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And maybe to punish us if we don’t.

The third tried to trick me. It almost had it—had the shape, the weight, the whip ends curling like they were alive—but the thorns were wrong. Too symmetrical. Too polished. Lust isn’t clean. It’s chaotic. It claws. It bleeds. Ittakes.

Branwen designed these to fail us, that much is clear now. Not just to confuse us, but to disorient us. To make us question what we remember, what was ever real. Because if we can’t recognize ourselves in our own crests, what the fuck hope do we have of finding a way out?

I move to the next one, and as I’m crouching, tracing the edge of a sigil that looks like it might belong to Riven—razor-sharp, carved in red-black stone with fury etched between every line—I hear Silas behind me.

Too close.

Too pleased.

Too Silas.

“I have an idea,” he says, his voice too loud in the kind of place built for whispers. “If we’re checking for crest accuracy, I feel like Luna should take her shirt off.”

Dead silence.

And then Elias, groaning like he’s aged five years in one second, mutters, “Ohmy gods, Silas.”

“No, I’m being helpful,” Silas insists, raising both hands like that makes anything better. “We all know she’s got the full crest set tattooed on her chest. Centered. Symmetrical. Perfect.” He turns toward her like he's making the world’s most logical offer. “Let me look. Just a quick check. For accuracy.”

Luna doesn’t even blink.

But Riven’s jaw flexes.

Lucien exhales like he’s considering murder as a viable solution to every problem.

“I know what my crest looks like,” Silas continues, undeterred, “but the Hollow likes to fuck with memory, right? I might bewrong. I could be misremembering a stroke. A loop. A line. I’m just saying—if you show me the version inked into your skin, Luna, we cancross-reference.”

“You want me to take off my shirt in front of the pillar of death so you cancross-referencemy tits?” Luna asks, tone flat but dangerous.

Silas grins like she just offered him a crown and a sword.

“I mean, when you say it like that—yes. Exactly. For science.”

Elias makes a strangled noise and turns around, facing the wrong direction, muttering under his breath, “I swear to fuck, I will slap him with my boot if I hear one more word.”

“You’d have to catch me first,” Silas sings.

“You’re not wrong about the magic,” Orin interjects, calm as ever, like he’s teaching a philosophy class and not intervening in the prelude to a very specific homicide. “The tattoos are stabilizers. Fixed points. They can’t be altered by this realm. IfLuna’s marks are unchanged, they might be the only versions untouched by Branwen’s distortions.”

I feel Luna exhale next to me, the sound more resigned than angry, and my chest pulls tight. She doesn’t like this attention—not this kind, not now. Not when everything about this place is already built to pull her apart. But she also knows the truth.

Orin isn’t wrong. Silas ismostlywrong. But not entirely.

“Fine,” Luna says at last, and her voice cuts through the space like the blade we’ve all been dancing around. “But only the top. You getonelook. And if you say something stupid, I’m binding your mouth shut with your own magic.”

Silas’s grin widens, and I catch the shimmer of arousal in his magic, the way it licks at the edge of mine, chaotic and irreverent, wild as ever.

“I’d thank you for it,” he purrs, “but I’m trying to be good.”

He’s not. He never is. But Luna still lifts her shirt. Not all the way. Just high enough for the intricate network of tattoos to be seen—each sigil inked in ink that pulses faintly against her skin. Lust. Wrath. Greed. Sloth. Envy.

Silas steps close. Too close. He leans in like a man about to drink from a forbidden altar. And then, for once, he shuts up. Because the crests areperfect. They pulse in time with her heart, steady and defiant. Pure. Untouched. The real versions of us, etched into the one person none of us can seem to survive without.

“They’re right,” Silas says quietly. “All of them.”

He looks up at her—less cocky now, more reverent. That rare moment of clarity sliding through the madness.