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The dragon’s jaw parts, and I don’t know if it’s a snarl or a laugh, but the sound that follows drips with disdain.“A likely excuse, little fire. Do you think you’re the first to say that?”Its claws shift in the coins, talons longer than swords, the sound of metal scraping metal stretching too long to be natural.“Mortals always lie when they smell gold. And they always believe their lie is new.”

I glance at Silas, whose mouth is still half-open, pupils dilated like he’s either aroused or religiously enlightened. Possibly both. Probably both. He raises a hand like he’s about to say something to help.

“Don’t,” I mutter.

“What? I was just going to say I’m offended he thinks we’recommonthieves,” Silas whispers. “I would never steal gold without a monologue.”

“You moaned when Luna yanked your hair. You’ve lost all moral high ground.”

“She made me feel things, Elias.”

The dragon’s head swivels in our direction—slow, deliberate. Its horns scrape against the ceiling with a low, resonant groan.

Silas shuts up. For once.

“We didn’t come for this,” Riven says, stepping forward now, tone level. Practical. He’s always the reasonable one when shit starts to spiral. “We’re trapped in this realm. We need to leave it. The last pillar—if Branwen left one—would be hidden somewhere like this. Something only the desperate would dare approach.”

“Branwen,”the dragon repeats, dragging the name out like a bruise.“She made promises she could not keep. Offered bargains she had no right to bargain. Her magic still clings to this realm like ash. And you come carrying her scent, her seal, and tell me you are nothere for what is mine?”

Gold stirs around its claws. Coins ripple outward like a tide. The vault groans again, and somewhere behind us, a few sapphires fall like water from a shattered chalice.

“Technically,” I say, because someone has to, “if we were here for the gold, don’t you think we’d berunningwith it already? Or at least stuffing it down our pants?”

Lucien groans softly. “Why are you speaking.”

“I’m addingcontext,” I snap. “He’s making a lot of assumptions. I’m just saying, if we were looters, we’d be dead already, and Silas would have gold coins in all his bodily crevices.”

“Ido,” Silas says helpfully.

“Shut up,” half of us chorus.

Luna’s hand lifts again—not in surrender, not in magic. It’s the kind of movement you make when you’re calming a horse youknow can kill you, but you stillneedit to carry you through the fire.

“We’re only here to find the pillar,” she says again, her voice dipping low now. Something intimate in the way she speaks to him, like the words are just for the dragon, just for the room. “Take your gold. Take your hoard. We don’t need it. We just need to get out.”

For a beat, the vault stills. The gold settles. Even the dragon seems to breathe slower.

Then it tilts its head, eyes narrowing, and murmurs, almost tender—

“Then die empty.”

The floorerupts.Coins explode upward like geysers, a shriek of metal and rune-etched flame slicing across the chamber. The entire vault convulses with raw magic as the dragon lifts from the mound, wings slicing the air in a hurricane of treasure and dust.

A talon crashes down where Luna stood a heartbeat ago—and she’s already moved, magic spiraling around her in a surge of bladed light. Ambrose is already at her back, murmuring something I can’t hear, but whatever it is makes the gold around her hiss like it’s been burned.

Riven throws a dagger that ricochets off the dragon’s flank with a flare of sparks, and Lucien’s charging straight toward its jaw like he wants to carve out a tooth and wear it as a trophy.

Silas throws a handful of coins at the thing and shouts, “I REGRET NOTHING!”

I duck behind a collapsed statue of some long-dead queen, draw two blades from my sleeves, and laugh under my breath.

Gods, I love this family. Even if they get usallkilled. It’s never subtle when everything goes to shit. No, it’s always loud. Always theatrical. Always catastrophic enough to make the ground splitand the ceiling quake and my instincts yellget downwhile my pride muttersbut make it look good.

And right now?

Right now it’s a full-blown chaos opera—screaming gold, blinding light, fire spiraling off the dragon’s wings in molten sheets—and for the first time since Branwen’s little hell-realm tried to chew us up, it feels likeus.

The Sins.