He ran a hand through his hair. “Your fire. My blood. Her laugh.”
Her throat closed. “And then?”
“Then the Hollow took her.”
Her heart twisted.
Cassian finally looked at her. His eyes weren’t the color of storm anymore. They were deeper now. Like dusk. Like something ancient trying to burn itself into the present.
“I saw what I’d lose,” he said. “But I also saw what I couldfightfor.”
She reached for him then, crawling across the broken floor, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, the soot staining her palms. She took his face in her hands.
“I don’t care what the prophecy says,” she murmured. “I don’t care what the Hollow wants. Or what my father thinks I’m supposed to be.”
His brow furrowed. “Sera?—”
“No. Listen to me.” Her voice trembled with fury and love and something desperate between the two. “I choose you. Not because it’s easy. Not because it’s safe. But because I love you. And I’m done letting duty dictate my heart.”
Cassian looked like she’d punched him. And maybe she had. Because that was the first time she’d said it like this. Not in a whisper. Not in a gasp. Not in the aftermath of fire and ruin.
Clear. Certain.Chosen.
His mouth parted like he had something to say—but then the air shifted.
Seraphine’s instincts kicked in at the same moment as his. She spun toward the entrance just as three shadows darted into view—fast, silent, deadly.
Executioners.
Not a fantasy. Not a fear. They werehere.
“Move!” Seraphine shouted, the cold stone biting her bare soles as she lunged for her glaive.
Cassian was already up. His blade igniting with a lowsnap, blue-white flames licking along the edge, his stance wide, solid, the storm inside him crackling for a fight.
The first attacker didn’t hesitate.
A woman, taller than Seraphine, face hidden behind a silver half-mask etched with the Emperor’s crest—fangs and flame. Her twin blades shimmered with runes, dark ink that pulsed like veins, dripping magic Seraphinefeltbefore she saw it. The air around them twisted, oily and wrong.
Seraphine ducked beneath the woman’s first strike. The second nicked her arm, but she didn’t flinch. Her momentum carried her into a tight spin, and she slammed the flat of her glaive into the assassin’s ribs with enough force to hear the crunch. The woman flew back into a cracked pillar and didn’t rise.
“Cassian—!” she called.
Two more shadows dropped from the broken rafters, fast andsilent.
He was already there, intercepting them in a spray of heat and steel.
The first blade clanged off his forearm guard, the second glanced his shoulder. He didn’t stagger. He roared, flames bursting outward, knocking one assassin back into a wall where the stoneshatteredunder their weight.
The other slid low, sweeping Cassian’s legs. He twisted mid-fall, drove his sword into the floor, and caught himself in a crouch.
“We have to run!” she shouted.
He blocked a strike with the edge of his flame-wreathed forearm and growled, “We can’t outrun them!”
Seraphine parried another strike from the silver-masked woman. She was back on her feet, somehow still moving—turned just in time to see a fourth assassin emerging from the tree line beyond the ruins.
“Then we don’t outrun them,” she hissed, catching Cassian’s eyes. “We outrun their expectations.”
