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I glance over at Silas, who’s busy flicking a pebble toward the pond with his fingertip like it’s some cosmic ritual. “Do you think she’ll be able to fix him?”

He doesn’t answer right away. And when he does, it’s quiet. Real. “I don’t think she should have to.”

“Silas!” Luna’s voice cracks through the air like lightning—sharp, commanding, the kind of sound that makes even me sit up straighter. She’s storming across the deck barefoot, hair wild, one of my shirts slipping off her shoulder like sin made silk. She looks like she’s ready to end him. Or kiss him. Knowing her, maybe both.

“I didn’t fall in!” Silas sputters as he resurfaces, eyes wide, curls dripping. “Ambrosepushedme. I wasdefending my seat.”

He points dramatically to the spot beside me—currently occupied by Ambrose, who lounges like a villain god with a glass of something expensive in hand, his expression carved from stone.

“I nudged him,” Ambrose says without even looking up. “With purpose.”

“And that purpose was what?” Luna asks, hands on her hips.

“Silence,” Ambrose replies, as if that answers everything. For him, it probably does.

“You’re all insane,” I mutter, and I mean it in the most affectionate, exhausted way possible.

Silas pulls himself up onto the dock with a series of wet squelches and noises no grown man should ever make in public.He flops beside Luna, who glares at him, then at Ambrose, and then finally—inevitably—at me.

“You look like you haven’t slept since the last Sin Binder war,” Silas says, poking at my arm with one water-wrinkled finger.

“And you smell like pond sex,” I shoot back.

Luna doesn’t laugh. Not really. But her mouth twitches at the corners as she drops to sit between us. Her hand moves like instinct, threading into Silas’s wet curls despite the muck. He leans into her like he belongs there. Maybe he does.

Ambrose watches from his perch, his gaze unreadable, fingers wrapped around the stem of his glass like it holds more than liquor. He says nothing. But I see it—the flicker of something behind his eyes. Want, maybe. Or warning. And then silence falls again. The heavy, waiting kind. The kind that doesn’t belong in a house full of gods.

Caspian’s still crying in his room. Riven’s pacing like violence given form. Lucien and Orin are still Branwen’s shadows. And Luna—our fucking anchor—is still dying a little more each day the bond with Caspian stays unfinished. But in this one sliver of breath, with Silas dripping and smug, Luna warm beside me, and Ambrose looking like he’s already five moves ahead—we’re together.

Caspian

They rotate like shifts in a prison watch, like I’m a loaded weapon none of them trust not to go off again. I don’t blame them. If I were on the outside looking in, I’d have chained me to the bed and burned the key. Instead, they sit. Watch. Pretend I’m still one of them while their eyes stay sharp with the memory of me stabbing her.

Luna.

Fuck.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like that. Not withher.

Silas is the one on duty now. Feet up on my bed like it’s a chaise and this is some kind of vacation, toes bare and infuriatingly close to my ribs. He’s humming something off-key, deliberately annoying, deliberately casual. Except his eyes flick to me every few seconds, like he’s waiting for me to crack open and bleed something worse than guilt.

He pinches me with his toes.

I swat at his ankle with a snarl, too exhausted to put any real malice behind it. “You’re disgusting.”

He grins like I complimented him. “But I’myourdisgusting,” he says, sing-song, and stretches, bones popping like he’s beencarrying weight even his chaos can’t deflect. Then he adds, quieter, “Still better than crying into your pillow all night.”

“I wasn’t crying.”

“Bro,Icried from hearing you cry. That’s how bad it was.”

I fall back onto the mattress with a groan, arm draped over my face like I can hide from it all—the shame, the rot Branwen left behind in my blood, the bond half-forged with Luna that pulses like it’s alive and starving.

“They’re all afraid I’ll touch her again,” I say, voice cracked and rough. “Not just stab her.Touchher. You know what has to happen next.”

Silas doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’t joke either. That’s how I know he understands.

“It’s not like she doesn’t want it,” he says finally, flipping onto his stomach like we’re having a sleepover instead of a breakdown. “You’ve seen how she looks at you. How she already starts responding to the bond. She’s yours—halfway.”