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“I’ll keep that in mind,” she murmurs.

“I’m very good on altars,” I add helpfully. “Flexible. Moody. Available in several flattering shades of desperation.”

Now she looks at me—just a glance, just a flick of her eyes—and it hits me harder than I’m prepared for. Because this isn’t the same Luna I used to tease in the corridors of the Academy. This isn’t the girl who glared at me when I stole her spell notes. This is someone forged by fire and bound to a fate none of us understand yet—and I still want her.

More now than I ever have. And that’s dangerous. Because the pillars are still glowing.

All of them.

Not one.

Not a chosen path.

A hundred doors, each screaming her name, each one pretending it’s the right one, the final one, the exit. But I know magic. I know lies that wear truth like perfume.

None of them are passive. They’rewatching her back.

Orin finally speaks, his voice low and sure. “They aren’t supposed to light like this. Not all of them.”

“Then what the fuck does it mean?” Lucien asks, stepping in close, jaw tight.

“It means this isn’t a test,” Orin says. “It’s aninvitation.”

Luna lifts her chin.

And I watch the light ripple across her throat like a promise. She’s not choosing one yet. But the room already knows she’s the one who must.

And gods help all of us if she chooses wrong.

Caspian

The hum of magic laced through the stone is too constant, tooaliveto ignore. The pillars don’t speak They burn with implication, each one casting a different kind of light, shadows bent in impossible directions. This room isn’t just watching her. It’swantingher. I know what that feels like.

And it makes my skin itch.

I stand behind her, just out of reach, but every part of me is drawn forward. Not just to the magic. ToLuna.She hasn’t said a word since they lit up. All of them. Every pillar in this cavernous, cathedral-sized tomb of possibility answered her blood, her presence, her power.

She hasn’t touched a single one. And it’s still too much. She looks like fate wrapped in soft skin, like the gods got greedy and made something they couldn’t contain, and now the room has caught on to the same terrible truth the rest of us already knew.

She’s not meant to survive this place. She’s meant toendit. And I can’t let that happen.

Not again.

Not after Branwen.

Not after what I did to stop her.

Luna said she forgave me. She touches me like she means it. Kisses me like she’s never flinched from the things I’ve done. But none of that changes the fact that I walked out of the cathedral where I killed the woman who made me a weapon, and I’m stillnot free. Not really. Branwen’s memory clings to the marrow ofthis place, and every step deeper into the Keep feels like she’s dragging her fingernails down my spine.

This realm is a graveyard for monsters, not saints. A mausoleum of sin binders who were never meant to last, their names forgotten, their power buried beneath stone and guilt andwant. Not one of them is whole. They died young, most of them. Betrayed. Cursed. Chosen. Chewed up by gods or lovers or something worse.

And it terrifies me that Luna will end up here too. If she dies, if this place takes her from us—I don’t know what I’ll become. But I do know one thing. I’d follow her. Here. Into this dead, cursed, hell-ridden,godforsaken realmfull of echoes and ruins and sanctified rot. I wouldn’t even hesitate. Because what the fuck is a life outside of this place if she’s not in it?

None of us talk about that. About what we’d do if it came to that.

But we’re thinking it.

I can see it in Riven’s posture—how close he’s standing, how his hand is never far from hers. In Ambrose’s silence, his calculations. Even Elias, snarky bastard that he is, hasn’t cracked a joke in three minutes, and that’s basically grief for him.