“You’ve been down there every night this week.”
Mira’s whisper carried more fear than judgment as she laced up the back of Ren’s gown, hands trembling slightly against the silk.
“The lower clergy are talking, my lady. About you and the Grand Inquisitor. About locked doors and hours no one can account for.”
“Let them talk.”
“My lady, please.” Mira’s eyes met hers in the mirror, wide and frightened.
“If High Bishop Malachi hears the wrong kind of rumor, he won’t need proof of heresy. He’ll simply need suspicion.”
Ren’s stomach tightened, because the girl wasn’t wrong.
She’d been careless — reckless, even, letting herself fall into something dangerous with a man who held the power to burn her alive on nothing more than a whisper.
Every night in that sanctuary had felt like the only honest hour of her stolen life, and she’d let that honesty blind her to exactly how much was at stake.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Bad enough that the High Bishop’s steward has been asking the maids questions. Small ones. Which nights you’re gone from your chambers. How long the Grand Inquisitor’s private sanctuary stays locked.” Mira’s hands stilled at the final clasp.
“My lady, someone is watching.”
She felt it the moment she stepped into the sanctuary that evening — a wrongness in the air, some prickle at the back of her neck that had kept her alive through a dozen back-alley jobs in her old life.
Lucan noticed it too; she saw his jaw tighten, his eyes flick once toward the rafters overhead before returning to her, casual, unhurried.
“You’re distracted tonight,” he said, voice carrying easy and normal across the sanctuary, though something sharp had entered his gaze.
“Am I?” Ren kept her own voice light, scanning the shadows above without turning her head.
There — a faint shift in the darkness near the highest arch, a shape too still to be a trick of candlelight.
“Perhaps I’m simply tired, Grand Inquisitor.”
“Perhaps.” He crossed toward her slowly, and she caught the subtle angle of his approach — positioning himself so his back faced the rafters, giving nothing away to whoever watched from above.
“Or perhaps something’s troubling you.”
Someone is in the rafters.
She couldn’t say it aloud.
Whoever it was would hear every word, report every gesture, and the moment either of them acknowledged the watcher, the game changed entirely. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
She had one option left, reckless as it was.
“Come here,” she said instead, reaching for the front of his tunic and pulling him close, close enough to speak directly against his ear where no distant listener could catch the words.
“Someone’s in the rafters. Above the north arch. Don’t look.”
He went rigid for half a second — the only sign he’d heard her — before forcing his body to relax into the embrace, arms circling her waist like the whole thing was simply passion instead of tactics.
“How long?” he murmured against her hair, voice pitched too low to carry.
“I don’t know. Long enough.”
“Malachi’s spy.” His grip on her waist tightened, fury bleeding through the careful calm in his voice.
“He’s finally decided to act instead of just asking questions.”
“What do we do?”
“We give them exactly what they expect to see.” His mouth found the curve of her neck, and Ren felt her pulse leap despite the danger, despite knowing this was strategy and not simply desire.
“A Saintess and her Inquisitor, indulging in exactly the scandal the rumors already suspect. Nothing that gives away what we actually are to each other.”
“That’s a fine line.”
“I’ve always been good at fine lines.” His hand slid up her back, drawing her flush against him, and his mouth found hers in a kiss that felt deliberately performed and devastatingly real all at once — the sort of kiss meant to be witnessed, meant to confirm exactly the scandal a spy in the rafters had been sent to catch, while somehow still managing to steal the breath clean out of her lungs.
Ren kissed him back, playing her part, letting her fingers curl into his collar the way a woman genuinely lost to passion might, all while her mind raced through the danger overhead.
If Malachi’s spy reported this — an embrace, a stolen kiss, careless indiscretion between the Saintess and her Grand Inquisitor — it would be scandal enough to fuel gossip through the entire Citadel.
Damaging, but survivable.
If the spy had seen anything more.
If they’d witnessed even a fraction of what had actually happened on this altar over the past week — her light poured willingly into his mouth, his confession of obsession, the dark cocoon of magic that had sealed them away from the world entirely — that wasn’t scandal anymore.
That was heresy.
That was a pyre with both their names on it.
“We need to know how much they saw,” she breathed against his mouth.
“I know.” His grip on her waist firmed, and beneath the performance of passion she felt the coiled violence gathering in every line of his body, ready to strike the instant she gave him an opening.
She tilted her head back, baring her throat in a gesture that could have passed for surrender to any watching eye, and felt Lucan’s mouth trail hot and deliberate along her pulse point while his gaze, hidden from the rafters by the angle of his bowed head, sharpened into something lethal.
“There,” he murmured, so quiet only she could hear it.
“I have him.”
“Now?”
“Not yet.” His hand slid to the small of her back, guiding her half a step further into the shadow of the altar, out of the direct sightline from above.
“Let him think he’s gotten away clean. Let him report back to Malachi that he’s confirmed the scandal. It’ll buy us time to decide how to handle what he actually witnessed.”
“And if what he witnessed is enough to hang us both?”
Lucan drew back just far enough to meet her eyes, and something cold and merciless had settled there, utterly unlike the desperate, unguarded man from nights before.
This was the Grand Inquisitor the whole Empire feared, resurfacing beneath the surface of a lover’s embrace.
“Then he won’t live long enough to deliver the report,” he said quietly.
“I promise you that.”
Overhead, the shadow in the rafters shifted again, retreating now, satisfied it had seen enough to justify whatever mission had sent it here in the first place.
Ren felt the tension in Lucan’s shoulders coil tighter as he tracked the movement without ever once looking up, every muscle in his body readying for violence the second their audience slipped free of the sanctuary.
“He’s leaving,” she whispered.
“I know.” Lucan’s mouth brushed her ear one final time, and beneath the words she could still feel the ghost of desire tangled up with cold, calculated fury.
“Stay here. Lock the door behind me.”
“Lucan—”
“I won’t be long.” He pressed one last, hard kiss to her mouth before pulling away entirely, already moving toward the sanctuary’s side passage with a speed and silence that belonged to a predator, not a man.
“Whoever Malachi sent to spy on us is about to learn exactly why no one survives crossing the Grand Inquisitor.”
The heavy door swung shut behind him, and Ren stood alone in the guttering candlelight, heart hammering, staring up at the empty rafters where a stranger’s eyes had watched them only moments before.
This is only the beginning, she thought, wrapping her arms around herself against a chill that had nothing to do with the sanctuary’s cold stone.
Malachi knows something is wrong.
And men like that don’t stop asking questions just because the first spy goes silent.