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S AFFRON AWOKE WITH HER HEAD IN THE NOOK BETWEEN Levan’s arm and chest, one hand stroking her hair and the other wrapped around her body. It was warm and sweet and terrible, and she wanted to sink into it forever.

She looked up and saw him staring at the ceiling. When he saw she was no longer asleep, he pressed a tender kiss to her forehead, but there was pain etched onto his face. The sight of it was a shock. Normally he kept it close to his chest, buried far down inside.

What did it mean that he was letting her catch a glimpse?

“Are you alright?” she asked, her voice pitching with concern.

“Fine. Better for some sleep.”

“You’re lying.”

He grimaced. “Fine. It hurts like all hells. Happy?”

“Ecstatic. Although the thought of your absurd power being amplified by the pain is vaguely terrifying.”

Something stilled in his body, for a brief, interminable moment, but was swiftly gone again.

He cupped her jaw with his golden hand and kissed her on the lips, so tender it was barely a kiss at all.

They pecked softly, sweetly, until gradually it deepened.

Saffron ran her traitorous hand up his broad chest, up his neck, through his soft, silky hair.

His teeth grazed her bottom lip, and that forbidden want pooled in her lower belly, tugging her toward him.

She propped herself up onto her elbow and kissed him harder, her wild silver-blond curls spilling over his chest and shoulders.

He pressed a palm to the small of her back, and with a fluid swooping motion, turned her onto her back and flipped himself so that suddenly, he was the one hovering over her.

His body heavy and warm against hers, Levan pushed her curls away from her face and pressed a kiss just below her ear, where her jaw met her throat. He brushed his lips farther down the side of her neck, then pushed her tunic to one side and planted kisses along the ridge of her collarbone.

The more she tried to tell herself how wrong it was, the more she wanted it.

He was a glittering gamehouse, a blackcherry sour, a dark prophecy.

And in this moment, he was hers.

His golden hand roved over her body, over the soft rolls of her stomach, the sloping curves of her thighs, the tender insides of her wrists, and the hard groove of her spine.

She longed for him to find the throb between her legs, but he took his sweet time, alternating between fingertip traces and feathery kisses, the occasional dart of his tongue sending desire lancing through her.

She reached her own hands up to him, but he pushed her firmly away. Before she could feel stung, he murmured, “Last time, you had all the power. It’s my turn.”

Oh, hells.

“Deal,” she breathed, an agreement, a surrender.

He reached out and grabbed his wand from the holder on the bedside table, then took both of her wrists in one hand, pinning them up against the headboard. With a quirk of his brow, he muttered, “ Et vinculorium. ”

A length of narrow rope shot from around the curtain of the four-poster bed and tied Saff’s wrists in a tight sailor’s knot. The two ends secured themselves to the spindly wood of the bed frame, so tautly her hands couldn’t move an inch.

A silken shudder tore down her whole body. Nissa had known her way around ropes and chains, but there was something about this situation, this vicious snarl of a romance that could only end in ruin, that made everything feel heightened.

His eyes twinkled in response. “ Sen evanevesstan .”

Saff’s clothes swept from her body to the floor, defying all seam-based logic, leaving her laid bare.

“ Sen? ” she asked lightly, though her pulse was hammering in her chest.

A smirk. “My intentions are far from honorable.”

He pressed her legs apart with the hard ridges of his hips and inched back on the bed, laying airy kisses down the center of her stomach, goosebumps stippling her whole body.

When his mouth reached her there, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she couldn’t stifle the moan.

Starting with delicate kisses, he worked his tongue in tiny, soft circles, his hands gripping her hips so hard it hurt.

Her wrists yanked at their bounds of their own accord, and the bite of rope into her skin only intensified the feeling between her thighs.

Everything felt molten, alight, a swirling of pleasure that swelled and surged.

All the blood in her body rose to the surface of her skin.

Just as the mounting sensation was about to swallow her whole, his golden hand moved from her hip and two fingers plunged inside her, filling her with a delicious cold ache .

She bit out a raw gasp.

“ Oh, Saints, ” she moaned, submitting to the overwhelming feeling.

“Shh,” Levan warned. “Can’t let anyone hear us.”

“ Saaaaaints, ” Saffron groaned louder, not truly caring who heard her blaspheme.

Levan grabbed his wand with his free hand. “ Sen orisilentian .”

Her mouth clamped shut, and she could not open it again.

Not when he tugged at her nipple piercing, nor when he slid a third finger inside her.

As his tongue circled her faster and faster, and his fingers slid in and out until the pressure was too much to bear, it was too everything, she peaked and then plummeted off the cliff edge of pleasure, her whole body shuddering around him, her magical well filling and then overflowing.

Being trapped inside the pleasure, unable to move or speak, only made it more …

more. It kept crashing down in waves, up and down her arms and legs, and she wanted to cry out but she couldn’t; she could only tremble silently, deliciously.

Withdrawing from her, Levan knelt back up onto his knees and tore his tunic over his head. Saffron tried not to look at the scarred mess of his arm—tried not to hate him for what he’d done to himself.

He rested his hand on his belt buckle. “Do you want to …?”

In response, she wrapped her long legs around him and tugged him toward her.

He fumbled with his belt—the sound of yanking leather and metal buckles sending another wave through her—and then pulled down his trousers.

Angling his hips, he plunged deep into her, so hard and sudden that her hands jerked against her bonds, her lips begged to part, and there was the seethe of rope burn and the intense fullness and the lingering tingle of her orgasm and she felt like she was falling off the edge of the world.

He thrusted his hips slowly at first, then sped up so fast his pupils dilated, his forehead glistened, and he dug a hand into Saffron’s hair. With his other hand, he picked up his wand, pointed it at her hips, and whispered raggedly, “ Sen ascevolo. ”

Her hips lifted as though suddenly weightless, and the shift unleashed a whole new sensation inside her, as though constantly pressing down on a taut knot of pure, raw pleasure.

Through the glittering haze, she saw a perilous expression appear on Levan’s face.

He pressed hard against her chest and whispered in her ear, “Fair’s fair, Silver.” He pulled back slightly and pointed his wand tip between her legs. “ Et aflan. ”

The raw magic was like a thunderbolt, a fork of scorched lightning, and she could barely see from the explosion of stars behind her eyes.

She whimpered against her clamped lips, and moments later, his hips shuddered, digging into her inner thighs, and he sighed into her neck.

Their chests were pressed together, frantic hearts beating through their skin, and she felt his every breath echo inside her.

Eventually he pulled away, and she missed the feel of him immediately.

“ Ans oriloquan .” Her lips came unstuck. “ Ans arrenodan .” The ropes replaced themselves around the bed curtains, but he didn’t seem in a hurry to return her clothes.

“That was …” she gasped.

“That was,” he confirmed.

They lay breathless in each other’s arms for a while. Saff’s wrists were red and tender, and her legs still shook from the intensity of the pleasure, but his arms were so strong and firm around her that she felt safe, steadied.

She felt safe in the arms of a Bloodmoon.

She had to focus, damn it. She was here for a reason. And that reason was not pure, animal pleasure.

Just refilling the well for what’s to come, she told herself.

A neat little lie.

“So what now?” Saffron asked at last. “You’re free, and you don’t want revenge against your father. So we just … carry on like nothing’s happened?”

“We’ll find another necromancer. But first we need to retrieve the lox I stashed the night we were raided. The gamehouse is running low.”

“You said you’d stashed it near Novarin?”

“It’s actually nearer Lunes, just on the Bellandrian border.

I grew up in hiding, in a tiny hamlet of wooden shacks in the Havenwood.

My mother’s ancestors were slain centuries ago, but still her parents would not risk civilization.

The shacks are abandoned now, but I still go up there, sometimes. It’s like she’s still there.”

Her heart stuttered on the fresh details. He had grown up only a few miles from Lunes, from her. They had always orbited around each other, and again this idea gave her an unsettling retrospective foreboding, as though there had been monsters lurking in the shadows all her life.

“How will we get there?”

“We’ll have to use our portari gate. I’ve been playing too fast and loose with the portari in my wand. Leaves too much of a trace, and the Silvercloaks seem to be getting much better at the art of tracing.”

Saff’s throat was dry. She was going to have to relay all of this to Aspar. She was going to have to fulfill her mission. And with every detail Levan entrusted to her, the closer she was to that inevitable moment. “When?”

“Tomorrow.” He rolled the half-golden wrist stiffly, grimacing. Now that the heat of the moment had subsided, his face had once again paled, and the skin around his eyes was lined with discomfort. “I’m going to find some pain relief that isn’t lox. I need my head to be clear.”

Now that he’d trusted her with his hurt, Saffron wished he hadn’t. It would only make it more terrible to betray him.

“Who will go?”

“Just you, me, and Rasso. Maybe Segal, though he’s Risen now …

Castian? A small crew anyway. Easy enough to portari us all away if anything goes wrong.

” He sighed and sat upright, pulled on his trousers, then checked his watch.

Saffron arranged the blanket around her, cold in his absence.

“I’m going to go and run and spar and bathe, then reach out to my Silvercloak rat.

Leak them some false information so that they’re far, far away from the Havenwood tomorrow night. ”

Saff’s stomach flipped over, as though her body had only just remembered that Tiernan was dead. Because of her. And sometime very soon, Levan was going to discover his informant was missing.

“I’ll see you later, alright?” Levan whispered, pulling on his tunic and bending back down to kiss her on the forehead.

It was only once he’d left the room that the realization struck Saffron hard and true.

She sat bolt upright, heart hammering fiercely in her branded chest.

Levan had used magic on her.

And it had worked.

The ropes and the clothes were external; her immunity wouldn’t have protected her against that.

But he had silenced her, and she hadn’t been able to say a word.

Which meant he’d found a way around her unique advantage.

Which therefore meant … he knew the advantage existed in the first place.

Or, she told herself, his magic was just so powerful that nobody, not even she, could resist it. Had the severed hand caused such intense pain that his power had exploded beyond all recognition? Is that why he had stilled so strangely when she’d mentioned the possibility?

She didn’t know which was more terrifying: that he knew she was hiding her magic immunity, or that he was powerful beyond measure.

Pulling her clothes hastily over her head, her mind filtered through her options.

She was approaching the end as a Bloodmoon; that much she instinctively knew.

She’d come further than any Silvercloak had ever come before.

She not only understood the ins and outs of their operation, but also why they did the things they did.

She knew what would happen if Levan brought Lorissa Rezaran back.

War. Bloodshed. Terror.

And she knew exactly how to stop it.

All she had to do was tell Aspar everything about their trip to Lunes. With Tiernan gone, the Bloodmoons would not be prepared for a second raid, and surely, surely the Silvercloaks would emerge triumphant.

The predatory gamehouses would be shut down, the hideous violence would cease, and the city would once again be rid of the cancerous lox.

Her parents would be avenged. Her fate would be fulfilled.

And yet doing so would see Levan in Duncarzus for the rest of his life—at best. House Arollan had abolished the death penalty several decades ago, but there had been mounting pressure in the pulps and the newspapers to bring it back.

Could she see this man executed on the Palace steps?

It was barely a question.

She knew, deep down in her marrow, exactly what she had to do.