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A thought darted behind his eyes, and the subtle mirth on his face withered and died.

He fixed his gaze straight ahead once more, resuming his guarded facade.

“I’ve already warned Segal, but don’t mention anything about Zares to my father.

He doesn’t know we’ve brought her in already.

He can be overzealous, and I don’t want him to end up killing her before she can do what she needs to do. ”

“What’s my silence worth to you?”

A careful beat, another tentative smile. “Marriosan’s gelato before we meet Erling Tandall?”

“Deal,” Saffron said, but the fleeting joy soured almost instantly.

Papa Marriosan was dead. The shop would be closed in mourning. Levan obviously didn’t know what Vogolan had done hours before his death.

Besides—if everything went according to plan, Levan would end this night in deminite shackles.

Why did the thought leave her feeling so … sad ?

Perhaps it was because she saw so much of herself in him.

He was a killer, a torturer, yes. But the evil didn’t seem core-deep to Saff—not in the way Vogolan was cruel for cruelty’s sake.

It was a product of his environment, his twisted upbringing.

The result of what she suspected was a crude and terrible brand on his chest.

No, I suppose I don’t have a choice.

Levan could have been something else entirely. His mind was brilliant, his power more potent than anyone she’d ever met. What could he have done with his life instead? That was what felt sad. The waste of it all.

But it wasn’t the only sad thing. There was the thought of him squirming beneath a hot poker, branded at the hand of a person he should have been able to trust. Had that happened before or after the years of grief-induced compulsions?

Before or after he had found solace in the story of Aymar and Baudry?

She was leading him to his shackled fate, and she hated that she was.

“Levan,” she whispered, stopping abruptly. Her hand went to the wooden pendant around her neck.

“Yes?” He halted a few footsteps ahead, swinging to face her.

They looked at each other then. Truly looked. It started as a subtle frown, a beat of confusion, and then melted into something richer, something simmering and ephemeral.

All the desire Saffron had suppressed since first meeting him rose to the surface of her skin, and she drank in all the beautiful lines of him. All the muscles in her lower belly tightened, the blood in her veins quickening and pulsing, and something warm cracked open in her chest.

The cresting lust was followed by a surge of existential recklessness, a feeling of we might be walking to our deaths, the sudden and undeniable realization that there was no sense in fighting this thing between them, because it was always fated to happen, and who was she to deny fate its bounty?

She closed the space between them, mirroring what he had done to her, running her hands through the soft hair at his temples, tracing a finger along his jaw.

Cupping his chin, brushing her lips tenderly against his, like satin against a bare thigh, like a breeze caressing the blossom trees, like a soft shiver and a sharp jolt all at once.

He pulled away for the briefest of seconds, eyes alight, so excruciatingly hopeful.

Saffron’s lungs inflated like wings.

And then their lips met again, firmer now, a desperation to it. Their tongues touched tentatively, and it felt so intimate, so vulnerable. He tasted of clove tea and warm skin, and as she pressed her body against his, as she felt the warm, hard planes of him, he sighed into her.

The sound tugged at her deep below the navel, like a knot of hunger.

It was like no kiss she had ever experienced, all of reality falling away behind them.

The crackle, the spark, the scintilla, a rightness, a slotting together of two fated pieces, two equals, two halves of one whole.

Kissing him was a … test, of sorts. She knew it was destined to happen eventually, and she wanted to see if she’d feel the urge to dig her wand into his stomach and cast a killing spell, to see if they were nearing their awful, inevitable end.

But all she felt was him.

His palm at the small of her back, pushing her even more firmly into him, both cold and warm and sharp and sweet and rich, euphoria unspooling in her heart. She wanted more, all of him, everywhere. His teeth grazed her lower lip and—

Wrong, her brain hissed, and filled with self-loathing. This is wrong, he’s a murderer, he’s a torturer, he’s—

—the man you’re fated to kill.

So why did kissing him feel so Saints-damned good ?

But she couldn’t dishonor her parents’ memories like this.

She pictured herself at six years old, grumpily playing Flight of the Raven with a twinkle-eyed father and honeywine-scented mother who adored the bones of her, and then she pictured herself watching through a keyhole as two scarlet cloaks slayed them where they stood, and she knew that she could not do this. To herself, or to them.

She tore herself away, shaking her head.

Rejection, or something similar, passed over Levan’s face as she withdrew. As though he knew exactly what was going through her head. As though he was picturing the very same scenes. Remorse pressed his lips together in a sad, straight line, and she could almost hear his heart sink in his chest.

The silence between them was endless and aching.

“We have to go,” he muttered eventually, running a hand through his hair, not meeting her eye.

And then they were walking again, leading each other to mutual ruin, neither of them breathing in quite the same way they had before.