I’ve drained tonight. “Luna shattered it.”

Lucien’s gaze cuts to me, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Then we find another way.”

I huff a bitter laugh, scraping my hands through my hair. “There isn’t another way.”

The cathedral groans around us, stone cracked and bleeding with old magic, echoes of something darker still crawling through the rafters like something unfinished. This place was built on blood and bargain—it doesn’t let people walk out clean.

Luna’s hammer strike was more than destruction; it was severance. The portal wasn’t just a door—it was the anchor that let this place bleed into our world. And she crushed it beneath her feet without looking back.