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I shrug, unfazed. “Tears are a sign of emotional investment.”

He groans and disappears into his room again, probably to pray for my extinction. I fidget with the chain around my wrist—one of my favorite toys. The links don’t connect in the mortal sense. They hover just far enough apart to buzz with static, laced in an enchantment that eats lies and occasionally tries to bite me. Sentimental.

“Severin’s real problem,” I call after him, “isn’t that we’re monsters. It’s that we don’tpretendwe aren’t.”

Dorian reappears in the doorway, this time with his coat draped over one shoulder. It’s black and blood-red and lined with sigils that scream when wet. “He’s terrified we’ll be ourselves in public.”

“Terrified?” I scoff. “Nah. He just wants the world to think he’srefined.You know, gentleman villain. Suits and smirks and emotional constipation.”

“Which is hilarious, considering—the cathedral.” I grin, spinning the bone ring on my finger, the one that hums when someone nearby wants to kill me. It hasn’t shut up since Layla arrived.

“Do you remember,” I muse, “the look on his face after the fire died down? When the bishop ran into the flames screaming and Severin just... watched?”

Dorian gives me a sideways look. “Watched? He applauded.”

“Right,” I say. “Polite applause. Respectful. Like he was at the opera and not an active war crime.”

“That’s our fearless leader,” Dorian says dryly, slinging his coat on and adjusting the lapel like we’re about to walk into a galaand not a metaphysical battleground of Council oversight and political manipulation.

“He just doesn’t wantherto see us like that,” I say, softer now, still fiddling with the chain. “Layla.”

Dorian glances at me.

I know that look. It meansbe careful.

I ignore it.

“She’ll see it eventually,” I continue. “The truth. The rot. The parts we keep beneath the charm.”

My hunger is showing again. I can feel it in the ache between my ribs, the way my skin hums too hot, stretched thin like it’s remembering what it means to need. I haven’t devoured anything since the last Wyrm breach, and the longer we stay in this house, the worse it gets.

The others can bury their Sins in ritual and routine. I wear mine. I am mine.

“I need out,” I murmur.

Dorian nods once, like he gets it. Because he does. He doesn’t feel hunger the way I do, but he feels emptiness. Different flavor, same rot.

“We’ll be out soon,” he says. “Try not to eat the Council.”

I laugh, sharp and light. “Only if they ask nicely.”

Footsteps echo farther down the corridor. Alistair’s, probably. Maybe Malachi’s. They walk like guilt. Severin walks like ambition. But me?

I walk like appetite.

And tomorrow, when we step through that gate—when we taste mortal air—everything changes. Because Severin wants us to act like redemption is possible. And I want to watch that ideachoke to deathon its own sanctimony.