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I turn before I unravel. Before I forget the plan. Before I let my selfishness anchor me to this place I know we must abandon. Lucien is pacing near the treeline, his jaw clenched, his whole body taut with that dangerous strain he only lets show when he thinks he’s the last man standing.
As I move toward him, I feel her eyes on my back. Burning. Branding. And I wonder if she knows that if she had asked me to stay—just once—I would’ve.
Lucien doesn’t glance back when he says it. “Stop looking so fucking defeated.”
He’s half a step ahead of me, boots cutting through brush with the kind of precision only fury can shape. Controlled. Calculated. But underneath it, I hear the shudder. He’s breaking apart and doesn’t even realize it yet. Or maybe he does. Maybe that’s whatmakes him speak like that—hard, cold, careless. As if none of this is bleeding us dry.
I keep my voice even. Measured. “You don’t understand what this costs me.”
That stops him.
Lucien turns, face a razor’s edge of skepticism, but I don’t wait for him to speak. I don’t give him a chance to twist this into strategy, to reduce it to risk and reward. I give him the truth—raw and impossible and mine.
“I love her.”
The words don’t echo. They just…settle. Like dust on an untouched altar.
Lucien’s jaw flexes. Something flickers in his gaze—disbelief, maybe. Or worse, recognition. Because heknows. Knows what it means when a creature like me lets that kind of attachment root itself. Knows what I’d be willing to do, and more dangerously, what Iwon’t.
“I’ve loved her,” I say, softer now, “since the first time I saw her wield mercy like a weapon and refused to kneel.”
He scoffs under his breath, but doesn’t interrupt.
“She smiled like she knew every ruin that lived inside me—and wasn’t afraid of them. And I—I wanted to keep her from ever knowing what I was.”
Lucien’s gaze narrows. “So you hid it. You let her fall for the others.”
“No,” I say, calmly. “I let her choose.”
He hates that answer. I see it in the way he turns away, jaw tight again, hands curling at his sides. Because Lucien doesn’t believe in choice when it comes to power. He believes in command. In dominion. In the inevitability of force.
And that’s where we differ.
“She doesn’t need more men taking from her,” I say, “or marking her like property. She needs people who will burn theworld before they let her become something less than herself. Even if she doesn’t pick me. Even if she never looks at me that way again. I will not be another thing that devours her.”
Lucien finally looks back at me, something unreadable sharpening behind his eyes. “Then why did you agree to this?”
“Because if we stay, if Branwen pulls the strings tighter, you won’t be able to resist her. And neither will I.” My voice drops, low and final. “And I would rather walk away now than be the one who lays her at Branwen’s feet.”
His stare lingers. Something in him softens, just for a breath. Then it's gone.
“We go at first light,” he says, and it’s not a suggestion.
I nod.
But when he turns away, I don’t follow immediately. I tilt my head toward the night sky, searching for the stars she once traced with her fingers, naming them after monsters she claimed were misunderstood.
She was wrong about the stars.
But not about the monsters.
Ambrose
I wake with a mouth full of copper and regret.
The copper’s not blood. Not mine, anyway. Just the residual bite of old magic, scorched too deep into the ground to wash out. My cheek is pressed against stone—no, tile. Cool, cracked. Familiar.
Daemon’s grounds.