Elias
We follow like we always do—silent hounds on the scent of something vile.
Ambrose doesn’t bleed, not like the rest of us. He fractures in quiet ways, in mirrored surfaces and low, cutting remarks that only make sense days later. But he’s been off. Meaner. More withdrawn. And I knew, the moment I saw that dark shade of regret trailing in behind the Council’s self-important robes, why.
Keira.
Of course it’s fucking Keira.
Silas makes a sound beside me that’s somewhere between a sigh and a growl, and Luna stiffens between us. She’s close enough that I can feel the warmth of her arm brushing mine as we crouch behind a crumbling courtyard wall, spying on what should probably be a private reunion.
Except Ambrose forfeited the right to privacy the second he got emotionally compromised. That shit’s dangerous in our line of… whatever the hell this is now. War? Apocalypse? A cosmic love triangle with a body count?
“Is that her?”
Luna whispers.
Her voice isn’t sharp. It’s soft, curious. But there’s an edge under it. A quiet, unsettled hum. And I don’t blame her.
Keira doesn’t just exist in a space. She infects it. That’s how it always was with her. The kind of pretty that makes you forget your common sense. The kind of power that makes the world tilt when she walks.
I glance down at Luna, her brows drawn, eyes narrowed like she’s trying to read a language she was never taught. She doesn’t know who Keira is, not really. Not yet.
But she knows enough.
“Yep,”
I say, keeping my voice dry.
“That’s the walking trauma spiral we don’t mention before sunrise.”
Silas chuckles.
“She’s the reason Ambrose nearly blew the wine cellar apart last spring.”
“Not the good wine cellar,”
I mock-gasp.
“The one with the 1802 Bordeaux.”
“Fucking tragedy.”
Luna shifts her weight, and I know that move. It’s not discomfort—it’s observation. She’s filing this away, piecing it together. Ambrose’s tension. The stilted body language. The way Keira tilts her head just enough to say I still own part of you.
And Ambrose? He lets her talk.
That’s what kills me. He listens to her. After everything.
He hasn’t looked at Luna once since they walked in. Not that he ever gives much away. But his silence now is too deliberate. Too cutting.
Luna leans closer to the crack in the stone, her fingers brushing mine on the edge of the wall. She doesn’t notice. But I do.
Always do.
“What happened between them?”
she asks, quieter now.
Silas opens his mouth—I jab him in the ribs before he can start with some joke about knives and orgasms.
“It’s Ambrose,”
I murmur.
“He doesn’t do love. He does strategy. But with her? He tried. Gave her the soft parts. And she tore them up like they were notes she didn’t like the tune of.”
Luna’s eyes darken. Not with jealousy. Not even hurt. Just this slow, soul-deep kind of understanding. She gets it. The weight of betrayal. The stain it leaves behind.
Ambrose and Keira keep circling each other, like wolves pretending they’re civilized.
She may not be bonded to Ambrose, but she feels him. The way we all do. The way this world warps around each of us, pulling, stretching, breaking.
Silas exhales dramatically.
“This is better than any of the Hollow’s hallucination loops.”
“Shut up,” I mutter.
He grins.
“Admit it. You love a little gossip.”
I ignore him and look back at Ambrose—at how his shoulders are tight, jaw locked, mouth moving with words we can’t hear, but feel the weight of anyway.
Something’s coming.
And this? This little prelude of betrayal and unfinished conversations?
This is just the fucking overture.
“I can lip read,”
Silas says proudly beside me.
He can’t.
Not even a little.
The last time he tried, we ended up thinking Caspian was planning an orgy in the chapel. Turned out he was just reciting one of his creepy incantations over the altar stones. Still, made for an awkward three hours of waiting behind the organ with a bottle of whiskey and anticipation.
Now, Silas squints toward Ambrose and Keira, his expression a tragic mix of self-satisfaction and utter delusion.
“She just said I still want you… or I have a horse. The lighting’s weird.”
“She said neither of those things.”
“You don’t know.”
“I know you’re legally blind in your left eye and your right one just vibes.”
Luna huffs a laugh between us, but it’s distracted. Her gaze hasn’t moved from Ambrose. She’s trying to decipher something, and I don’t like how quiet she’s gotten. I don’t like how still. Still means thoughts. Thoughts mean feelings. Feelings mean she’s not looking at me.
I nudge her arm with my elbow.
She blinks at me.
“Want me to take her out?”
I ask, nodding toward Keira.
“I’ll make it look like an accident. Slip on the wet stone. Broken neck. Tragic, really.”
Luna’s mouth twitches.
“You’d be the most obvious suspect.”
“Only if they find the body.”
“She’s Council.”
“Even better. We can blame it on protocol. I’ll write a whole speech about it. Something poetic. We regret to inform you that your treachery has expired. Please exit via the nearest pit.”
Silas leans in.
“I’ll bring the shovel.”
“Oh, no, no,”
I whisper.
“You bury things like a raccoon on a caffeine binge. It’s not dignified.”
Luna’s smile deepens, but her shoulders are still tight. We all feel it. And watching him spiral toward old disaster is like watching your ex dive back into the arms of the trauma that built him.
Keira steps in closer, voice too low to hear, but her posture is pure poison—back arched, head tilted, lips parted like she’s delivering a monologue written for someone she already intends to betray.
I hate her. Not for what she did to Ambrose.
I hate her because she’s the ghost that’ll linger in Luna’s head after this.
“You okay?” I murmur.
Luna nods. Lies.
So I reach over, tug her hood down gently to shield her face and lean close, my mouth just at her ear.
“Just so we’re clear,”
I say quietly.
“if you ever pull some ancient heartbreak out of your back pocket and parade him around looking like a Calvin Klein curse, I’m throwing him off the roof.”
She exhales through a laugh.
“That’s fair.”
“Damn right it is.”
Silas watches us, dramatically wounded.
“You two flirting without me again? Wow. Disrespectful.”
“You were busy misreading Keira’s lips.”
“I was—she just said I am the villain in this story and I’ll ruin everything you love.”
“…Okay, that might actually be accurate.”
We all go quiet again.
Ambrose says something sharp now. His face is blank, but I catch the flicker of hate under it. Not fury. Hate. A colder, older thing. Keira flinches—but only slightly. She’s practiced. This is their dance. Wounds hidden in every step.
I lean back, bump her shoulder with mine, and sigh dramatically.
“This is why I’m emotionally unavailable. No one ever cries over me in the rain. Where’s my tragic ex?”
“You don’t have one.”
“I should get one.”
“I don’t think you’re capable of sustaining a relationship long enough to earn one.”
“That’s mean.”
She grins at me again. Genuine this time.
And that? That’s all I need.
Let Ambrose tear himself apart with his past. Let Keira play whatever long con she’s staging. As long as Luna keeps looking at me like that, I don’t care what collapses around us.
Let it all burn.
Holy shit.
Keira lunges like a starving thing and wraps herself around Ambrose like she’s starving for rot. Like she never left. Like nine months of silence never happened. Her lips crash into his with the desperation of someone trying to rewrite time, rewrite consequences.
And Ambrose—he doesn't flinch.
He just lets her.
My stomach flips, sour and sharp. Not because I give a damn about Ambrose—he’s a walking vault of secrets I’m not interested in prying open—but because Luna’s standing right beside me.
The bond between us tugs like it’s testing for fracture lines. Her magic slides under my skin like it’s searching for the part of me that can make sense of this, soothe it, solve it. But I can’t. Because Luna isn’t rage or envy or sorrow.
She’s the storm that contains those things. Barely.
I glance sideways, expecting her to look away, or burn the world down.
But no.
She’s watching. Her eyes unreadable. Her expression still.
I’ve seen her set fire to a dress just because a girl looked at me too long. I’ve felt her power coil around me in warning, possessive, hungry, protective.
But now?
Nothing.
And it’s worse than fury.
“Should we, uh…”
Silas whispers from my other side.
“Intervene? Or… I don’t know, scream ‘get a room’ and throw something?”
“She’s not doing anything,”
I mutter, narrowing my eyes on Luna.
“She always does something.”
Her jaw flexes. That’s the only sign of strain. Like she’s trying not to grind her own teeth to dust. The restraint is unnatural. Wrong.
She turns slowly, deliberately, and begins walking away.
“Luna.”
I follow her immediately, grabbing her wrist—not to stop her. Just to anchor her. Her pulse is calm. Too calm.
“Say something.”
She looks up at me, expression still smooth. Still deadly.
“I don’t need to.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Then let it be.”
She pulls her hand from mine, and I let her go, even though every part of me wants to cage her in, force her to rage, to feel—because at least that would mean she still wants something from him. Something that isn’t silence.
Behind us, Silas curses.
“We should’ve drowned her in the fountain.”
“Keira or Luna?”
“Why not both?”
I should laugh. But my stomach’s coiling too tight, too fast.
I catch up with Luna again as she turns the corner, and I fall into step beside her. Quiet. For once.
Then, unable to help myself, I say.
“You know, statistically, I’m a better kisser than Ambrose.”
She arches a brow.
“Research-backed. He’s probably like… all teeth and condescension.”
Finally, her mouth twitches.
“You have very scientific priorities.”
“I’m an academic.”
That gets me a huff of something that almost passes for a laugh. I’ll take it.
But I know what I saw.
And I know what she didn’t do.
“It’s not like he cares about me.”
Luna says it flatly, kicking a loose stone across the path with more precision than emotion. It skips once, twice, then dies against the crooked edge of the courtyard wall, the echo dull in the after-rain hush.
I lean against the cracked archway, arms folded, watching her without really watching her. That’s the trick—don’t look too long. Don’t let it sink in. She’s radiant in that ruined way, the kind of beauty people bleed for, the kind that twists inside you until nothing feels right unless she’s in the room.
But she’s not mine to keep still. Not completely.
“It's not,”
I say. My voice scrapes low, lazy. I’ve mastered the art of sounding like nothing gets under my skin. Even when everything fucking does.
“But that doesn’t mean the rules aren’t there.”
She pauses, just enough stillness to feel the shift in the air. Her head tilts, sharp and deliberate, like a blade testing its edge. She doesn’t speak. Just waits.
“There are… rules,”
I mutter, scrubbing a hand down my face like it’ll clear the taste of this out of my mouth.
“Written into us. Etched into the bones of what we are. Doesn’t matter if we’re bonded or not—when a sin binder enters the picture, something shifts. We can’t touch anyone else.”
Her brows furrow, a flicker of disbelief breaking through the practiced calm.
“Ambrose obviously just did.”
“Yeah.”
I push off the wall, stepping toward her slowly, boots crunching over wet stone.
“But we left before the good part.”
She blinks.
“The part where he threw her off?”
I nod once.
“He has to. It’s not a choice. Not for any of us. Once you're here, once you exist the way you do, the rest of us—no matter how far we try to run, how clever we think we are—it’s written into the marrow. Touching someone else? It burns.”
Her eyes narrow.
“Then why did he let her kiss him?”
And there it is.
The real question.
I don’t answer right away. Because the truth is complicated. Feral. Vicious in the way all of us are. Because we’re sins. Because we were never supposed to be tamed.
“Because Ambrose likes to burn,”
I say finally.
“He’s trying to fight it. The bond. The inevitability. He doesn’t want you to be the exception, Luna. He wants you to be the failure point.”
Her breath hitches, just slightly. I hate that I hear it.
“But it won’t work,”
I add, softer now.
“It never works. You’re already under our skin. And you’re not going anywhere.”
She looks at me then. Really looks. The kind of gaze that peels you apart and sees the raw pieces you thought you’d buried under a lifetime of sarcasm and shadows.
“You didn’t fight it,” she says.
“No.”
I reach out, brushing her knuckles with mine, barely a touch.
“I couldn’t. Still can’t.”
She sways closer without meaning to, her body pulled to mine like gravity’s got a personal grudge. The bond between us hums—a livewire we walk every damn day, pretending we don’t feel it, pretending it’s not the only real thing in this place built on lies.
“I didn’t want you to,”
she whispers.
“I know.”
I smile, slow and dark.
“But you’re not allowed to tell the others. I’ve got a reputation to maintain.”
She smirks, and it’s sharp enough to slice me open.
And still, I lean in.
Because if I’m going to burn—I want it to be by her hands.
I fumble through the folds of my coat like a man on the verge of cardiac arrest, patting one pocket, then another, ignoring the way Luna’s watching me like I’m about to pull out a dead rat or something equally on-brand.
“Hang on,”
I mutter, biting my lower lip in theatrical concentration.
“I know I had some—ah-ha!”
Plastic crinkles in triumph as I yank a half-squished breath mint from the depths of my coat. Not the freshest, but in this house of gods and monsters, we take what we can get. I unwrap it with ceremony, pop it into my mouth, and let it dissolve slow on my tongue as I turn to face her.
She’s standing with her arms crossed, hips cocked, and an expression that says she’s maybe, just maybe, considering whether I need to be punched or kissed.
I waggle my brows. Twice. For dramatic effect.
“So,”
I say, dragging out the word like it’s foreplay.
“Is this the part where we get naked?”
She blinks at me, long and slow, and for a beat I think she’s going to walk away. Or throw me through a wall. Both equally valid responses.
Instead, she steps forward, close enough that her breath kisses the skin just below my jaw. Her hand slides up my chest with no real purpose other than to make me forget what language is. Her fingers toy with the edge of my shirt, not tugging, just resting. Temptation in slow motion.
“Do you always prep for nudity with a mint?”
she asks, voice like silk wrapped around a blade.
“Only when I want to be respectful,”
I reply, deadly serious.
“And thorough. I’m a gentleman, Luna. A mint-loving, shirt-removing, consent-enthusiastic gentleman.”
She laughs. And it’s real. Not the sharp bark she gives when something’s just barely amusing, not the fake one she tosses out when someone’s trying too hard. No—this is warm. Genuine. Like I caught her off-guard.
Her fingers hook into my waistband.
And my heart does something traitorous in response.
“You’re lucky I like you,”
she murmurs.
“Oh, I know.”
I lean in, dropping my voice to a mock-whisper.
“I’m adorable. In a feral street rat sort of way. Like Aladdin, but if he’d been raised by morally bankrupt vampires and had zero filter.”
She snorts.
“That’s disturbingly accurate.”
“I aim to please.”
And I do. When it comes to her, I always fucking do.
But then her hand slips away, and the warmth of her presence moves with it, and I’m left blinking in the dim light of the corridor as she saunters off like she didn’t just rearrange my insides with a look.
I stare after her, breath mint forgotten, and mutter to myself.
“Gods, I’m so screwed.”
But I’m smiling when I say it.