Page 118 of Lustling

She says she is sorry. The word breaks me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, breath like glass. “I did not want to go.”

Then she tells me why. Zepharion’s visions, repeated and cruel. How I die. How Bastion is torn. How Cassiel bleeds out in her hands. She could not bear the futures. She did what she thought would save us.

Anger tries to rise in me, hot and immediate. “You should have trusted us,” I spit. “You should have trusted me.”

She presses her forehead to my chest and says, small and raw, “I could not lose you.”

I hold her so hard my arms ache. She keeps apologizing. I tell her to stop. She does not. She tells me about the wedding. The wedding that will bind her. Politically, magically. Permanently.

Ice slides into my blood. My mind goes blank for a beat. Then the rage floods in, a white hot thing that blunts thought but sharpens purpose. I drag her closer until I can hear her breath, until my teeth press into my own hand to keep from roaring.

“You are stronger than you know,” I tell her, a promise and a command. “You can eclipse me. If you wanted, you could break mountains.”

She shakes her head. “I cannot. He is starving me. Food, touch, everything. I am fading.”

I look at that thing at her throat, the garnet and obsidian. Heavy. Wrong. Every instinct in me screams. I know the scent of a trap when I smell it. I know the way a leash feels in the hand of a man who toys with souls.

I do the only thing left that feels like answer. I kiss her like war. Like a vow. Like the last breath I will ever take. She cries into my mouth and I swallow every tremor and tear and thread of hunger between us.

When I pull back, my voice is sand and steel. “We will come for you soon,” I promise.

Her voice breaks on the word, “Deimos—” Then, as if the world allows one soft, impossible thing before it takes her away, she says, “I love you.”

Those three words are gold in the fog. They burn through everything for a second and then the veil tears and I am ripped out of her like a limb.

I jolt upright, gasping, heart hammering against my ribs. Cassiel’s hand is at my shoulder. Bastion is already on his feet.

“He is going to marry her,” I blurt before I can steady myself.

Bastion snaps, “What?”

“In front of the court. The wedding is days away, maybe sooner.”

Cassiel’s face hardens into something carved from ice. I press my hand to my chest. The bond aches. It is still there, a burn under my skin.

“She is wearing something,” I say, voice low and sharp. “A necklace. Garnet and obsidian. It’s suppressing her.”

Bastion emits a sound like a throat clearing through teeth, then moves with a kind of ruthless clarity that is almost comforting. “Then we break it,” he says.

If it were only a matter of shattering metal, we would have done it already. This is not a trinket. It is a tool woven to a man who reads blood and bargains with kingdoms. Removing it will cost us more than force. It will cost cunning, leverage, and maybe things none of us want to pay.

Still, the thought makes something in me bright and simple. I picture Zepharion’s court burning until the stars look away. I picture my hands on that necklace and the sound it makes when it is broken.

“I will burn down his entire goddamn kingdom if it means getting my mate back,” I say. The words are a promise, and they feel like a blade.

Bastion’s jaw tightens. Cassiel’s eyes go flat and businesslike. Plans begin to form in the heat of that vow, not soft and sentimental but sharp, necessary and terrible. We will move tonight. We will gather what we need. We will go to whatever door opens for us and pay whatever price it demands.

There is no debate now. Only the map of a war being drawn with three hands.

SEVENTY-TWO

Iwake with the ghost of Deimos’s kiss still burning on my mouth.

For one breath—just one—I let myself believe he’s still here. That I’m not alone. That I’m not cold. That the dream wasn’t just a desperate hallucination clinging to the last scraps of hope.

But then the necklace pulses. And the pain is sharp. Searing.

It tightens like a fist around my throat, as if it heard his name echo in my chest. As if it wants to choke the memory from me.