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S AFFRON TURNED BACK TO THE TRAPDOOR AND RAN FOR HER life.

Behind her were a few heavy footsteps, then a vicious lupine snarl and the squelch of teeth into flesh. Levan roared as Rasso hung from his forearm, face contorted with pain and fury, thrashing wildly to shake the fallowwolf off.

He knew now, beyond all doubt, that she was the undercover Silvercloak.

He knew now, beyond all doubt, that she had betrayed him the way Alucia had.

And there was no way he’d let her walk out of this alive.

Rasso unhinged his jaw and landed neatly on all four paws.

Both Saffron and the fallowwolf dropped to the bottom of the ladder just as Levan’s deathly face appeared in the square of light above. Rasso let out another hair-raising growl, and Saffron fled down the tunnel spoke.

Levan followed.

His magic worked on her. He could compel her to stop if he so wanted to, and yet he chose not to.

She reached the center of the wheel layout, Rasso panting at her heels.

Indecision rooted her to the spot like the sen debilitan charm.

She’d have to choose a tunnel spoke to hare down, but doing so would trap her on that path, since they were all dead ends.

She would have no choice but to emerge into the shack she’d chosen, because Levan would be right behind.

If only she had a weaverwick wand. She could try each spoke in turn, then commit to the least tragic of them. The one with the best chance of escape.

Footsteps thundered toward her.

Saffron closed her eyes, reaching her instincts out in front of her like tendrils.

They pointed down one particular spoke, and so she ran, Rasso right behind, to the rope ladder at the end.

She climbed up, trying not to think about what might be waiting for her in the shack above.

The worst-case scenario was Lyrian, who had killed her uncle, who wanted her dead, because surely Levan would not leap to her defense now.

But there was only a one-in-eleven chance of finding the kingpin on the other side. She had to trust the odds, like some twisted gamehouse attraction. She could almost hear the tinkle of coins, could almost smell the rich fruity scent of the blackcherry sours.

Only she was gambling not with ascens but with her life.

Wandless, she shoved upward. The trapdoor swung open into the storage closet. There was a cacophonous racket in the main dwelling, but the closet door was mercifully shut. Rasso sprang into it behind her just as Levan appeared at the bottom of the ladder.

“ Silver, ” he mouthed, but the second syllable was severed by the closing trapdoor.

Saffron sat down on top of it, breathing hard as Rasso curled into her lap.

It would not stop Levan; he could catapult them into the rafters if he so chose.

But it would buy her a few moments.

From her lower vantage point, she could see through a narrow gap between the slats of the door into the kitchen.

Thudding boots and blasts of magical light, overlapping yells and curses, the rush of enchanted wind knocking bodies off their feet.

It was too chaotic to make any sense of, and besides, her mind orbited around one thought and one thought alone.

Levan is a Compeller, Levan is a Compeller, Levan is a Compeller, Levan—

Had he compelled her before?

Would she know if he had?

Back at the Academy, Aspar’s secret Compeller had tried to order her during the final assessment. It hadn’t worked, thanks to her magical immunity, but she already knew Levan alone could breach those defenses. Could force her mouth shut during the throes of sex.

She thought back to the conversation she’d overheard while hiding in Levan’s closet, when the tracing charm led his father to his door.

All along. It was you all along.

How could I have been so blind?

Had Levan been compelling his father this whole time? Had Lyrian finally realized it, and stabbed his son through the hand with deminite so that it could never happen again?

Everything slid into awful place.

Lyrian’s jade necklace—a supposed ward against compelling, Saffron now remembered.

The kingpin repeatedly, doggedly insisted that he didn’t want to do such hideous things, that he’d never had the same bloodlust as his wife.

It was all Levan.

“Silver,” came a breathless voice through the pane of wood that separated them. He rapped gently on the trapdoor with his knuckles. “I’m not going to blast through. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

She said nothing. Almost always the safest option.

“We’ve both been keeping secrets from each other,” Levan said, voice strained, almost inaudible over the frenzy of spells in the main shack.

Saffron still could not speak.

“Do you really think I’d hurt you, Silver? Let me in. I could force you to do it right now. I could compel you to open the trapdoor, or slam it open so hard you crumpled like a tin can, or just kill you straight through the wood. But I’m not going to. Please.”

It was true. If he wanted to hurt her, she’d already be dead.

And there was so much she wanted—needed—to understand.

Bile rose in her throat, stinging her tonsils and tongue, as she rolled off the trapdoor.

Levan climbed slowly into the closet beside her, holding his palms in the air—one pale skin, one golden as the sun—as though to show he meant no harm. Rasso’s teeth had torn into his forearm, shredding the fabric and drawing thick red stripes of blood, but he hadn’t bothered to heal it.

He didn’t go straight to her, but instead sank to his knees.

He pressed his face against the door into the main shack, then sucked in a sharp gulp of breath.

Whatever he’d seen through the crack, he did not relay it to Saff.

Instead, he turned to face her, sitting back against the door, resting his elbows on his knees.

The deadness had gone from his eyes, making way for a deep and terrible hurt.

“So it was you,” he whispered hoarsely. “You’re undercover.”

Saffron neither confirmed nor denied it, but her silence was damning enough.

He rubbed his weary face. “And so history repeats.”

Why did Levan keep falling for the women sent to ruin him? Was it because they were the only ones to show him any humanity—for the sake of getting close to him, for the sake of uncovering his secrets?

Saff swallowed hard. “If you portari out of here now, you’ll escape the—”

“That’s not what it is to be a Bloodmoon,” he replied quietly. “Family is everything. Loyalty is everything. My father is in there right now, battling it out with two of yours. Your captain’s been hit. She’s alive, but barely.”

Saints, Saff thought, with a savage clench of her stomach.

Levan twisted his lips as though in pain. “And yet here I am, crouched in a closet talking to you.” A disbelieving grimace. “I’m a senseless fool.”

“All the times you’ve tortured people for information when you could’ve just compelled them—why?”

A muscle feathered in his jaw. “I couldn’t risk anyone knowing what I am. It would’ve been immediately reported to my father, and my father would’ve realized who’s been puppeteering him this whole time. Though he figured that out anyway, in the end.”

Saff’s chest rose and fell unevenly. “So why control your father at all?”

He gave a dark shrug. “Control or be controlled.”

“A bleak worldview.”

He gazed at her in turmoil, and she couldn’t parse the emotions, because there were so many. Shame, self-loathing, a kind of deep internal horror he’d never be able to outrun. A love so complicated neither of them could understand the exact shape of it.

“Do you want to know why I’m so powerful?” he said, voice clotted. “Why I can heal and wield and transmute and compel with such terrible force?”

Saffron nodded, dread curling in her stomach like a slow python.

He leaned his head back against the wall, letting his eyes fall closed, as though they were not in the middle of a brutal battle.

“Not long after my mother died, my powers started to develop in earnest. It was clear I had a proficiency for healing, and so my father thought perhaps I could learn the subclass of necromancy and bring back my mother. He kept her preserved, just in case, using every scrap of ascenite they’d gathered over the preceding few years.

But no matter how much I studied and practiced, I could never master it.

” Inhale, exhale, both tremulous. “So one day, Vogolan came to my room and restrained me. Then he hit me with sen doloran . The torture curse. Hours and hours and hours he did it, trying to make my magic powerful enough to raise the dead. Pain is power, after all.” A flat grimace. “I was seven.”

Saffron’s stomach twisted. “But it didn’t work.”

A head shake. “He came back the next day, and the next day, and the next, believing that perhaps he could make my magic permanently potent. It went on for years, and while he succeeded in twisting my magic into something monstrous, something unstoppable, I never did learn to raise the dead.”

“That’s horrific.”

He shrugged woodenly. “It’s hardly a new concept.

Pain is the whole foundation of the Nyr?thi military, after all.

They sleep on beds of nails, apparently, and high-ranking officers flagellate themselves every day at dawn.

The Daejini have bits of themselves removed, so that the phantom pain might always hurt.

” He held up his golden hand scornfully.

“Even the Eqoran soldiers burn themselves with jeweled lighters when they need a boost.”

“Yes,” Saffron conceded softly, “but they aren’t children, Levan.”

His jaw clenched, and she remembered too late how much he loathed pity.

“You could’ve stopped him,” she added, both a question and a statement. “If you were that powerful, you could have prevented Vogolan from ever laying his hands on you.”

Another stiff shrug. “A large part of me wanted it to work . I would’ve suffered all the pain in the world to bring my mother back.”

“But why did Vogolan care so much about whether or not your mother was resurrected?”