Page 5

She’s still watching.
She always is.
And if Caspian gives in again—if she makes him beg, and he breaks beneath her touch—he won’t come back the same.
That should concern me.
Instead, I wonder what she’d do if Luna was the one who came for him.
I wonder if Branwen would finally bleed.
The stone whispers her voice again—not loud, not forceful. Just...insistent. Like a thought you can’t shake. Like memory dressed in silk and pretending it isn’t poison. It curls beneath my skin, wraps around the backs of my teeth, and dares me to answer.
Ambrose,she purrs, but the sound doesn’t come from the door this time. It comes from everywhere. From the slab I sleep on, from the veins in the walls, from the water in the basin that now ripples without movement.
She’s trying to seduce me. Again.
As if I’d ever choose her.
The sheer arrogance of it almost makes me laugh.
She’s fucking delusional if she thinks I’ve forgotten who she is. What she is.
Caspian may have bent. Lucien might have wavered. Even Riven, for all his blood-drenched loyalty, bore her influence once. Orin too, in his ancient silence—he served her once, even if he never speaks of it now.
But not me.
Never me.
I saw her clearly the first time she smiled like a saint and offered ruin like it was salvation. Branwen was death from the beginning—painted in allure, perfumed with submission, but it was always rot underneath. The kind that promises pleasure just long enough to hollow you out and wear your skin like proof.
And yet, she still wants what she can’t have.
“You’ve always resisted me,”her voice sighs through the cracks in the floor.“Why, Ambrose? You of all creatures were made for greed. Don’t you want to know what I taste like now?”
The walls pulse once. Just once. Like breath. And it’s revolting.
I push off the slab and pace slowly to the basin. The water glows faintly gold now—her color. Lust’s color. She’s steeping this place in it, steeping me in it, as if I might be corrupted the way Caspian was. As if I haven’t spent centuries cataloguing every lie she ever told in that sweet, deadly tone.
“You mistake resistance for disinterest,” I murmur, low and calm. “I want plenty of things, Branwen. But I don’t want anything that wants me for what it can feed on.”
Her laughter answers me, soft and decadent.“Still pretending you’re not like the others. But you are. Even worse, perhaps. You’d rather starve than kneel.”
I glance at the wall and catch my own reflection in the water. Only it’s not mine—not exactly. My eyes are too bright. My mouth too cruel.
She’s trying to rewrite me.
She can’t.
Because I am Greed. And I do notkneel. I trade. I take. I own. And Branwen is a contract I never signed because I don’t accept terms I can’t renegotiate.
“You sent Caspian,” I say quietly, deliberately. “To rattle me. To remind me what happens to those who give in.”
There’s no answer. Not this time. Just the steady pulse of the stone beneath my feet. Like a heartbeat, but slower. Hungrier.
She’s watching. Listening. And if she’s silent, it means she’s pivoting. Already shifting her strategy. That’s what she does—she adapts to whatever you want most, and then offers it in just the right shape to get you to bite.
Too bad.