Page 7

I let out a slow breath. Cassia had been here. I could smell her. Crouching, I felt for a pulse on the body. Nothing. But the skin was still warm, a grim reminder of a recent feeding—a sloppy kill.

Closing my eyes, I let the light bend inward and called up the projection. Time unspooled as thin as smoke. The alley walls flickered with a ghostly film: Sera pinning the man against the bricks, her hunger turning too brutal. She never knew when to stop. The image shifted. Cassia appeared like a phantom, a silent witness to the ruin before she, too, was gone.

I opened my eyes. The air was cold and empty, but Cassia’s presence lingered, a faint charge in the air.

I wasn’t supposed to be in Berlin. My orders were to observe. But an icy knife twisted in my gut when I felt the weight of Cassia’s anguish. So, I moved.

Over the rooftops, I followed the trail of Sera’s heat signature, the lingering scent of her kills scorched into the pavement. I found them behind the club. Cassia stood frozen like a stone while Sera fell apart at her feet. The sister was a broken thing. Cassia offered no comfort, no touch. Just watched her sister in silence with heavy judgment. From the shadows above, I saw Sera trying to reach out with a last desperate plea. But Cassia stepped back, turned, and walked away.

And in that moment, the scene fractured as I recalled a sharper memory.

Paris. Decades ago. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen one sister break and the other choose a path of ruin. But in Paris, Cassia hadn’t walked away. In Paris, she walked in.

I remembered seeing her broken and desperate on the ground of that dirty alley. She wasn’t cold or defiant. Her face was a mask of sheer terror, her eyes begging me not to deliver a judgment I was supposed to provide. So, that night, I betrayed Heaven for her—for the first time.

I had held her afterward in their tiny flat as she lay motionless and spent. She hadn’t been a monster. She had been a terrified sister, willing to burn her own soul to protect the only family she had left.

Now, watching her walk away from Sera in Berlin, I understood. She was finally done. It was almost hard to watch this act of self-preservation, of strength. But seeing her walk away, so cold and alone, felt like watching the last light in my universe go out. The memory of how utterly broken she had been that night in Paris, I couldn’t bear to see again. I couldn’t let her be that alone, never that alone.

My focus wasn’t on Sera’s collapsed form anymore. Instead, I focused on the solitary figure disappearing into the rain-slicked alley.

I followed Cassia through the quiet streets. Her pace was steady, controlled. She reached a crumbling brick tenement, ivy crawling up its face like a shroud.

She paused at the weathered door, her hand resting on the rusted handle. And without turning, she spoke, her voice low. “You’ve followed me enough times to know how this ends, Remiel.”

I said nothing.

She turned then, her rich brown eyes meeting mine across the empty street. Cold. Exhausted. But still holding onto that brutal beauty who had always been her curse—and mine. “I don’t want your pity,” she said, her voice final. “And I sure as hell don’t need your guilt.”

“I wasn’t offering either,” I replied, the words quiet against the rain.

“Then what are you doing here, Remiel?” The challenge was there, laced with a vulnerability she’d deny to her last breath.

I couldn’t tell her the truth. Couldn’t voice the tangled mess of duty and the memory of her that kept me tethered to her shadow.

Her laugh was as soft and as sharp as broken glass. “Still can’t say it. After all this time.”

“I just wanted to see if you were all right,” I said, the admission weak. Insufficient. But it was the only piece of truth I could offer.

“You saw me walk away,” she said, her voice flat. “That should’ve been enough.” With that, she turned the handle, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. “Go back to whatever high perch they’ve assigned you, Guardian. You’re not meant to follow fallen things, not anymore.”

The door slammed shut, the sound echoing.

She was right. Orders instructed me to relinquish my guardianship of the sisters and assume my role as Michael’s second. I stood there in the rain, the cold seeping into my bones, and wondered if I’d ever find the strength to stop. But every time I saw her walk away, every time she chose the darkness, I remembered the woman on her knees in Paris. And I remembered why I couldn’t leave her and why I never would.

4. Cassia

I’ve always despised mornings. They arrive like an accusation, an unwelcome summons from the oblivion of sleep. A stark reminder that the world, in its brutal indifference, insists on marching forward. Even when invisible blood still clings to your skin, when your eyes ache with the grit of unshed tears, and when your chest is a hollow cavern echoing with a pain that no grinding passage of time can ever truly soothe, it stubbornly marches forward.

The weak ashen sunlight, already defeated by sullen clouds, filtered through the grimy windowpane, and I squinted as though the very light itself had conspired to offer a personal insult. My coat collar was turned up, a futile battlement against the chill. Sunglasses, like a dark shield, were firmly in place. Still, nothing about the morning’s reluctant arrival failed to feel like a fresh insult.

With a finality that was more resignation than resolve, I shoved the last of my meager possessions into a battered leather duffel, its surface a road map of scars from countless journeys. Not that I possessed much to begin with: a threadbare collection of interchangeable outfits. A slender silver blade nestled in a cleverly hidden false bottom—a relic of a life I barely remembered wanting. I had three soul vials, their contents a testament to my fractured existence. One was utterly empty, a hollow echo. A delicate spiderweb crack marred another, its light struggling to shine. The third still faintly glowed with a pale, otherworldly luminescence.

The flat, once a repository of shared laughter and whispered secrets, now felt vast and echoing, already half empty. Though I’d paid my dues for the month, the thought of lingering in that space was unbearable. I wasn’t returning. Berlin had turned bitter in my mouth, and the relentless rain had performed its cleansings, washing away most of the physical blood. Yet the haunting memories clung to every wet cobblestone, every shadowed turn, and every forgotten corner where her hunger had feasted.

When I arrived at the train station, a dense, cloying gray mist enveloped the cavernous space, smelling of damp wool and despair. Cheap stained tiles reflected the muted light. People looked like a river of ghosts, drifting in the directionless shuffle of the early morning, damned. Each face was a mask of weariness.

I ignored the flickering departure board, its pronouncements irrelevant, and made my way straight to the counter. Behind it was a clerk with tired half-lidded eyes, accentuated by smudged eyeliner.