Lucan didn’t sleep that night.
He sat alone in his private quarters, a bottle of holy wine untouched on the table beside him, staring at his own hands in the low candlelight — hands that had held a blade to her throat hours earlier, hands that had traced the exact shape of a memory he’d spent five years trying to bury.
*She’s her.
She has to be her.*
And yet some desperate, self-preserving part of his mind kept circling back to doubt, kept manufacturing alternate explanations, kept insisting that a man who’d built his entire life on rooting out lies couldn’t possibly have fallen this deeply for one without noticing sooner.
He poured the wine anyway, drank it in one long swallow, and felt nothing.
No warmth.
No dulling of the thoughts spiraling faster and faster through his skull.
*Ren.*
The name surfaced unbidden, the way it always did in his weakest, most unguarded moments — a street thief’s sharp eyes staring up at him from a gallows platform, refusing to give him the satisfaction of watching her break.
He’d told himself for five years that the guilt was simply professional.
A miscalculation.
A case that had troubled him more than most because something about the evidence had never quite sat right, some instinct he’d overridden in favor of following church orders exactly as written.
He hadn’t let himself examine, until tonight, exactly how much of that guilt had curdled into something far more dangerous.
Obsession.
Devotion.
A five-year ache that had apparently been waiting, patient and corrosive, for a face close enough to hers to finally give it somewhere to go.
His ash-corruption flared without warning, black veins crawling up from his wrist toward his elbow, and Lucan hissed through his teeth as agony lanced through his chest — worse than usual, sharper, like his own magic sensed the absence of the one thing that had been soothing it for two weeks straight.
*I need her.*
The thought arrived with terrifying clarity, stripped of every ounce of Inquisitorial rationality he usually wrapped around himself like armor.
Not wanted.
He pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum, trying to breathe through the pain, and found no relief in it at all.
The corruption spread further, blackening down toward his fingers, and for the first time in five years he felt genuinely afraid of what his own magic might do to him without her presence to balance it.
*This is what she’s done to me.
Made me dependent.
Made me weak.*
And still, even knowing that, even understanding on some rational level exactly how dangerous it was to need another person this completely, he couldn’t make himself resent her for it.
Couldn’t make himself wish, even for a moment, that he’d never scented that strange, bitter trace beneath her divine aura on the very first day.
He tried meditation next, the old techniques the church had taught him during his Ash-Binding training — breathing exercises meant to center the mind, to separate the self from the corruption crawling through his veins.
It had worked, more or less, for five years.
Enough to function.
Enough to hide the pain behind a mask of cold composure that had made him the most feared man in the Empire.
Tonight it did nothing at all.
The ash-veins spread past his elbow, climbing toward his shoulder, and Lucan doubled over the table with a strangled sound, agony ripping through his chest like something trying to claw its way out from the inside.
Sweat beaded cold along his hairline.
His vision blurred at the edges, black spots swimming, and somewhere beneath the pain a single, desperate thought repeated itself over and over.
*Caelia.
I need Caelia.*
He didn’t remember standing.
Didn’t remember crossing the corridor, didn’t remember the particular sequence of turns that carried him from his own quarters to hers, driven by nothing but raw, animal instinct chasing the one thing capable of quieting the fire in his blood.
He only became fully aware of himself again standing outside her chamber door, breathing hard, one hand braced against the wood, black veins visible even in the dim corridor light crawling up past his collar toward his throat.
Turn around.
This is exactly the kind of weakness you swore you’d never show anyone.*
He tried the handle instead of knocking, and found it unlocked — whether by careless oversight or some deeper instinct on her part, he didn’t know, didn’t care.
He pushed inside, and the sight of her asleep in the canopy bed, silver hair spilled loose across the pillow, hit him like a physical blow.
*I have no right to be here.
Not like this.*
He should have turned around.
Should have retreated back to his own quarters and endured the corruption alone, the way he’d endured it every night for five years before her light had ruined him for anything less.
Instead he crossed the room and sank to his knees beside her bed, breath ragged, black veins pulsing visibly against his throat, and pressed his forehead against the edge of the mattress like a man seeking absolution he had no right to ask for.
“Caelia.” Her name came out broken, barely a whisper.
“I need—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Didn’t need to.
The pain had grown too consuming to articulate anything more coherent, and some distant, humiliated part of him recognized exactly how pathetic this looked — the Grand Inquisitor of Aethelgard, feared by an entire Empire, kneeling half-broken on the floor of a woman’s bedchamber like a supplicant begging at an altar.
He stayed there a long moment, forehead pressed to cool linen, corruption crawling steadily worse across his skin, and felt something in his chest crack open entirely — not just physical pain now, but every carefully buried fear he’d refused to examine since the dungeon.
The terror that she really was Ren, returned somehow, impossibly, and that loving her meant loving a ghost who might vanish again the moment he finally understood the truth.
The terror that she wasn’t Ren at all, and that everything he’d built these past two weeks was simply grief wearing a stranger’s face.
The terror, underneath both, that either answer would cost him everything he’d fought to protect since the moment he’d first stepped through her chamber door.
His hand found the edge of the blanket, gripping it tight enough that his knuckles whitened, black veins pulsing dark against pale skin.
“Please,” he whispered, to no one, to everyone, to whatever gods still listened to a man who’d renounced most of his faith in them years ago.
“Just this once. Let me have this without it costing me everything.”
The candlelight guttered low beside the bed, throwing long shadows across a Grand Inquisitor undone by his own desperate need, kneeling in the dark outside every boundary he’d sworn to maintain, waiting — helpless, ashamed, and utterly incapable of leaving — for the woman sleeping just inches away to wake and save him from himself one more time.