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W HEN SAFFRON ENTERED THE CELL AT AROUND FOUR IN THE morning, Levan’s head lifted off his chest. He’d perhaps been dozing, but the red rims around his eyes suggested he hadn’t had any real sleep over the last three days.

“Silver,” he said, a hoarse murmur, and it raked down her back like nails.

His hair was damp, his face clean shaven. A bucket of soapy water sat on the floor beside him, a cloth resting over the edge. The clean tang of citrus soap oil hung on the otherwise stagnant air.

“I know why you’re doing it,” she replied softly, pressing the door closed behind her.

“Why I’m …?”

“Hoarding ascenite like the mountain dwellers in Lost Dragonborn. Obsessively tracking down necromancers.”

As ever, he held his features perfectly still.

“I found the crypt. Your mother.”

Levan’s face remained impassive, but his eyes weren’t as cold and empty as they usually were. They churned with anticipation. “So then, from the date … you know the truth about yours.”

She hadn’t noticed a particular date. “What do you mean?”

A fraught pause, in which Levan clearly realized he’d said too much. “No. Nothing.”

Saffron’s limbs had been heavy with tiredness, but a sudden chill shook the exhaustion off her like leaves from a winter tree.

“The truth about my … mother?”

Her heart pounded, as though her body knew something her mind did not.

Levan shook his head, freshly washed hair gleaming in the low lantern light. “Forget it.”

“Would you forget it?” She took one step toward him, then another, planting her palms on his broad, firm shoulders and forcing him to look at her. The warmth of his body spread up through her hands like she was holding them to a hearth. “Tell me, Levan.”

Averting his gaze, he carefully studied his pinned hand. “Twenty-one years ago, my mother died during a heist in Almere. Just over the Bellandrian border. Segal had a scroll of all the registered necromancers in Vallin. A few villages away, in Lunes—”

“Was my mother,” Saff finished, with a thunderclap of understanding.

“They came to your door in desperation.”

“How do you know?”

“Segal told me, when he saw we were getting closer. Your parents died because my mother did.” Levan looked up at her through dark eyelashes. “Ever since I found out … it’s felt like our fates have always been braided together.”

At the very moment she was hunched over her parents’ bodies, weeping and pleading with the world to undo it, a young Levan was doing the very same just a few miles away.

She had always felt it: a shared grief, a shared pain, a shared fate.

If she hadn’t turned that doorknob, her parents would still be alive.

And so would Levan’s mother.

It was a revelation so enormous that Saffron couldn’t hold it in her head.

She didn’t know whether to turn and run from this room, this house, this life, far, far away until she could breathe enough to process it, until her ribs knotted themselves back together again—or to give herself away to the pain, to run straight into Levan’s arms, the way the prophecy foretold, the way destiny had written it from the beginning.

“You genuinely believe you can bring your mother back?” she asked gently. “After all this time?”

“That belief is the only thing that keeps me upright.”

The image of Lorissa Rezaran lying motionless in that crypt burned blue-white in Saff’s mind, and she thought that maybe his conviction was not so misguided.

Levan shifted uncomfortably in his wooden chair. “Can I ask a favor?”

She nodded, ears ringing, dimly aware that her palms were still upon him.

He gestured to the ground. “Castian brought me soapy water to wash, but I can’t undress with my hand pinned. I’ve managed my hair and face, and my bottom half, but … can you cut this sleeve off?”

Saff removed her hands from his shoulders, pinching the cuff of his cloak between her thumb and forefinger. Pulling out her wand, she drew upon her near-empty well, hoping there would be a final dreg, a shallow scrap, to produce this simple magic.

“Sen incisuren.”

A small, unconvincing tear appeared at the cuff.

Saffron discarded the wand and carefully ripped the fabric with the grain, all the way up to his shoulder, then across the chest, so that the cloak—and his black tunic—fell away from his arm.

At the sight of what lay beneath, Saffron gasped sharply.

Carved in a neat tally line were dozens—if not hundreds—of equally spaced scars. Some were fresher than others, the skin around the top five raw and inflamed.

“Levan, what the hell are those?”

But some part of her already knew.

“My kills,” he replied gruffly, not meeting her eye.

The freshest cuts, red and gnarly, had to be the mistaken-identity Brewer, the three Whitewing assailants, and Tenea.

“That’s why you needed the salve,” she said flatly. She didn’t know why she felt so angry at him, only that she did. A kind of protective, emotionally charged anger. “Why do this to yourself?”

He shrugged, but it was far from nonchalant.

“I always thought you didn’t feel anything about the bad things you do. You told me your emotions are essentially scar tissue.”

He made a pfft noise, puffing the air through his lips. “I feel everything at full and terrible force. I just keep it inside, where it belongs.”

Levan shrugged the cloak and tunic off the rest of his upper half, dropping them to the ground. Gingerly, to protect his impaled hand, he dipped the washcloth back into the citrus-oiled water, squeezed out the excess liquid, then washed himself.

Saff found it almost impossible not to watch.

His body was a map of the person he was.

It was lean and toned from his running and combat training, knots of muscle in his arms and shoulders and chest. His stomach was more concave than she suspected it usually was, with two hollow grooves either side of his belly button, the sharp V of his hips disappearing into his waistband.

And there, right over his heart, was the unmistakable pink-silver of a burn scar. Old, but undeniable.

“So you do have a brand.”

He stopped for the briefest moment, tense, but said nothing.

“When did it happen?”

“I was ten.”

“Your father?” Saff was almost afraid of the answer, because there was a very good chance she’d want to murder Lyrian if so.

“Vogolan held the poker, but my father gave the order.”

His tone betrayed no bitterness or anger, but he must have been writhing with it.

“How could he do that to his own son?” The thought of Joran giving her so much as a paper cut was unfathomable.

Levan’s jaw clenched, but he did not reply.

There was also a betrothal tattoo where his rib cage kissed in the middle of his chest. A traditional sprig of holly, with two leaves and two berries.

Alucia.

She couldn’t bring herself to ask what happened. There had been too many painful revelations for one night, and her exhaustion had returned with a vengeance.

Levan washed his torso, his pinned arm, pale skin glistening with the citrus oil.

But when it came to his back, he struggled awkwardly with the angle of it, flicking the cloth between his shoulder blades without achieving very much, and when he tried to wash his unpinned arm, he couldn’t fold his wrist the right way.

“Do you want me to do it?” Saff asked, before she could think about what she was suggesting.

Levan froze for a beat, swallowed so hard his throat bobbed, then handed her the cloth.

His back was rippled with muscle, every groove and ridge shadowed by the flickering lantern light behind them. She ran the cloth over the sharp lines of his shoulder blades, and he shivered as the cold fabric brushed his warm skin.

Still standing behind him, she delicately held his hand as she cleaned the inside of his pulsating wrist, the crook of his elbow, the bulge of his bicep. For some reason, it felt more intimate than the impassioned kiss they’d exchanged, and he seemed to have temporarily stopped breathing.

She didn’t want the moment to end, so she squeezed the cloth and rubbed it against the back of his head, soaking away the excess oil and moisture.

His hair felt impossibly soft. Every other part of him was hard, honed, a stoic construct against the world, but his hair felt like skimming the bolts of satin her uncles used for the royal cloaks.

As her nails scraped over his scalp, he let out a long, slow sigh.

She felt the reverberation all the way up her arm.

In that moment, every other emotion fell away, leaving only want.

It wasn’t just the generalized arousal she always felt after too much casting—the simple animal of her body trying to replenish its magical well.

It was deeper, richer.

Darker. Altogether more terrifying.

Tentatively, heart racing, she planted a kiss on his tufted double crown, the hair scented with grapefruit and blood orange and lemon zest. She cupped a palm in the crook between his throat and his collarbone, then traced kisses down his neck, the skin warm and tender, his pulse skittering against her lips.

Levan’s breathing turned ragged as he laid his free hand over hers.

“I’m not a good person, Silver.”

She pulled her mouth away, but only slightly, so that her breath still caressed his throat. “You told me to abandon childish notions of good and evil or I wouldn’t survive here.”

Dropping the cloth to the ground, all the exhaustion had suddenly left her, but so too had that jittery, uncomfortable adrenaline. She coursed with a pleasant flutter, a raw anticipation, the air around them charged, crackling with something singular and intimate.

He tilted his head back against her hand, the lantern illuminating every ridge of his throat, and he sighed his surrender.

Still standing behind him, she traced her forefinger up his sharp jaw then brought her lips to his.

They were upside down, the angles all wrong, and surely his throat was pulling tightly, but he breathed against her, ragged, and as they kissed softly, uncertainly, that familiar unspooling began in her chest, her stomach, between her legs.