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Riven is fire and stone beside me, already throwing two of them back with a wave of his hand. Silas laughs like this is a performance designed for him alone—he’s on top of a boulder hurling insults and enchanted daggers in equal measure, twirling one between his fingers like a conductor.

Caspian’s eyes have gone black. Deep magic—bone magic. His shadows ripple out across the wet grass like fingers made of grief and promise. Even Ambrose is laughing, that smug bastard—he lures one of the dead in close and murmurs something into her ear that makes her stop cold, then collapse.

I let go of Maeve’s throat and step over her collapsing body like she’s nothing but smoke and old memories. Because she is.

My hand lifts, fingers curling as I reach into the earth beneath us—deep, where gluttony lives not in hunger for food or power, butfor more. More pain. More pleasure. MoreLuna.

Roots answer me. Earth groans. A low pulse of hunger wakes under the soil, magic older than even I am, and it is mine. I draw it up like breath through bone and let it spiral up my arms, veins glowing gold under skin that was carved from night.

The first of them leaps at Luna.

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t flinch.

Because she knows we arealreadybetween her and death.

I catch the dead woman mid-air and twist—not her body, but the magic animating it. I crack it like glass, and she disintegrates into dust that shimmers before it hits the ground. A moment of beauty. Then it's gone.

Another comes.

And another.

And they will keep coming. Because this is what they are now. Desperate. Starving.

And I? I do not starve.

Iconsume.

There’s an artistry in war that no one speaks of—only the victors understand it. It’s not about rage. Not for me. Rage is cheap. Reactionary. No, Ichooseevery strike I make. Icraftit. I study it the way I studied ancient tongue, sacred geometry, the mathematics of seduction. I kill the way I love—slowly, deliberately, with reverence.

And they keep coming back.

The bodies we drop don’t stay down. These aren’t women anymore. They’re memories twisted to rot, animated by something spiteful and old. Hunger drives them, not conviction. And it shows in the way they move—jerky, too fast, reaching for Luna like she’s their salvation or their ruin.

Perhaps both.

I step in front of the third that lunges toward her, hand out, palm raised not in warning but in judgment. I don’t strike first—Istripher magic out of the air around her, draw it through theley lines that lace my body like molten thread. She gasps, claws at her throat as her spell dies on her tongue.

"You were beautiful once," I murmur as I twist her magic into a thin blade between my fingers, spectral and bright. "But you’ve let your grief fester into envy. And envy has no elegance."

I drive the blade through her sternum and feel her unmake around the edge of it, her form dissolving like silk submerged in acid. No scream this time. Only the sound of defeat.

Behind me, I can feel Luna’s breath hitch—and not from fear. No, she’s watching us. Watchingme. And I want her to see this. I want her to know exactly what I’m willing to become for her.

Caspian is to my left, silent and savage, shadows pouring from his sleeves like smoke drawn from the bones of saints. He doesn’t talk in fights. He lets his grief do the speaking. When one of the women breaks past the outer circle, Caspian slams her with a whip of shadow, dragging her across the stones and through the coals of the dead fire. She doesn’t burn. But she breaks. And that will do.

Riven roars, stone cracking beneath his feet. The groundheaves, roots and stone erupting to wall off a dozen of the attackers. But they claw through it. They bleed magic, and it coats the air in something putrid and desperate. My nostrils flare. It smells like failure.

“Still standing?” Silas calls across the madness, blood down his cheek, a giddy gleam in his eye as he spins two of his curved blades like a circus act gone murderous. “That’s cute. Anyone want to guess which one used to sleep with me?”

“That’s not narrowing it down,” Elias growls beside him, ducking low and sending a blade slicing into the thigh of a woman lunging for Luna. “Could beallof them.”

She almost gets through. Almost. But I’m there before Luna has to lift a hand. I slam the woman into the mud, crushing herspine beneath my boot. And this time, I don’t drain her. I don’t need to. My hunger shifts—narrows. She’s not worth it.

Only Luna is.

The circle tightens. Each of us moving like parts of a machine wound around her, muscle and magic designed to kill anything that comes close. And yet—

They rise.