I am right behind him. But Deimos does not answer. He does not even look at us. He screams. Something I have never heard from him before. Not when he descended into the Void. Not when he clawed his way back. This is something else: raw, broken, torn.
He curls forward, clutching his chest like something is being torn out from the inside. Smoke leaves his wings in quick bursts and vanishes. His eyes are too bright, too wide, like he is trapped in a private inferno.
“What the fuck is happening?” Bastion demands, dropping to his knees and gripping Deimos by the shoulders as if physical contact can tether him to the present.
I already know. The faint tear in the air, the snap that felt like a cord being cut from the other side. The bond. My throat goes dry.
“He’s trying to sever it,” I say. The word leaves me small and hollow. Zepharion. Lillien.
Deimos utters a guttural sound, half-curse, half-curse against the world. His shoulders heave. “He tried,” he rasps. “Tried.” His voice is torn raw. “He did not finish it. I can still feel her.” He sucks a breath in. “Barely. Like she is buried under a mile of stone. But she is there.”
Relief cuts through me, sharp and immediate, but it is not clean. It is a fracture line of hope. Bastion exhales harshly and bows his head for a beat, like he is gathering himself. Then he slides his hand along Deimos’s spine in the only way he knows how to be steady.
“If the bond is still alive,” Bastion says, voice low and dangerous, “even dimmed, then we still have a chance.”
Deimos looks at him as if Bastion has spoken a prophecy. “A chance?” he spits. “To what? March into the domain of a Warden of Hell and ask nicely for her back?”
Anger floods the room. It is bright and animal and very human. Bastion’s hands clench into fists until his knuckles go white. He paces, a coiled thing. “We cannot stand here and do nothing,” he says. “We do not bargain with monsters with words. We take what is ours back.”
Heat rises behind my eyes. I want to throw myself at Zepharion’s throat. I want to tear down his hall with my bare hands. I want to find Lillien and pull her free. But the priest in me counts the cost with every impulse. We are soldiers. We are not fools. We have to move with a plan.
“No,” Deimos says, voice cutting through Bastion’s fury. “Not alone.”
A silence sits heavy for a moment, then Bastion collapses into a chair and punches the armrest as if punching the world will rearrange it. “Then what?” he snarls. “Do we crawl to him on our knees? Do we beg the Great Warden to hand her back because we asked nice?”
I bow my head, fingers brushing the faint scar along my wrist where vows were once sealed. The mark burns sometimes when I pray too hard or remember too much.
“We need help,” I say, my voice steady but cold. “We can’t take Zepharion’s court by brute force. Not even together. We need leverage. Allies who know how to bargain in his realm.”
Deimos looks at me then. “What about my father?” he asks after a beat.
Bastion’s pacing stops. “Your father,” he repeats, half hope, half disgust.
“Would you go to him?” I ask. I have seen Deimos’s father carved in old stories and whispered as a threat. He is not a man to be invoked lightly. He is not a savior. He is a storm that claims what it needs and discards the rest.
Deimos’s answer is a sputter of bitterness. “He never helped me before. He barely claims me. You think he lifts a finger for what I care about?”
Bastion’s laugh is short and ugly. “Perhaps he will if she is worth something to him. Perhaps he will if this Isarienne name means anything in his halls.”
The name Isarienne hangs between us. It changes the air. We all know what it means, what value and danger and history it carries.
I step forward, careful. My voice steadies. “I know you hate him,” I say, not flinching from the honesty of it. “I would hate him too. But this is not about old wounds. This is about her.” Imeet Deimos’s eyes. “We cannot charge blind into Zepharion’s court. We will lose her for good. If there is a chance your father will answer—if there is any part of him that ever acknowledged you as more than a mistake—you have to try.”
Deimos flinches and the motion is almost confession. He exhales like a man who has swallowed salt. “Fine,” he says finally, pushing himself upright. His voice is rough and low. “We will ask.”
He turns toward the far wall, toward the ancient sigils carved into basalt that none of us read but that all of us feel. “But do not expect him to say yes,” he adds, eyes black and hard.
The room seems to close in at those words. We stand on the edge of a thing that will change everything. I feel the weight of the vow we have already made to her, the one that sounds in every heartbeat: we will not let anything happen to you. We will go anywhere. We will beg anyone. We will burn the world down if it stands between us and her.
SIXTY-THREE
Iam fraying.
Not at the edges, not in any visible way—but in the deepest places no one can see. At the seams of my soul, where once there was heat and harmony and golden humming light… now there’s only static. Like a broken connection. Like a song I can’t quite remember, stuck behind walls too thick to breach.
Zepharion doesn’t chain me. He doesn’t need to. He plays a longer game.
He feeds me—power like honey, thick and slow, dripped from his fingers with decadent precision. Meals spiced exactly to my taste, drawn from memories I don’t remember sharing. Baths scented with things I once loved. He clothes me in silk and satin, lavishes me in illusion and luxury, and wraps his indulgence in a bow of false freedom.
