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The short, stout figure. The low, heavy brow.

The scratchy voice, like a rat’s claws against a slate.

Twenty-one years had not been kind to him—everything sagged and snarled in a way it hadn’t back in Lunes—but Saff would recognize him anywhere.

Hatred pulsed through her, white hot and roiling, expanding outward so fast it might decimate the alley walls in an instant.

But she couldn’t let it show. Aspar had advised her to keep that particular aspect of her history hidden, lest her captors become too suspicious of her willingness to join them.

She couldn’t let this Segal know that she wanted to flay him alive, wanted to pour acid into his wounds, wanted him to suffer as she had suffered.

Segal shook his head, still watching Saff intently. “No truth elixir on me.”

He shouldn’t be able to place her—she’d stayed hidden in that pan try all the while he was in their house—but Saffron had spent enough time staring wistfully into mirrors to know that she was the perfect blend of her parents.

Mellora’s tumbling curls and heart-shaped face, Joran’s high, aquiline nose and mirthful eyes.

Hopefully he’d taken enough lives in the last two decades that they all blurred into one faceless victim.

Saffron faced her fated lover with as much courage as she could muster. She was only an inch or two shorter than him, at nearly six feet tall.

“So brand me, then.”

The very air in the alley seemed to solidify, as though struck by effigias.

“Brand you,” he repeated slowly, scarred lip curling. “You’d bind yourself to the Bloodmoons—the decades-old enemy of the Silvercloaks—just to save your skin.”

“I said my cohort’s integrity wouldn’t give. Not mine.”

He made a pfft noise. “You’re more cowardly than I thought.”

“Perhaps I don’t want to die for the simple crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The Bloodmoon stood perfectly still for a moment, as though calculating a complicated chess line.

“You could have killed me,” he said evenly. “When I had my back turned, chasing down that illusion. Segal was distracted. You could have killed us both and fled, but you didn’t. Why?”

Because the mission requires me to take you alive.

“Because I’m not na?ve enough to think I can kill two Bloodmoons and then go about my life as normal. And because I didn’t have enough magic left to cast ammorten once, let alone twice. The illusion took everything I had left.”

“Good to know you’re powerless right now.”

Saffron squared her shoulders to him, taking a step forward, their eyes level. This close, she spotted the telltale signs of exertion: a quickness to the breath, a subtle sheen to the temple.

“Magic is not the only kind of power,” she said evenly.

“It’s the only kind that matters.”

“And yet all the magic in the world hasn’t led you to Nalezen Zares.”

A pause, in which an ephemeral shadow flickered over his face. “Nobody has chosen the brand in years.”

“Yet here I am, choosing it over certain death.” She laid her palm over her thumping heart. “Is that so hard to believe?”

A long, sprawling silence, in which she could practically hear the cogs turning in his head. Behind him, Segal shifted uncomfortably, plucking at the fabric over his heart. Did it still hurt, after all this time? Or was it a kind of phantom pain?

“If I find out this is all a trick,” her fated lover snarled, “I will not kill you. I will hunt down everyone you have ever loved and bleed them dry in front of you. I will spread their deaths out, so that your suffering is not one fast strike, but a series of fatal wounds you’ll never recover from.

And when you beg me to kill you, I won’t.

I will force you to live with the pain until your heart eventually dies in your chest. And I will enjoy it. ”

“Cute speech.” Saff smiled, because she had won, and she did so love to win. “No notes. I accept your terms.”

She expected anger to break across his face in response to her flippancy, but he did not rise to the bait. His eyes were so lifeless that he barely registered the goading at all.

“Very well,” he said finally, holding out a palm. “Your wand.”

With a surge of triumph, she relinquished her wand, leaving her exposed and vulnerable, crossing over some treacherous precipice, the chasm widening and fissuring behind her.

Nothing had gone as planned, but as the Augurests would say, It was written.

It was always going to happen like this. A chance encounter in a darkened alley.

And now she was going to be mutilated.

They’d endured torture training at the academy.

A cold-faced Wielder with jet-black hair had waterboarded them for hours, ensuring they could not be coerced into treason unless forced by a particularly talented Compeller.

The truth could be easily loosed by elixir, which is why so much intel was classified, but Silvercloaks could always be trained how to resist orders.

Tiernan had failed the torture exercise over and over again until Auria sat in there with him, so he could focus not on the intense pain and fear but instead on her gentle face.

Saffron had passed on the first try, yet the silken streams of water seemed a kinder fate than the unrelenting, permanent scorch of a brand.

She knew she could survive the pain. She had plenty of experience locking herself away from suffering. Hells, she could barely feel the hot sting of her arm where she’d shredded it.

It was what the brand represented that troubled her. Since she was immune to magical healing, she would be marked forever.

She could only hope that in time, it would come to represent bravery, not evil.

“Er, Levan?” asked Segal in that craggy voice. “You still want me to take the Brewer to the incinerator?”

A missed-step yank in Saffron’s stomach.

The doorstopper case file on Lyrian Celadon floated to the front of her mind, bright and clear as a beacon.

Levan.

The Bloodmoon in front of her was Levan Celadon.

The kingpin’s son.