I rest against his chest, fingers sketching thoughtless patterns over his shoulders while his hands soothe down my spine. For one aching heartbeat, I let myself believe this could last. That this softness could be mine.
But I know better.
Eventually, I peel myself away, legs unsteady as I stand, adjusting my clothes with shaking hands. Cassiel doesn’t speak. He only watches, his silence heavy, his eyes following me as I take a final look around the room that raised me.
The end of something I can never reclaim.
I swallow the lump in my throat and step into the hallway. Cassiel follows, like a silent shadow at my back.
I hug my parents one last time, burning the warmth of them into my memory, the shape of their arms, the sound of their breath. I hold on too long, because I know this is the last time.
Then I walk out into the night. The air is cool and sharp, stinging my skin. I don’t look back.
I wait.
Minutes drag, heavy as centuries, before Cassiel emerges. His presence feels different now—weighted, darkened. I don’t need to ask. I already know.
He doesn’t speak. He only pulls me against his chest, holding me as if he can shield me from the choice he just made for me, for them.
And when the air splits and shadows fold us away, I hear it—the faint, final sound of glass shattering.
And I know.
Not again.
FIFTY
The moment we step through the portal I know something is wrong. Lillien is still in my arms, warm and solid and real—her scent, dark sugar and heat, clinging to my skin. For an instant that small certitude steadies me. Then my boots hit the apartment floor and the air rips open.
Glass crunches underfoot, a thousand tiny screams of light. The coppery tang of blood licks at my throat. The apartment is a ruin: furniture splintered into raw shapes, the drywall blackened where scorch marks climb like veins, shards of window glass glittering cruel as ice. Scattered in the wreckage are other shapes—too many: at least ten of Zepharion’s guards. Silent, patient, their armor eating the light.
One of them moves like an animal. He lunges. I do not think. I move. I shove Lillien behind me with one arm and let instinct take the rest. My wings flare out as if they have their own will, blackened feathers edged in holy fire, a remnant of the thing I was before. They haven’t seen me like this. Never like this.
He never lands a hit. My fist finds a hollow in his chest and sends him through what’s left of a coffee table. He does not get up.
But the others are on us. Bastion becomes a storm, ripping and throwing, a blur of brutal force. Deimos is silk and shadow, a blade of motion that opens skin and bleeds red mist into the air. The room becomes a war hymn.
And me—something that has been sleeping in the hollow of my chest claws awake. The pain of what I almost did, the memory of offering her up like an object—those times when I chose what reason told me to choose. The shame and the guilt and the memory of her face at that moment snap like a wire.
No more holding back. No more pretending.
I let go.
Fire answers me. Not the lazy, corrosive fire of sinners, but a white-hot flame that feels like memory and bone and the old brutality of Heaven. It roars up from my palms as if the world had been waiting for permission to burn. This is not Hell’s flame. This is mine—holy and cursed and precise. The nearest demon goes to ash before he can scream. The rest turn, too late, as light spills from me and eats the room.
I do not stop. The blaze devours flesh, armor, the smell of iron and the soft pop of things breaking down into nothing. It is violent and clean and it strips the place until silence falls.
When the light collapses back into shadow, the apartment is a graveyard of blackened bones. I stand in the center, breathing too fast. My hands still glow as heat rises off my skin in visible waves. My chest is a drum. My heart is a war.
“Cassiel.” Lillien’s voice cuts through the stillness—soft, steady, and it feels like a tether.
I turn slowly. She is staring at me. Not with fear. Not with horror. With something else. Awe, maybe, or the fierce thrill of witnessing power. Her face is honest in a way I am not.
Deimos and Bastion stand behind her, blood and bruises on them but alive. They trade a look that resembles respect.
Deimos moves first. He steps forward, breath ragged, then grips the back of my neck and pulls me into a hard, unbearably human embrace. “About fucking time,” he mutters into my shoulder, the words an odd blessing, then breaks away with a crooked grin and goes to Lillien.
She has not taken her eyes off me. “That,” she breathes, “was so fucking hot.”
