Page 86 of Lustling

“Literally,” Bastion adds with a grin, shaking ash from his shoulders. Laughter rolls through the damaged room. For a moment the sound is almost normal, and it sinks like honey.

Then Lillien sniffs the air and wrinkles her nose. She points at Bastion and Deimos and, with the most ordinary cynicism, says, “Wait a second… Did you two fuck while we were gone?”

Bastion’s grin stretches wider. “What gave it away?”

Deimos just lifts a brow and smirks. “You were busy. We were bored.”

Something inside me loosens—a laugh that begins as a bark and turns into something real. I have not known how to laugh like that in a long time. The room hums with a new shape of ease.

But Deimos is watching me with a small, keen light now, tilting his head. “And you didn’t?” he asks.

The question lands like a dare. Lillien slides closer and presses a soft kiss to my cheek. My skin warms at the contact and a flush climbs my neck. The tension remains—edges still sharp—but it is different now. Not the weight of accusation, but something warmer, wired into the moment like an ember.

The apartment stinks of ash, but in that scent there is the cold, sweet scent of something remade. For the first time since the flames died I do not entirely hate what I see in the ruined mirror of the room.

FIFTY-ONE

The air still tastes of ash. Smoke curls up from the bodies littering the stone, armor fused to bone, mouths frozen in screams that never finished. The apartment smells of iron and something older — old war, old vows — and it sticks to my throat. Cassiel stands in the center of it all, chest heaving, eyes hollow and too bright. Around his boots the ground is scorched in a perfect ring, a clean line where the light obeyed him and bowed.

No one says anything. Not Deimos. Not Bastion. Not me. The silence is thick enough to cut.

“We need to move,” Deimos says at last. His voice is low and flat, a growl held behind silk. He kneels and drags his fingers through the soot. Where his fingertips pass the stone shivers, a spark igniting, then a seam in the world. A rift yawns open like a pale wound.

“I’ll take us somewhere safe,” he adds, already stepping through before I can answer.

“Where?” I ask, the sound small in my mouth. Blood still drums behind my eyes, adrenaline a bitter aftertaste.

He does not look back. “Back to Hell.” His boots hit nothing and then he’s through.

Bastion grips my wrist and I go last, my heel crossing the edge of the portal. The world flips, brimstone flooding my lungs, and we are inside a hall carved from obsidian. Vaulted arches tower overhead, black ribs holding a skyless ceiling. Crimson light filters through stained glass panels that seethe with impossible scenes—wings and fire, hands reaching, something writhing in the dark I can’t quite name. The silence here is not empty. It hums, full of waiting.

Cassiel stumbles a step and hangs back, like a man brushing dust from a grave he thought he'd closed long ago. I watch him and, for a split second, I see him as he might remember himself: a thing not entirely human, not entirely lost.

“Where the Hell are we?” I ask, and my own voice sounds ridiculous in the cavernous room.

“Hell,” Deimos says over his shoulder, casual as if naming a street. “More specifically, my fortress in the lower circle.”

“You have a fortress?” The words fall out of me loud as a laugh and too small at once.

He shrugs, one shoulder a careless defiance. “It was abandoned for centuries. I reclaimed it. It’s protected. Shielded from Zepharion’s eyes. No one comes down here unless I allow it.”

“What if he finds us?” I ask because the question is a stone in my pocket.

“He won’t,” he insists as he turns. The light catches his face and his eyes are molten, steady as a threat. “But if he does, then he dies.”

The sentence is simple and absolute. It vibrates the air like a chord struck in a sealed chamber.

We move between columns carved with faces contorted in age-long torment, runes worn smooth by hands that once begged and then were forgotten. The hall smells of cold stone and old blood and power that has been sleeping. At the far end,a throne of obsidian sits veiled in shadow—an altar made to rule over silence.

Deimos catches my gaze on it and says, softer, almost offhand, “I’ve never sit there.”

“Why not?” I ask.

He looks away for a moment, the light clarifying a line of regret. “I’m not a king.”

The words hang between us, heavy and true. “But you’resomething,” I whisper, because the fortress has the shape of him in it: claimed, reclaimed, dangerous.

He doesn’t argue. “I might have been once,” he says instead, the past folded tight behind his jaw.