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She lifted her gaze, and a slow and awful smile spread across her lips. “Cassie,” she breathed, her hand reaching as if I was a lifeline. “I-I wasn’t expecting you.” Her voice cracked, as thin as old paper.

That, somehow, was the cruelest cut.

I stayed put. “Don’t.” My voice was low. “Don’t use my name like that. Not now.”

Her face crumpled, and a raw, animalistic need warred in her eyes before she just…deflated. “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, the sound barely there. “He was just… He felt so warm, Cass. I could stop this time.”

“But you didn’t,” I stated, as flat and cold as the alley stones.

Her eyes shot wide. “I…I know. I tried, Cass. Shit, I tried. You don’t get what it’s like! This hunger… It just screams in my head louder and louder every time. Overpowering anything. I thought if I just…if I just took a little…”

“He’s dead, Sera.”

The words hit her like a fist, and she stumbled back a step. “N-no… No, I…I wouldn’t have…”

“You drained his soul. There’s nothing left.”

Her lower lip trembled, and any strength she’d pretended to have vanished. She folded in on herself, her arms tight around her knees, and rocked as if trying to make herself small enough for the surroundings to swallow her.

“I-I’m so tired,” she choked out, her voice raw and almost delirious. “Cassia, I’m so damn tired. I hate this. I hate what I am and how it feels. I don’t want to be this thing. Please. Please, Cass… Help me. Just one more time. I’ll stop. I swear I’ll stop. I’ll be good.” She reached out, her hand shaking and her eyes swollen but dry and unable to even cry anymore.

For a beat—for a dangerous beat—I almost gave in. Almost knelt. Almost offered the same old lies, the same useless comfort I’d peddled for years.

But then I saw it: the fresh shimmering smear of essence on her wrist, the predatory vacancy in her dilated pupils, and the way the shadows shrank from her aura instead of dancing with it. She wasn’t just lost in despair. She was high on it, drunk on the stolen lives that were now eating her from the inside out.

My voice was a scalpel, slicing the quiet. “How many?”

She didn’t answer. Just looked away.

“Sera.” Quieter now, but no less sharp. “How many did you kill tonight?”

Her voice was a thread. “I don’t… I didn’t mean to…”

“How. Many?”

“I don’t know!” she cried out, the words ragged with a terror that felt almost theatrical. “Please, Cass. Please don’t leave me.”

Something inside me didn’t just break. Scattered in the chilling wind, it turned to dust.

Her pathetic pleading did not break my resolve solely. It was also the sickening certainty that she meant every word, with all of her ruined heart, until her next feeding. And there would always be a next.

“No,” I said. Firm. Final.

2. Cassia

The silence in the archive stretches as the grim Berlin alley had, the air thick with the phantom chill of rain and regret.

The keeper’s hourglass eyes narrow, the ancient dust within swirling. “Berlin was the full stop, you said.” Its rumbling voice still vibrated. “The end of your complicity. Why was that one man the breaking point?”

I let out a slow breath, a gritty sound in the stillness. A bitter smile touches my lips. “Because before Berlin…there was Paris.” The name hangs in the air, heavy with a history even darker than the one I just shared. “Berlin wasn’t the first time she had lost herself. It was just the first time I refused.” My gaze drifts, lost in a far bloodier memory. “In Paris, I saw what she was truly capable of, the monster she could become, and I chose her anyway. Berlin was me keeping a promise I had made to myself in the wreckage of Paris.”

The keeper slightly leans forward, its shadowy form seeming to absorb the dim light. “This first transgression,” it rasps, the words both a demand and a statement, “the moment you chose your sister over the law, the archive demands it. Elaborate.”

I take a sharp breath, the air catching in my lungs. “Oh, it was far from the first. But very well…”

Paris in the 1920s was a city desperate to feel alive. The scars of the Great War still marked its stones, but the city concealed them with jazz, champagne, and smoke. Mortals and the occasional stray supernatural drank and danced and argued as if the world might end at dawn, and they were determined to go out breathless.

And for two relatively new fallen angels, it was the perfect place to drown in sensations, to forget the tribunal.