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“The transformation is almost complete, Lady Flame. Don’t fight it. The ring isn’t a cage; it’s a cocoon. Let it finish its work.”
The silence stretched long between us, thick. I should’ve gone back inside then. Back to the dubious safety of the flat, to the bed. Back to Remiel.
Instead, I slowly moved as if drawn by an invisible current. I sat beside Valden on the low stone ledge, just far enough that our shoulders didn’t touch yet close enough for the air between us to crackle with a new unspoken tension.
He was still. Too still. The kind of predatory quiet that listens for the faintest tremor of weakness.
He turned his head, and I felt his gaze slide along my cheek, cold and precise. “You know,” he said, his voice a conspirator’s whisper, “he’ll never stop watching you, Cassia. It’s his nature. His curse.”
I said nothing, my gaze fixed on the sleeping city’s distant glittering lights.
“He’ll never let you become what you’re truly meant to be. Because that’s not what he was made for. He was made to preserve, to protect the status quo. Not to embrace glorious chaos.”
I felt a shift in him, a subtle change in the air. His fingers, cool and weightless as a phantom’s touch, brushed my cheek. Only then did I realize a tear had fallen, one I hadn’t felt leave me.
He caught it with a reverence that chilled, as if even my sorrow was something for him to claim. “He’s the watchdog of the light, my dear,” he murmured, his breath ghosting against my skin. “And you and I, we will always be creatures of the magnificent, unapologetic dark.”
The touch lingered. Gentle. Unwelcome. A brand I didn’t want.
I stared out over the sleeping city and spoke quietly, my voice devoid of emotion. “Please take your hand off my face, Valden.”
A pause. A heartbeat of suspended tension.
Then he did. Gracefully. Without argument. As if the touch had never happened. But it had. And we both knew it.
“I meant no offense, Cassia,” he chuckled softly, his voice once again smooth and controlled. “Only the truth.”
I didn’t answer. The silence between us turned thick, a wall of unspoken resentments and dangerous realizations.
He stood then, his long coat shifting around him like a whisper of shadows. Then, ever the performer, he bowed. Deep and precise. As if we were still at some gilded masquerade ball and not on a cold, windswept rooftop soaked in the ghosts of past betrayals.
“Rest well, Lady Flame,” he said, his voice a silken farewell. “You’ll need your strength for the funeral.” And without another word, he stepped onto the edge of the balcony and leaped into the night.
I rushed to the edge, but he was gone.
I looked down at my hand. The ring pulsed, a slow, steady beat that matched my heart. I felt the light inside me—the small stubborn ember of grace that I had clung to for so many years—flicker and dim.
I should have taken it off, should have thrown it into the street.
But the silence in my head was so sweet. And the face in the mirror—the monster with the black eyes—didn’t look afraid. She looked powerful.
I turned back to the room where the angel slept, unaware that the woman he protected no longer needed his oversight.
22. Cassia
Sleep did not reclaim me, though the angel beside me had succumbed. Remiel’s arm, draped across my waist once more, was a warm, loose anchor, rising and falling with the steady rhythm of a man who had spent his strength and perhaps, for now, had nothing left to guard.
He had not stirred when I had returned from the rooftop balcony. I had slipped back under the covers, into the residual warmth of his presence. His hand had gently curled around my stomach, a touch I could neither fully accept nor entirely refuse.
I lay flat, my eyes open to the predawn darkness, as the ceiling above me faded from shadows to a bruised, pale blue. Prague’s dawn was a reluctant, creeping thing.
And my body, that traitorous vessel, still remembered what my mind desperately tried to forget. That safe house. The suffocating aura inside. The silent scream caught within its very walls.
I glanced at Valden’s ring on my finger. I could almost feel a faint heat radiating from it, a subtle call. And its power slipped into my skin, into my bones. The cuffs on my wrists burned dully again. And behind my forehead…that terrifying pressure. My horns. They had started to push against my skin once more, a horrifying echo of what had happened at the safe house.
It wasn’t a hallucination. Nor some lingering residual trauma.
Before my body could betray me further by letting that transformation fully take root, I ripped the ring from my finger and hurled it across the room.
