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I clutched at him, my nails raking across the burning runes on his back. “…I take you,” I whispered, every word trembling from the rhythm of our bodies. “In shadow…in hunger…in light…in death. As my ruin. As my salvation.”

Our foreheads pressed together, our breaths breaking into one another like vows carved into flesh. He thrust up again harder, dragging another cry from me.

His wings flared once more, and the chapel burst into blazing light. He dragged me down one last time, holding me as if to fuse me into his soul.

“Kil’yati.”

The word left his lips like a prayer torn from the marrow of the world. My body seized, and my vision blurred. I knew what it meant. My ruin. My flame. My only salvation. Though it belonged to no tongue I had ever learned. To be named such was to be claimed—to be bound, to be loved in a way that was both worship and annihilation.

The realization detonated inside me, and I shattered, my orgasm crashing through me in violent waves that left me sobbing.

His face broke open into raw abandon, and a guttural sound, ancient and unearthly, tore from his chest, reverberating through the cracked chapel. His hips thrust up one final time, and he spilled into me with a shudder.

For a moment, we were nothing but ruin and light, locked together in the violence of our completion.

31. Remiel

Cassia was spent. My kil’yati slept in my arms, her body slack against the jagged altar. Her breaths came soft and shallow, her shadows faintly curling outward from her gathering at the foot of the altar. I held her closer, feeling the aftershock of what we had done settle through my bones.

For the first time in an age, everything inside me felt whole.

Peace lay over me like borrowed time, and I knew it would be taken back. The tribunal would hunt me already. For Serion. The bond I had forged with her only added iron to those chains.

Fragments of memories pressed through me like shards of light through broken glass. A loss so absolute it left its taste on the back of my tongue. None of it whole. None of it merciful. Enough to remind me I was not the obedient thing they had made.

Movement shifted at the foot of the altar. The burned air thinned as shadows condensed, and two shapes resolved where darkness had pooled moments before. Wolves. Massive and silent. Their coats blacker than pitch. Their eyes smoldering like coals. My spirit had worn those forms before, in wars my memories refuse to recall, but my bones still remember. They had hunted with me. Guarded my back. Now, they crouched at her feet, as if my oath had leaped from my mouth and grown bodies.

Tension in my body eased. I smiled without meaning to, weary and grateful in the same breath. They would not leave her, even if chains closed over my wrists again. They would keep watch.

I shifted to rise, and the wolves lifted their heads. Their ears pricked, their bodies tensing with the urge to follow. I gathered Cassia in my arms and eased her down upon the altar stone. She made a small sigh that brushed my collarbone like a fading prayer. I drew the torn shirt over my shoulders and pulled the ruined coat across the runes that still burned low on my skin. Each motion felt like stitching myself back into a smaller life.

They stepped forward, a low growl building in their throats.

I caught their gazes and held them. “Stay,” I said, my voice quiet and edged. “Guard her. Until the end of you, guard her.”

The words wrapped around their forms like iron bands. They went still, their eyes brightened with the pain of obedience. I touched each broad skull, a farewell made of fingertips, and returned to the altar.

I studied her face. Her mouth slightly parted in sleep, stained with a hint of gold. The faint tremor in her throat that said our tether still sang. I bowed and pressed my lips to her forehead. No promise. No apology. A blessing offered in the wreckage.

The chapel lay split. Torches guttered. Embers died where they had fallen. Beyond the doors, the night waited.

I rose and did not look back.

The darkness received me like an old confidant. It never troubled me; my eyes cut through it as if it was silk. The old graveyard spread away in crooked lines of stones, markers slanting at strange angles and moss swallowing names that used to matter. The air had a river’s chill, and the earth gave off the cold of long-kept bones.

On a slight rise, beneath a willow’s hanging veil, a figure stood within a sheath of shadows so dense it drank the starlight. I knew him before the tug in my chest tightened.

Some bonds never break, even when you beg them to.

I crossed the graves with measured steps. Gravel shifted, and old names watched. The willow’s branches swayed in a wind I could not feel. When I reached the rise, we stood nearly eye to eye, halves of a severed mirror that had learned to hate its crack. The golden brown of my hair against the ink of his. The bronze heat of my skin against his pale white. We matched in height and breadth, but none of it mattered.

I held his gaze inside that shroud of shadows and let the silence open like a wound.

“Hello, Brother,” I said.

The words had scarcely left my mouth when the night split. A line of searing brilliance drove through my back, slid between ribs, and burst from my chest in a flare that turned the graves as bright as noon. Breath tore out of me in recognition. This was no mortal strike. It carried precision and doctrine. It was meant to drag, not to end.

My knees gave. Gold ran from me in a rain I could not hold. The edges of the world went soft and far. Through the glare, I saw him jolt as well. His head snapped back. His mouth opened with a question we had spoken to one another for longer than our lives. The same blade lived in him now too, flooding his shirt with red.