Ren woke to the weight of a body pressing against the mattress and a voice broken with pain whispering her name.
“Lucan?” She bolted upright, heart slamming, and found him half-collapsed against her bed, black veins crawling visible up his throat, sweat soaking his collar.
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know.” His voice came out ragged, barely holding together.
“The corruption. It’s worse tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t near you.” He lifted his head, and even in the dim candlelight she could see how much the admission cost him — the Grand Inquisitor, reduced to something raw and desperate, kneeling at her bedside like a man begging for mercy he had no right to ask for.
“It’s never done this before. Not this fast. Not this violent.”
Ren swung her legs off the bed, kneeling in front of him on the cold floor, and pressed her palm flat against his chest without thinking twice about it.
Light answered instantly, spilling warm and bright between her fingers, and Lucan groaned low in his throat as the black veins began, slowly, to recede beneath her touch.
“Better?” she asked.
“Better.” His breath came easier already, though his eyes stayed fixed on her with an intensity that made her pulse quicken despite the late hour, despite the danger of him being here at all.
“You should hate me for this.”
“For what?”
“For needing you like this. For crawling to your door in the middle of the night like some starving animal because I couldn’t bear the pain a single hour longer.” His hand came up, covering hers where it still rested against his chest, holding it there like an anchor.
“It’s weakness. I’ve spent five years despising weakness in every man I’ve ever executed.”
“This isn’t weakness.”
“Then what is it?”
“Dependency isn’t the same as weakness, Lucan.” She said it quietly, honestly, watching something in his expression crack further at the gentleness in her voice.
“Everyone needs something. You’ve simply spent five years pretending you didn’t, because admitting it made you vulnerable to people like Malachi.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re vulnerable to me instead.” She held his gaze steady. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Which one of us that’s more dangerous for, I genuinely don’t know.”
He laughed — a short, rough, disbelieving sound, mostly pain still bleeding through the edges of it.
“You’re remarkably calm for a woman with the Grand Inquisitor bleeding corruption onto her bedroom floor at midnight.”
“I told you before. I’m not most people.”
“No,” he murmured, eyes tracing her face with something achingly tender beneath the exhaustion.
“You’re really not.”
He shifted forward, and before she could react he’d climbed fully onto the bed, pulling her down with him, black veins still faintly visible but fading fast beneath the steady flow of her light.
He pinned her gently beneath him, not with force this time, just weight and warmth and the desperate, wordless need of a man seeking relief from pain he’d carried alone far too long.
“Lucan—”
“Let me have this,” he murmured against her throat, mouth trailing slow and reverent along her pulse.
“Just tonight. I’ll ask you nothing. I’ll demand no confession. I only need to feel your light without the fear crowding in for a few hours.”
Ren’s breath caught, torn between the wisdom of pushing him away and the traitorous ache in her own chest that wanted exactly what he was offering.
She wound her fingers into his dark hair instead, drawing him closer, and felt him shudder against her at the wordless permission.
“You said you needed answers,” she said softly, even as her body arched instinctively toward his touch.
“Soon, you said. In the dungeon.”
“I did.” His mouth found the curve of her collarbone, and heat pooled low and molten in her stomach despite every warning bell still ringing distantly in the back of her mind.
“I meant it. I still need them.”
“Then ask me now.”
He stilled entirely above her, breath ragged, and when he lifted his head to look at her, something raw and terrified had surfaced beneath the desperate hunger in his eyes.
“Why did you execute the thief Ren five years ago?” she asked quietly, echoing back the question he’d never quite let himself examine.
“Not the official record. The truth. Tell me what actually happened that day.”
Lucan’s jaw tightened, and for a long moment she thought he might deflect, might retreat back into desperate physical need rather than face the memory head-on.
Then, slowly, he lowered himself to rest his forehead against her collarbone, voice dropping to something raw and unguarded.
“Thinner than I usually accepted for an execution order. A merchant’s testimony. Some stolen goods that could have belonged to half the thieves in the Lower Market. I remember reading the file and thinking it didn’t sit right, that something about the timeline didn’t add up.” His hand fisted slowly in the sheets beside her head.
“I signed the order anyway. Because High Bishop Malachi personally requested it be expedited, and questioning him wasn’t something I did back then.”
“Why not?”
“Because I believed in the church more than I believed in my own instincts.” His voice cracked slightly.
“I stood on that platform and watched her look up at me — not afraid, not pleading, just this cold, resigned defiance — and something in my chest told me I was making a mistake. I ignored it. I gave the order anyway.”
Ren’s throat tightened, her own memory of that exact moment rising unbidden — the platform, the rope, the man standing above her whose face she’d hated for exactly this reason, for hesitating and doing it anyway.
“And afterward?” she asked, voice unsteady.
“Afterward, my ash magic hesitated for the first time in my entire career.” His grip on the sheets tightened further, knuckles white.
“It’s supposed to be instantaneous. Efficient. Painless, more or less, if the corruption’s been properly channeled. Hers wasn’t. It stuttered. Delayed. I’ve never told anyone that, because admitting my magic hesitated on an execution I’d personally signed would have raised questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.” He lifted his head finally, meeting her eyes directly, raw and exposed in a way she’d never seen from him before.
“Her death has haunted every dream I’ve had since. Not guilt exactly. Something closer to unfinished business, though I could never explain what business a dead street thief and I could possibly have left unfinished.”
Ren’s chest ached, tangled up in guilt and grief and something dangerously close to forgiveness she hadn’t expected to feel this soon, if ever.
“Lucan—”
“Don’t.” His hand came up, cupping her face gently.
“Not tonight. I’ve given you the truth you asked for. I don’t have the strength left tonight to hear whatever you’re about to say back to me, whatever it costs either of us.”
She studied his face in the dim candlelight — exhausted, unguarded, stripped of every ounce of Inquisitorial armor he usually wore — and made a decision that felt both reckless and inevitable in equal measure.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said quietly.
“I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”
Something flickered behind his eyes — hope, fear, both tangled together in a way that made her chest ache further.
He didn’t push.
He simply lowered his head back to her collarbone, breathing slow and even now that the corruption had fully receded beneath her steady light, and let himself, for the first time in five years, simply rest.
Ren lay awake long after his breathing evened into something close to sleep, one hand still tangled in his dark hair, staring up at the canopy overhead and turning over the enormity of the promise she’d just made — knowing that tomorrow, whatever came of it, would change everything between them irreversibly.