The wind howled behind them. Far off—but gaining.
They weren’t going to get a second warning.
They’d chosen each other.
Now they had to survive it.
THIRTY-ONE
SERAPHINE
They found shelter in a ruined hall carved into the cliffside, half-swallowed by moss and ash, long since abandoned to whatever gods had fled this place first.
The Wyrdlands didn’t welcome them. They endured them.
Rain pounded the stone above like fists. Lightning cracked across the jagged sky, and the wind screamed through the broken archways like it remembered war.
Seraphine shucked off her soaked coat and shook out her braid, hands trembling only slightly from the cold—maybe the fear.
Cassian was pacing. Jaw tight. Eyes darker than they’d been even during the worst of the fights. The fire in him burned lower now, flickering—not from weakness, but restraint.
Too much boiling beneath the surface.
He hadn’t spoken since they left the ridge. Neither had she.
She sank to the cracked stone floor near a shallow alcove where the roof had only mostly caved in. “We should rest,” she said, voice rough.
Cassian didn’t stop pacing.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor,” she muttered.
“I can’t sleep.”
“You need to.”
“I can’t.”
She looked up at him. “Why?”
He froze. Just for a second. Then he turned, slow, deliberate. “Because every time I close my eyes, I see you dying.”
Her breath caught. She hadn’t expected that.
He moved toward her, boots dragging through the wet leaves that had blown in. He stopped a few feet away, arms crossed like he was holding himself together with muscle and will alone.
“You don’t think I know what we’re walking into?” he said. “You don’t think I’ve figured it out?”
“Figuredwhatout?”
“That there’s no version of this ending where we both survive.”
Her chest tightened. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” His voice was quiet. “Because I’veseenit, Sera. When I died—when the Hollow touched me. Isawwhat it wants. And I saw what has to happen to stop it.”
She stood slowly. Rain dripped through the cracked ceiling, catching on her shoulders, her jaw, her lashes.
“I don’t accept that,” she said. “I won’t.”
