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Esmara looks at him, at me, at Lucien who hasn't spoken, at Silas who’s practically vibrating with the urge to shout something crude, and then finally back at Luna.

And then, for the first time in a long, long time, she looks… small.

The silence stretches. Dangerous.

I lean forward slightly, voice cool as a blade. "Don’t make us ask again."

Esmara tilts her head, her smile curdling like spoiled honey. "You’ll regret this."

And then she turns and walks away. But she’s not done. We all know it.

Luna watches her leave, her spine straight, her jaw set. And when she finally glances back at us, her eyes snag on me—and for a second, she looks like she’s waiting for me to contradict her. To tell her she doesn’t get to claim us like that.

Instead, I smile slow, sharp, and tell her the truth.

"You’re dangerous when you’re possessive, darling."

She doesn’t blink. "Good."

The corner of my mouth curves higher. I think I’m starting to like her.

Silas lets out an exaggerated groan, loud enough to make a few of the villagers who’ve been peering too long from their windows wince and dart back inside. He drops his hands onto his knees like the weight of existence itself is too much to bear.

"Well," he huffs, wiping imaginary sweat from his brow, "that was exhausting. I haven’t had to pretend to be madly in love with Elias in, what, two centuries? And last time, at least I got dinner out of it."

Elias, standing beside him, doesn’t miss a beat. "You wish you could pull me, Veyd," he drawls, voice like smoke curling low in his throat. "You couldn’t handle me."

Silas flips him off lazily. "That’s exactly what you said the last time you let me tie you up."

I snort under my breath, because I can see where this is going already—the unraveling chaos that always follows when the two of them decide to perform for each other, for us, like they haven’t been ripping each other’s clothes off and falling into bed for months now.

Riven mutters something about idiots under his breath, but he’s smirking too.

Lucien rolls his eyes so hard I half expect them to fall out of his skull. "Can we not?"

Orin is the one who finally says what we’re all thinking. "The real issue isn’t their dramatics," he muses, folding his arms, his voice even but carrying weight. "It’s that she didn’t leave when we asked the first time."

"Yeah," Silas says, pointing a finger at Orin like he’s awarding him a prize. "That’s because Esmara’s idea of love is cutting our hair in the middle of the night and making dolls out of it."

I arch a brow at that, because I’d almost forgotten about that particular bit of lunacy. "And that little shrine she made in the woods," I murmur, voice sharp as a blade slipping between ribs. "The one with everyone’s teeth."

Lucien lets out a grim laugh, shaking his head. "Don’t forget the letters," he says dryly. "The ones she used to leave under our pillows—each one written in a different language."

"She’s multilingual, she’s ambitious, she’s deranged," Silas adds, counting off on his fingers. "And Elias is apparently the love of her undead life."

Elias drags a hand down his face like he’s regretting every choice that’s brought him here. "She used to leave dead birds on my windowsill. Every morning. For six months."

"That's courtship," Silas says, completely straight-faced. "You should’ve married her."

Luna, standing beside me, shakes her head, lips twitching like she’s fighting a smile. But I can feel her gaze on me, can feel the ripple of something sharp and satisfied crackling through her bond to all of us.

Because she’s not laughing about the dead birds or the teeth. She’s laughing because she said we belonged to her—and none of us argued. I glance at her out of the corner of my eye, the weight of her words from earlier pressing heavy against the edges of my ribcage.

And I think I might not mind being possessed.

Luna

I should be more upset than I am. A rational person would be—any normal girl might scream, or demand to know why she’s standing in the wreckage of two hundred ghosts of the Sins’ past, each one crazier than the last, each one a ticking bomb in this cursed, crumbling realm.