My hands curl into the sheets, white-knuckled and clawed, but there’s no satisfaction in the grip. No anchor. Just silk that slides away too easily—like control, like hope, like breath.
I force myself up. Each movement a negotiation. My knees threaten to buckle, but I find the floor. My legs carry me to the hearth, where the coals still smolder. I sink to them like they’re the last bit of heat I’ll ever know.
And I reach. Not for the fire—but forthem. My bonds.
Cassiel. Bastion. Deimos.
“Please.”
My fingers curl against the mark on my chest, the place where their magic once hummed like a song beneath my skin. I push inward. Harder. Desperate.
For a moment—a moment—I feel it. A flicker. A faint thread of something warm. Familiar.
“Cassiel?” But then it slips.
Snuffed out like a candle in a storm. The necklace around my throat pulses—tightens—like a collar with a leash I didn’t agree to.
Pain sparks down my spine. The bond dims again. Gone.
My shoulders hunch forward. Silent tears track down my face.
I can’t keep doing this. No.
I force myself upright, the movement clumsy, defiant. I drag my trembling limbs across the room to the gilded vanity. The mirror stares back, cruel and cold.
A stranger blinks from within the glass.
Her cheeks are hollowed. Her skin dulled to ash. Her eyes… Gods, her eyes arewrong. Wide and hollow, rimmed with shadow and grief. The necklace gleams at her throat—garnet and obsidian, polished like a trophy. Like shackles dressed up for court.
She looks like she belongs to him. But she doesn’t. Not truly.
I lift a hand to the glass and touch the reflection’s face. Her skin is cool where mine burns. Her mouth trembles where mine sets into steel.
“I won’t let you win,” I whisper.
The voice is faint. But it’s mine.
“You want to make me your bride,” I say to the mirror, to the walls, to the monster watching from the shadows. “You want to make me forget.”
But I remember.
“I belong tothem,” I whisper fiercely. “To Cassiel. To Bastion. To Deimos.”
Not to Zepharion. Not to this prison. Not to the lies dressed as ceremony and silk.
And even if the world forgets me.I won’t forget who I am.
SEVENTY-THREE
The throne room smells like old power. Blood, ash, sanctified ruin. It sits heavy in the throat.
Deimos paces like a living wound, shoulders tight, jaw a razor line. Cassiel stands over the long table, maps and notes spread like a war surgeon’s instruments, eyes tracing every imaginable breach in Zepharion’s domain. Me, I am perched on the lip of the table, arms crossed, fists ready to break bone. I am not good at waiting.
“We should march in,” I say, voice flat. “Take the fight to him. Force him to look at us before we tear out his throat.”
Cassiel does not look up at first. Then he lifts his head, slow and deliberate. “And then what?” he asks. “Alert every sentinel in his court? Get pinned at the outer sanctum with no angle left? If we are going to do this, we do it smart.”
I snort. “If we wait, he binds her to him in every way that matters. Spirit, body, power. You really want to calculate that risk?”
