Isarienne. My true demon name. I have only seen it once, in a file buried beneath everything they let me believe about myself. It has never been said aloud. Not until now.
I try not to tremble.
Zepharion gestures to the crowd. “You see her beauty. You feel her power. She is already everything I promised and more.”
A pause, then his voice drops, smooth as poison. “However, there is one small complication.”
A hush falls again, immediate and sharp. My heart trips in my chest. Zepharion turns to me, still holding my hand. His smile is almost regretful.
“She came to me willingly,” he says. “But she did not come untouched.”
Murmurs ripple. People laugh. He lets the word sit and rot in the air. “She is bonded to another.”
The room tightens. The laughter dies. A quiet fear spreads like smoke.
“Deimos Tenebris,” Zepharion says, low and almost bored.
Gasps. Flinches. A creature at the front physically steps back. I blink, confused. Why are they afraid?
Before I can move, Zepharion drops my hand. Two guards step from the shadows behind me. Hands are on my shoulders. I hardly register the movement before they push and I fall to my knees.
The silk of my dress pools around me like blood in water. My hands land flat on the cold obsidian. My breath catches. The room holds itself again. Not out of reverence. Not respect. Anticipation.
Zepharion steps in front of me, looking down as if this is routine. “She gave herself to another before she knew what she was meant for,” he tells the crowd. “It is no fault of hers. The world lies to children. But now...”
He lays a hand on my head. His fingers thread gently through my hair.
“Now,” he says softly, “she will be made whole.”
The crowd bows its head in eerie unison. My pulse hammers. I want to scream, to run, to fight. But the world already feels off. My thoughts thicken. Every instinct warns me this is not ceremony. This is sacrifice.
Zepharion lifts his other hand. A blade appears, ornate and carved with markings that shift when I try to focus on them. It glows and pulses with a life I cannot name. He does not press it to my skin. He raises it above me and slices through the air.
Heat, or maybe absence, rolls through me. The bond with Deimos wails. It is not a sound I can hear but a tearing inside my ribs, a ragged hollowing pull. For a second the world snaps sharp and I know everything at once—his face, his promise, the tether humming under my sternum.
Then my thoughts thicken like oil. I reach for that tether and my mind will not obey. The bond dims as if someone has drawn a curtain between us. It does not break. It gutters and thins, a dying ember held in cold fingers.
Something in me fights. I reach, in the dark behind my eyes, for Cassiel’s ribbon, for Bastion’s armor, for Deimos’ ember. The threads answer faint and thin as cord pulled through wool. When I try to widen the seam the light stammers into static. The basalt plates crawl up like a memory with all their hunger stripped away. The braid we made in the practice chamber unravels to a whisper.
My tongue thickens against the roof of my mouth. Words dissolve as I try to shape them. I want to tell them to run, to smash everything, to take me and leave, but the sentence will not form. I can think in images—Deimos’ hand closing over mine, Bastion’s blade flashing, Cassiel humming light—but the plan that would take me to them fragments before I can hold it.
Zepharion watches me like one inspects a specimen. His smile is a white blade. “There,” he says to the court. “Clean.”
He steps back and lifts his arms. The crowd erupts. They call my true name again as if to bind it into me. The choker rests cold and indifferent at my throat. The wool around my mind tightens and I sit in a slow pool of muddled thoughts, trying to drag a single plan through the fog.
For a single, tiny instant I feel Deimos’ ember pulse back—faint but real. I seize it like a rope. It gives me an image, a single sharp thing I can still force into words: run, find, break. I try tomove on that image, to whisper a warning, to send Deimos one small signal.
The choker presses at my throat. The thought scrapes and falls silent. The court cheers. They call me queen, and I am a captive of velvet and gilding, moving under a weight I cannot quite lift.
SIXTY-TWO
Deimos is mid-sentence, pacing in front of the massive obsidian throne, jaw tight, fire burning under his skin, when it happens.
He stops. Just stops.
His breath catches like a trap snapping shut. His body tenses, eyes flaring. Then he drops. Hard. He hits his knees with a sound that twists my stomach. His hands slam against the stone floor, fingers clawing at the cracks as if he can hold himself together by force.
“Deimos?” Bastion is already moving, faster than thought, faster than breath.
