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I follow her into the soft hush of morning, my fingers twitching with restraint, the knife a weight in my pocket and her name a curse behind my teeth. I could ruin her with one word. One command. One whisper of my power.

But I don’t.

I walk beside her instead. Silent. Starving. Irrevocably hers.

She talks like I’ve always been listening. Like we’ve done this before—just the two of us, on a walk through overgrown gardens and shadow-stained stone, like I didn’t try for months to make her hate me. Like I didn’t spend half her life at the Academy acting like her existence was an inconvenience to my power, my position, my goddamn sanity.

And maybe it was. But now I’m the one watching her lips, the curve of them when she smiles as she talks about Mr. Bean—how he climbed into the laundry basket and fell asleep on her uniform skirt, and how Silas claimed the kitten tried to hypnotize him into stealing jerky from the pantry.

“And he did it,” she says, grinning wide, eyes shining. “He actually snuck out in the middle of the night and came back with like eight kinds of jerky and insisted they were ‘gifts for our new overlord.’”

I raise a brow. “Our new overlord?”

She nods solemnly, though the corners of her mouth twitch. “Mr. Bean.”

Of course. Of coursethatridiculous name would belong to the little hellbeast I handed her with the stupidest part of myself still clinging to the gesture like a fool with hope in his teeth.

I should be irritated. Instead, I ask, “And what are his demands, this tyrant feline?”

She bites her lip like she’s trying not to laugh. Fails. “Fresh fish. Clean sheets. Unlimited attention. And the blood of his enemies. Specifically Elias, who tried to dress him in a waistcoat yesterday.”

I snort before I can stop myself. “A waistcoat.”

“Velvet. Maroon. With gold buttons. It had a little tie.” She blinks at me, all mock innocence and dimples I didn’t know she had. “He looked very dashing. Until he vomited on Elias’s pillow.”

I shake my head slowly. “That sounds accurate.”

She hums, clearly pleased she’s amused me. “He’s very discerning.”

“He has taste,” I say, and when she glances at me sideways, her eyes gleaming, I can’t hold back the smallest grin. It’s involuntary, unguarded. A lapse. And yet, I don’t retreat from it.

Instead, I commit.

“So,” I ask, feigning gravity, “what punishment did Silas receive for betraying the pantry?”

She grins, wide and wicked. “Laundry duty. For a month. No powers.”

I let out a low whistle. “Cruel.”

“Justice,” she says with mock-regality, tilting her chin. “Mr. Bean rules with an iron paw.”

She’sglowing. Not with magic. Not with power. Just life. Just the kind of light I thought I’d bled out of the world with every cruel decision I ever made. And she’s choosing to give it to me—here, now, unprompted. It guts me more than it should.

I find myself responding more. Asking the kind of stupid, mundane questions I used to scorn. I ask how the cat sleeps, and she tells me curled between her ankles like a cursed little comma. I ask what else she missed about the Academy, and shestarts talking about the creaky fourth step in the library, and how Elias used to charm it to moan like a ghost just to freak out the first years.

She’slaughing. And I don’t even fucking care if it’s at me or with me or at the world—we’re sharing it. The sound. The moment. The kind of weightless thing I didn’t think I could carry anymore, but here it is, in my hands like something fragile and real.

I should walk away. I should get this out of my system before I fuck it up again. But then she bumps her shoulder into mine—light, careless, like gravity means nothing around her—and I know I won’t. Ican’t. I'm already in too deep.

So I just say, low and stupid and entirely unguarded, “Tell me another one.”

And she does.

Elias

I don’t say anything at first—just press my face harder against the cold glass pane like it’ll somehow decode the impossible image outside. Lucien.Lucien. Walking with Luna like he didn’t spend the last however-many months making her life hell and acting like he’d rather peel off his own skin than be in a ten-foot radius of her heartbeat.

“Is that,” I say slowly, voice low with something close to dread, “a walk?”