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Instead, they gave her to us.
A mortal vessel meant to tame immortals. A girl who shouldn't matter this much, and does anyway. And I can feel it in the way Riven watches her from the shadows. In how Elias paces like a caged animal when she looks even slightly off. In the way Lucienbites his words to keep them from spilling into confessions he’ll never allow himself to speak.
I glance at her. She catches me.
Her brows rise like she’s expecting something—maybe another joke, maybe another ridiculous line that will earn me an eye roll and nothing else. Maybe she knows what I’d do to keep that look on her face.
I smirk.
Because I’m Envy. That’s what they forget.
I want everything I can’t have. I crave the heat that isn’t mine, the touch she gives to others, the smile that lingers longer when it’s not for me. I want Elias’s ease, Riven’s certainty, Orin’s calm. But most of all, I want her—every part she guards, every sharp thing she hides beneath that soft skin.
She already bound me. I should be satisfied.
I’m not.
Because the more I have, the more I want. Her voice. Her hands. The way she says my name like it’s both a warning and a prayer.
“Stop brooding, you look constipated,” Elias mutters beside me, elbowing my ribs like he’s trying to jolt me out of something.
“She’s not asleep,” I say, gaze fixed on her.
“So? You gonna write her a sonnet now, Romeo?”
“I’m working on a whole tragic ballad. The part where I die heroically gets rewritten every time she looks at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I matter.”
Elias doesn’t say anything to that. Because he feels it too. The weight of what she is. What she’s becoming. What we’re becoming because of her.
And none of us were made for that.
She shifts again, pulling her knees up, those watchful eyes still sharp, still waiting.
I wonder if she knows—if she can feel it. That even now, we’re circling closer.
And if we ever lose her... it won’t just shatter us.
It’ll make monsters out of what’s left.
“What sonnet you like written about you,” I say, stretching my legs out in front of the fire, arms folded dramatically behind my head like I’m about to launch into something Shakespearean. “Something tragic and swoony? Or dirty and wildly inappropriate? Either way, I’m ready. I’m like the bard of sin over here.”
She doesn’t even blink, just rolls her eyes with the kind of exhausted amusement that makes me want to chase every flicker of it. “It’s not a sonnet anymore, Silas,” she says dryly. “It’s a song. Keep up with the century.”
“Oh,” I say, cocking my head, “so you want me to serenade you now? Because I could—though I must warn you, my voice has been known to make angels cry.”
Elias groans from behind her. “That’s not because of your voice. That’s because you sangWAPto the Headmaster’s pet gargoyle.”
“It was relevant!” I protest. “Topical. The gargoyle needed it.”
Luna’s lips twitch, just the barest hint of a smile, and gods, it wrecks me. That smile. That quiet permission to be exactly who I am when I’m around her. I’ve been a lot of things in my existence—envy, chaos, complication—but with her, I’m just Silas. The Sin she didn’t run from. The one she reached for first. And every moment I spend near her, I want to be the reason she smiles again.
She leans forward, the firelight catching on the strands of her hair, casting molten gold over her skin. “If you ever write me a song, Silas,” she says, eyes cutting to me like a dare, “you better make sure it doesn’t rhyme with vagina.”
Elias chokes. “You underestimate his commitment.”