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Elias rolls his eyes. “You’d fumble through divine conception like it’s foreplay and a punchline.”

“Foreplay is a punchline, Elias.”

“You’rea punchline.”

“Say that when we have twins, asshole—”

“Gentlemen,” Orin says, with a small smile, voice like velvet over ancient steel, “you’re in the presence of something sacred. Do try to behave like you belong here.”

Ambrose brushes hair back from my cheek. His expression is quieter. Hungrier. “You’ll have my son,” he says, voice raw. “Even after I nearly broke you. You’llstillcarry me inside you.”

Caspian’s hand trembles slightly when it finds mine. “You’ll make me a father,” he murmurs, like he’s just now realizing he’s worthy of that.

And Lucien—

Lucien hasn’t said a word. But I feel it. That familiar pull. ThatDominion. My skin tingles, my pulse kicks up. Because he doesn’t need to speak. Not when his power is already curling around my body, wrapping itself over my spine, whispering promises of what he’ll take from me—last—when I’ve given all the others what they were promised. He’s going toruinme for all of them. And I’llthankhim for it.

But first—Riven. And I look up at him, and I nod.

Because this is the beginning of a different war.

Not to survive.

But tocreate.

And I’ve never been more ready to beundone.

Lucien’s voice cuts through the reverent silence like a blade across velvet.

"And the others?" he asks, quiet but deliberate, eyes on Blackwell with the weight of someone who doesn’t ask things he doesn’t already suspect the answer to. "The sub-sins. Were they yours too?"

The air tightens—not in that overused way stories love to describe, not like a clichéd hush. This is deeper. Colder. Like the gravity in the room recognizes the question for what it is: a challenge.

Blackwell doesn’t bristle. He smiles. It’s the kind of smile gods wear when they’re about to admit something blasphemous and holy in the same breath.

“The sub-sins were… born of necessity,” Blackwell says, voice slow, like he’s picking his words out of ash. “They were echoes. Aftershocks. Created not by me but by the void left when your kind tried toreplacewhat I made.”

Lucien’s jaw flexes. “They’re fragments.”

“Attempts,” Blackwell corrects gently. “Failed ones.”

I feel Riven shift behind me. Silas snorts. Elias mutters something under his breath about ‘budget sins,’ and Caspian, quiet and still as always, watches Blackwell like he’s weighing the entire creation of our kind in his palm.

Blackwell lifts his hand, palm open, and between his fingers, light fractures into seven points of color—crimson for Wrath, gold for Greed, deep violet for Lust, and so on until all of them hover there, humming like stars reborn.

“These,” he says, “were never meant to be replicated. But mortals never stop trying to tame what was meant to consume them.”

“And our children?” I ask, voice low. “Are they echoes too?”

His gaze flicks to me, sharp anddeep. “No. They are prophecy. Not what was made to fill a void—but whatwas always meantto be born.”

Lucien's eyes stay locked on his, unreadable. “And Layla?” he asks. “What happens to her?”

A ripple moves through me at the mention of her name. My sister. Bound to the sub-sins. Still walking a blade’s edge.

Blackwell exhales like he’s been waiting for someone to ask that.

“She walks the harder road,” he says simply. “Yours was to bind. Hers will be tounmake. But if she succeeds…” He trails off, then looks at me. “She will not just earn her freedom. She may earn a new dominion altogether.”