Page 14

The parchment is brittle between my fingers, edges frayed from too many nights of my touch, the ink fading where I’ve traced the same lines over and over like they’ll reveal something I’ve missed. Across from me, Lucien leans back in his chair, one hand curled loosely around a glass of something stronger than wine, something sharp enough to sand down the sharp edges in his jaw. He hasn’t spoken in a while, but I can feel the question vibrating beneath his skin. We’re both thinking the same thing—we always are, even when we pretend we’re not.

“This pillar…” I murmur, tapping the diagram with two fingers. “It wasn’t built to be shut. It’s a conduit. A lock, yes, but also a door.”

Lucien drags his gaze back to me, something tight and bitter behind his eyes. “You think she can open it?”

“I think,” I say carefully, “that we’re wasting time trying to force it when the Hollow’s been bending itself around her since the moment she bled into it.”

He snorts, but there’s no humor in it. “You mean to tell me all the death, the devastation, every fucking Sin Binder that’s died in this graveyard, and the answer is her?”

I lift my eyes to his, slow and deliberate. “It was always going to be her.”

The truth lodges in the space between us like a blade, sharp and final.

I lean back in my chair, dragging a hand over my face. “We go back to the chapel tomorrow,” I say, voice quiet but certain. “All of us. Together. Maybe the Hollow needs more than her blood this time. Maybe it needs every single thread that binds us to her.”

Lucien’s gaze flickers, his mouth pressing into something resigned. “And if we can’t open it?”

My smile is thin. “Then we stay in hell, Lucien. We stay until it eats us.”

Before he can respond, the door creaks open.

Riven’s silhouette fills the frame, his mouth tight, eyes sharp as a blade unsheathed. “Have either of you seen her?”

My chest tightens. Something shifts in the air—wrong, off-kilter.

Lucien straightens. “She’s not with you?”

Riven shakes his head, dark hair falling into his eyes. “No. She’s not in her room. Her window’s open.”

A curse slides off Lucien’s tongue, sharp enough to cut.

I rise from my chair, my pulse a thunderous drumbeat in my ears. “When?”

“Not sure,” Riven grits out. “But her bonds—” He stops, throat bobbing. “I can’t feel her.”

Lucien pushes back from the table hard enough to rattle the old wood. “Find Elias. Find Silas.”

I’m already moving before the command finishes leaving his mouth.

Because the Hollow is hungry. And Luna is running. And this place does not forgive the ones who run.

The house is a storm of noise and movement by the time I step back inside. Footsteps pounding. Voices sharp, slicing through the thickening dark. Riven’s already half-wild, stalking through the narrow hallway like he’s hunting something only he can sense. Caspian’s downstairs, tearing through cupboards like Luna’s hiding in the shadows behind old parchment and rusted knives. Elias and Silas are arguing in the front room, their panic thinly veiled under crude insults and louder shouting.

It’s chaos—the kind we haven’t descended into in weeks.

And it’s all because of her.

Because Luna is gone.

I can feel it in the weight of the Hollow tonight, the way the walls breathe a little differently. A low, humming pull at the base of my spine like something has shifted beneath the skin of this realm.

“Elias,” I bark, sharp enough to cut through his argument with Silas. “Sweep the southern boundary. Now.”

He mutters something under his breath but obeys. Silas follows without another word, his usual grin wiped clean, something brittle and raw in its place.

I catch Lucien’s gaze across the room. He hasn’t moved since Riven’s announcement. Still as stone, jaw locked, eyes distant.

When the others have scattered, I move to him. “What aren’t you saying?”

Lucien’s shoulders stiffen. He doesn’t look at me right away. Instead, he glances toward the door like he wants to vanish right through it. Then, finally, he mutters, “Outside.”

We step into the cold night, the Hollow’s shadows crawling at the edges of the clearing, alive in ways they shouldn’t be. I wait, folding my arms over my chest, letting the silence stretch long enough that it forces him to speak.

Lucien drags a hand through his hair, exhaling sharp. “I may have said something.”

I arch a brow. “Define ‘something.’”

His mouth twists into something ugly, something bitter. “I tore her apart.”

The admission hits me like a blow.

“What. Exactly. Did you say?” I keep my voice steady, careful, but every word is a blade, poised at his throat.

His jaw flexes, guilt flickering behind his eyes like something he’s trying to smother. “I told her she wasn’t enough. That none of us ever wanted her. That she was a mistake.”

I stare at him, cold crawling beneath my skin like ice under flesh. “You told her that.”

“She came to me. Pushed.” Lucien’s voice cracks at the edges now, brittle and raw. “And I shoved back.”

“You shoved hard enough she ran.”

My pulse thrums sharp and brutal beneath my ribs, because I know Luna. I know what lives in her—the hollow places carved out by everyone who left before us, the doubt she keeps stitched beneath her skin. I know how words like his would cut deeper than any blade.

“She sealed the bonds.” The words slip past my teeth, quieter now. “All of them.”

Lucien’s breath shudders out, his composure fracturing. “She won’t come back.”

“She will,” I say darkly, already moving toward the trees. “Because I’ll drag her back myself.”

Because none of us survive if she doesn’t. Because I will not let him—any of us—be the reason she disappears. I haven’t courted her this long to let her shatter herself like this.

And because this realm, this cursed place, will eat her alive if I don’t find her first.

I move fast. Faster than I should. Every step calculated, every glance sweeping the tree line for a sign of her—a footprint, a broken branch, a thread of magic unraveled.

She’s ahead of us. She’s clever, too clever, and she’s hurting. That’s a dangerous thing. A hurting creature runs harder, disappears faster.

Ambrose crouches low beside me, fingers grazing the disturbed earth where her trail flickers like a pulse. His expression is taut, focused, all the sharp edges of him honed to one point. “She’s good,” he mutters without looking up. “Too good.”

“She’s desperate,” I say, voice low. “That makes her unpredictable.”

The others fan out behind us—Riven moving like a shadow through the trees, Elias and Silas bickering as they follow close, their voices sharp with something more brittle than usual. Caspian’s behind them, quiet but watchful, the way he always is when he’s afraid to lose something he doesn’t know how to keep.

Lucien lingers at the back. His power coils too tight around him, leaking out in the way the Hollow recoils from his presence, the way even the trees seem to bend away from him.

We stop when Ambrose lifts his hand, finding a strip of fabric caught on a thorn—Luna’s shirt, torn clean through. He tucks it into his pocket like a lifeline.

“She’s bleeding,” Ambrose mutters, too low for anyone else but me to hear.

The others catch up, breathless, restless, strung tight on the knowledge that she’s out here and we can’t see her. And Lucien, for once, doesn’t bother hiding the way he shatters.

“She ran because of me.”

Every head turns.

Lucien doesn’t look at us. He looks at the ground like it might swallow him whole. His voice is flat, devoid of that Dominion pull he always drapes over his words. “I said things I shouldn’t have.”

Silas, wild and raw, scrubs a hand down his face. “You what?”

“I told her she didn’t belong here. That none of us wanted her.” Lucien’s gaze flicks to mine, razor sharp and unapologetically brutal. “I made her leave.”

The air shifts, heavy with something sharp and bitter.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Elias says, but there’s no snark in it. Just exhaustion, disappointment. His eyes flick to me. “What do we do?”

“We keep going,” I say, already moving again. “Because she’s out here alone, and this place will swallow her if we don’t find her first.”

Riven moves beside me, his face carved in stone. “You think she wants to be found?”

I glance at him, at the Hollow stretching endlessly ahead of us, and I know the truth of it.

“She doesn’t.”

But we’re going to find her anyway. Her trail is easy enough to follow at first, but I already know she’s getting smarter the deeper she goes. The soft impressions of her boots in the moss, the broken twigs underfoot, they get lighter, more deliberate.

Ambrose stalks ahead of me like a blade unsheathed, cold and purposeful. Riven walks to my left, his gaze sharp, jaw clenched so tight I can feel it vibrate in the air around him. Behind us, Elias and Silas trail a step behind, arguing under their breath but too restless to mean it. Caspian’s further back, quieter than the rest of us, his eyes flicking to every shadow like the monsters in the Hollow might crawl out and finish what Lucien started.

Riven finally breaks the quiet, voice rough. “She covered her tracks here.”

I crouch beside him, studying the ground. Sure enough, the footprints scatter and vanish. Her magic threads faintly here, that same stubborn spark that’s always humming beneath her skin. She used it. She’s cleverer than we ever gave her credit for.

“She doesn’t want to be found,” Riven mutters, and there’s something hollow in his voice when he says it.

“She’s trying to survive,” I answer evenly, because someone needs to say it out loud. “Because someone made her believe she wasn’t wanted.”

That gets a sharp, venomous glance from Lucien, but he doesn’t defend himself this time. Doesn’t even try.

Silas pipes up then, tossing a small rock into the darkness like it’s a grenade. “She’s not a fucking rabbit, Lucien. She’s not prey you can hunt down and rip apart. And you might be the smartest one here, but you’re a goddamn idiot if you don’t know why she left.”

Ambrose straightens, his voice cutting like glass. “Save the lecture for later. She’s bleeding.”

Elias, for once, doesn’t crack a joke. He glances at me, something uneasy flickering in his dark eyes. “The Hollow’s watching.”

I feel it, too. That hum beneath the branches, like the entire place is holding its breath.

Lucien’s footsteps slow until he falls beside me, quiet. He waits until the others surge ahead, until it’s just us moving side by side.

“I didn’t mean to—” he starts.

I cut him off with a glance. “You meant every word.” I stop walking, turning to face him fully, letting my voice lower to something dangerous, deliberate. “You don’t get to break her and then decide you didn’t mean it. Whatever you said back there, you shattered something. And you better hope to the gods she lets you fix it.”

“I didn’t think she’d leave.”

None of us did. We underestimated her. Again.

I turn away from him, already moving back toward the trail. Ambrose is crouched up ahead, pointing to a thread of fabric snagged on a thorn bush.

“She went north,” Ambrose says quietly.

Riven’s head jerks up, something like alarm flashing through his expression. “That leads to the edge.”

The Hollow’s edge isn’t a boundary—it’s a graveyard. Nothing lives there. Nothing comes back.

“She’s not thinking clearly,” I say, voice tightening as I move forward, faster now. “She’s trying to disappear.”

Elias jogs up beside me, breath shallow, hair disheveled like he’s unraveling too. “If something happens to her—”

“It won’t,” I cut him off sharply, because I can’t let the alternative live inside me. Not tonight.

Silas bounds up next, quieter than usual, and that’s how I know how scared he is. He shoots Lucien a dirty glare but doesn’t waste the energy to speak.

We move together, faster now, like the world is closing in around us, and I know—every step we take, every moment she’s out here alone—it’s getting worse.

Because she’s not running anymore.

She’s vanishing.

The trail grows colder the farther we move into the woods. Every step deeper feels like walking into the mouth of something ancient and watching, something that’s been waiting for this very moment. The Hollow has always been predatory, but now it feels… anticipatory. Like it knows she’s running, knows how badly we want her back.

I glance at Silas when he jogs up beside me, his usual cocky grin wiped clean. There’s nothing light or chaotic about him now. He’s chewing the inside of his cheek raw, his hands fidgeting uselessly at his sides.

“Silas,” I say quietly, keeping my voice low so it doesn’t carry to the others. “Try her bond again.”

He jerks his head toward me, blinking like I just punched him. “I’ve been trying.”

“Try harder,” I murmur, because we’re running out of options. “Push.”

Silas hesitates for a breath, then nods once, like he’s about to dive into something sharp. His brows pinch together, mouth parting slightly, and I watch him reach for her in the way only he can—through that living pulse that ties them together. That thread that should be unbreakable.

Seconds stretch thin.

Silas’s expression tightens, and when he finally opens his eyes, there’s nothing playful left in them.

“She’s shut me out,” he says, voice scraping low. “I can’t feel her.”

The weight of it sinks heavy into my chest. Because for her to do that… she’d have to want to disappear from all of us. Completely. It’s not something done lightly, not something you do if you think there’s any chance of going back.

Lucien says nothing, standing a few paces away, arms crossed tightly over his chest. His jaw flexes, and I know without looking too closely that he’s spiraling. He caused this. We all know it. And yet none of us can afford to waste time tearing him apart for it when the damage is already done.

I blow out a breath, forcing my focus back to the ground, the broken leaves beneath my boots, the faint indentation of her steps disappearing into the wild. Ambrose doesn’t wait. He’s already moving again, relentless in the way only he can be.

“She doesn’t want to be found,” Silas mutters beside me, voice cracking despite the way he tries to swallow it down. “She shut me out, .”

“She’s scared,” I say, and it tastes like something bitter in my mouth. “And right now, the only thing she believes is that we’re the monsters she’s running from.”

Lucien finally speaks, voice like razors. “She’s not wrong.”

No one argues with him.

Because right now, she isn’t.

I signal the others forward, and we move faster, the weight of her absence dragging behind us like a storm we can’t outrun.

Ambrose

She’s clever—too clever. She’s zigzagging through the woods like she thinks she can outsmart us, like she believes we won’t know every trick, every pattern. But she forgets I’m the one who taught her how to cover her tracks in the first place. Every subtle shift in the soil, every broken stem beneath her boots—I read it like scripture. She might’ve learned how to hide, but I learned how to hunt.

The others move behind me, but I don’t slow. I don’t need to. My eyes catch every scuff on the forest floor, every leaf turned wrong. She’s not just running. She’s spiraling. Desperate.

I glance back when I feel the crackle of tension—not the kind that curls between Luna and me when we fight and fuck and ruin each other—but real, barely-restrained violence. Lucien’s moving stiffly, jaw tight, fists clenched like he’s two seconds away from shattering the entire Hollow around us.

My gaze narrows, venom sharp behind my teeth. I hate a lot of things about Lucien, but tonight? I hate this the most. “You want to glower at me, Virelius, fine,” I mutter low enough for only him to hear. “But you did this.”

His dark eyes flick toward me, but he says nothing. His guilt clings to him like blood-soaked chains, heavy and dragging with every step. And gods, I’ve said some cruel things to Luna. Done worse. I’ve twisted the knife more than once—but I never tried to make her believe she didn’t belong to us. That we didn’t want her.

Lucien did that.

And now she’s out here, alone, running blind through a world built to devour her.

What gnaws at me isn’t the thought of her outpacing us. It’s the way she’s not using her magic. She’s clever, but she’s emotional, too—reckless when she feels too much. If she were hiding herself, cloaking her presence, we’d feel it through the ripple of her power. I’d taste it like sugar on my tongue, the way I always do when she lets her magic bleed into the world.

But there’s nothing. Just cold air and empty ground.

She’s not hiding.

She’s not using anything to protect herself.

She’s running like a mortal girl, broken and raw and thinking none of us want her.

It makes my teeth grind. It makes me want to tear Lucien’s throat out for putting that idea in her head.

Riven’s pacing a few strides ahead, shoulders tight, muttering curses under his breath while Silas, for once, is silent, stalking beside Elias. Even he can’t joke his way out of this one. Not when we can all feel her absence like a wound.

“She’s smarter than this,” Elias mutters, glancing sideways at me. “She wouldn’t run like this unless she thought she had no choice.”

“She doesn’t,” I say quietly, eyes cutting forward again. “Not after what Lucien said.”

I don’t look back this time. I don’t need to. I feel Lucien’s flinch, sharp and unguarded, like he’s unraveling at the seams. Good. I want him to drown in it. Because every second she’s out here, thinking we hate her, thinking we’d be better off without her—I’m hating myself more.

And when I find her, I’m not letting her run again.

The further we move into the Hollow’s belly, the more I hate how quiet it is.

Not the woods—I can hear the grind of leaves underfoot, the distant rustle of unseen creatures watching us from the bramble—but quiet where it matters. Inside me. Where her bond should be.

I try again.

I close my eyes briefly as I walk, reaching for her, slipping threads of my magic out like fingers on a pulse. Usually, she’s there—whether she means to be or not—a low thrumming weight at the back of my mind, a splintered ache between my ribs. Sometimes she’s all heat and static, sometimes a sharp flicker, but she’s always there.

Now there’s nothing.

Not a door slammed shut, not a wall I could break through if I wanted.

Nothing.

Like she’s not even on the other side.

My jaw flexes as I flick my gaze toward , who moves like a blade beside me—precise, lethal, quiet. He feels it too. I can see it in the crease between his brows, in the way his shoulders go rigid every time we hit another footprint or a broken branch in the path ahead. Elias and Silas aren’t even pretending anymore. They’re frantic behind me, arguing about which direction she might’ve turned last, but I barely hear them over the roar beneath my skin.

The hollow ache of the bond is worse than silence.

Because I know she’s not dead. I’d feel that. We'd all feel that.

No, she’s doing this on purpose. She’s holding herself somewhere I can’t get to, not even through the thing that binds us together. And that terrifies me more than any beast hiding in these woods.

“She’s not blocking it,” I mutter, mostly to myself, but ’s sharp gaze slices toward me anyway.

“What?” he asks, voice rough.

“She’s not blocking me. She’s not throwing up shields.” My mouth feels dry, my throat tight around the next words. “It’s like she’s not even on the other side.”

exhales slowly, and I can see the calculation happening behind his eyes, the way he’s tearing apart every possibility, every magical theory, every contingency. But he doesn’t say what we’re both thinking.

If she’s cut herself off so completely, it’s because she believes there’s nothing left on this end to come back to. And that—that’s my fault. And Lucien’s. And all of us, really, every last one of us who pushed and pulled at her until she unraveled.

A branch snaps up ahead. Riven lifts a hand to signal us forward. Silas and Elias fall in line behind him like hounds too long off the leash, but I pause one second longer, tilting my head back to the Hollow’s sky—black and endless, bleeding with faint slashes of crimson. This place is alive. It breathes around us. It wants her.

If she keeps running like this, it will find her before we do.

I push the bond one last time, this time harder, rougher—like dragging knuckles over broken glass.

Luna.

Still nothing.

A void where she should be.

And something cold unfurls in my chest, sharp and sharp-edged. She’s slipping further away. And if we don’t find her soon, none of us are going to survive what happens when we lose her.

The forest shifts around me like a living thing—low-hung branches slicing at my arms, brambles clawing at my ankles like they want me to bleed for every step. I move faster, slicing through the shadows, the pulse of magic under my skin humming like a live wire. Ahead, the footprints grow staggered. Scattered. Hers.

She’s slipping.

Every few yards, the dirt tells me a different story—the drag of her boot where she stumbled, the heel mark when she pivoted too sharp. She’s zigzagging, but she’s not clever enough right now. Not careful enough. She's too upset to hide herself properly, and that alone makes my chest pull tight.

Because it’s not just the Hollow that hunts here.

It’s not just the wild, maddened things Branwen left behind when she made this place her graveyard.

It’s the others.

Two hundred binders—or what's left of them. Monsters, half-mad with grief and magic, with their own histories and grudges. Half of them would tear her apart if they caught her. The other half would tear her apart just for the hell of it.

And she’s running right toward them.

I pause at a break in the path, crouching low. The soil here tells me more—lighter footsteps overlaying hers, trailing her path like shadowy echoes. Not one. Two, maybe three. Too far apart to be animals. Too light for men.

My gut knots, and when I glance over my shoulder, is already closing the distance to me, his eyes sharp as cut obsidian. “What is it?”

I rise slowly, wiping my hands off on my thighs. “We’re not the only ones following her.”

His gaze sharpens. “Sin binders?”

“Could be,” I murmur, glancing back down the trail. "They’re smart. Keeping to the edges. Watching."

Behind us, Elias and Silas are arguing—loudly, annoyingly—about whether she could have gone left at the last fork, and I snap my fingers to get their attention, cutting them off mid-bicker.