Behind me Cassiel sinks to the floor, hands braced to pull himself upright. Bastion prowls the edges of the hall, a sentinel tasting exits and weaknesses the way soldiers test a wall. The fortress does not invite easy departure. It rings with the gravity of the lower circles; it knows Hell in the way a blade knows blood.
We have descended, and the place accepts us in the way monsters accept kin. For a dizzy breath I feel a strange warmth: the kind of wrong belonging that hums like a second skin. Hell welcomes us home, and for the first time since the ash cleared, I do not entirely fear what that means.
The fortress smells of brimstone and old iron, but the hall still holds heat in its bones. Bastion is curled behind me, heavy and warm, one arm thrown possessive across my waist. Deimos stands by the door, eyes closed but alert as wire. Cassiel isfarther off, close enough to reach, far enough to watch. Always within reach now.
I close my eyes to the steady dark and fall.
The dream finds me fast, as if it's been waiting for me. I am somewhere I have never lived. Roses gleam like obsidian, their petals razor-slick, roots writhing beneath my boots like sleeping serpents. The air tastes of old prayers and rot. I don’t know how I know it, only that I do: this is Zepharion’s garden.
He steps out of the mist and is perfect and terrible. He wears charm the way other men wear armor. His eyes are soft and their kindness is a lie that thins the air. He smiles like a man who has planned a triumph.
“You cannot hide forever, petal,” he says, voice silk and razor. “You think you are safe beneath my soil? Every breath you take here is mine.”
I lift my chin. The garden should be his cradle. “Send your guards then. Bring them all. We will kill them for sport.”
He laughs, and the laugh is a blade through warm flesh. “Yes,” he murmurs. “I want you to. It will make the next part sweeter.”
The world he gave me curdles. The roses blacken. The ground opens and the smell of iron roars up. I am not standing anymore. I am falling into the center of the thing he meant for me.
First Deimos appears, crucified against a gate of bone. His wings are torn ragged from his shoulders. He tries to cry out and only a bubbling, strangled sound comes from his throat. His eyes find me and the look is not pleading but accusation. I cannot reach him. My hands are full of air.
Bastion is on a bed of living fire. He is laughing once, a thin, stunned sound, and then someone pierces a blade through his chest. The movement feels clinical, casual. He does not diegently. His fingers twitch as if still reaching for me and the sparks that fly off those fingertips look like promises breaking.
Cassiel kneels with his back bowed and his mouth stitched closed. The thread around his lips glows faint with a soundless heat. He is burning from the inside, and his eyes are wide and wet like a hurt animal. He cannot sing. He cannot speak. He cannot breathe properly, and those little gasps are the kind of things that lodge in my throat and do not go away.
I scream. The sound tears out of me and into the dream but it accomplishes nothing. I am not the author here. My voice is swallowed and rearranged.
Zepharion leans close, breath cool and precise against my ear, and says, “Do you hear them calling for you? No? Because they will not. They never will.”
His whisper is a cold knot. He turns my love into spectacle and my fear into entertainment. He forces me to watch, looping the same image until my eyes burn. He rewinds my worst memory and sets it in my chest.
I wake choking. The sheets feel like ash. My throat is raw and the room is ordinary and wrong. Hell’s heat press against skin does nothing to chase away the ice blooming under my ribs.
Deimos is at my shoulder before I can collect myself. His hands are steady on my shoulders. His voice is softer than I expect, threaded with panic that tries to sound practical. “Lustling. Tell me. What did you see?”
The dream is too big to pour into words. The images are still there, bright and sticky. I feel their weight in my hands. I cannot fold them into a sentence that will make him understand without breaking him too. I find my throat closing like a trap.
“I’m fine,” I say, and all the lie tastes like metal.
He does not push. He holds me as if holding will keep me from being hollowed out again. I curl my knees to my chest and try to tuck the sound away. The echoes do not obey.
Zepharion’s voice is still in my head, patient as rot.They will not come for you, he said. The thought settles like a stone. It is not a threat that he will take them that hurts the most. It is the part where he tells me no one will answer when I call. That is the cruelty he wants me to believe.
FIFTY-TWO
The garden is too still, a silence that presses into the ears like velvet. Light sifts through leaves that never brown, and flowers bloom without a single rustle. Time moves differently here, soft and suspended, like a held breath that will not be released. Everything feels sacred and wrong at once, as if the place remembers prayers it was never meant to keep.
Her laughter fractures that hush, low and sultry and all wrong in a field of quiet piety. It slips through the air, curling like smoke across a cathedral floor. I should have noticed then; I should have read the rhythm of the moment and stepped back. I did not. I let the sound pull me forward.
She steps barefoot across the grass, the fabric of her dress dark against the pale blooms. Every movement is a poem, slow and certain, as if she had been born to inhabit beauty. She reaches for me, but not for my hand and not for my face. Her fingers find my wing.
Wings are private. Sacred. I stiffen at the touch as if someone has pressed a holy thing to my ribs. Her fingers skim the outermost edge like a thief learning a lock, reverent and curious both. “They’re beautiful,” she whispers, voice soft enough to make the petals tremble.
Her lips brush the feathers, soft and careful and electric. She tastes like heat and wine and temptation wrapped in silk, and the honest, stupid thing is that I lean into it. “You’rebeautiful,” she says then, and the world tilts.
I should have pulled away. I should have known. Instead, I let her kiss me. I told myself then that this is love, that what I feel is pure, righteous in its own way. I convinced myself that Heaven would understand such honesty, that devotion could not be sin if it was true.
The shift comes small and slow at first, a thinning of the light, a hush where the birds stop singing. A warm, dry breeze curls around us and beneath the flicker of perfumed air something else threads in, the faintest curl of brimstone. I smell it and the roots of me answer, the way a beast recognizes its hunter.
