Lucan slept later than she’d ever seen him, sunlight already slanting gold through the tall windows by the time his eyes finally opened, and Ren watched the exact moment memory returned to him — the slow tightening of his jaw, the flicker of vulnerability quickly masked by something more composed.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“It’s my bed.”
“I meant you didn’t leave. After everything I said last night.” He sat up slowly, studying her with a wariness that hadn’t been there in the desperate dark of midnight.
“I half expected to wake up alone. Or worse.”
“Worse meaning?”
“Meaning arrested. Denounced. Whatever a woman does when the Grand Inquisitor confesses his magic hesitated on an execution order and admits he’s been chasing a dead thief’s ghost through her face for two weeks.”
Ren sat up beside him, pulling the sheet loosely around herself, and studied the exhaustion still lingering beneath his eyes.
“I told you I’d give you the truth today.”
“You did.” His voice had gone careful, guarded, the composed Inquisitor reasserting himself in the daylight even as something raw still trembled underneath it.
“I’ve been lying here for the better part of an hour, trying to decide if I actually want to hear it.”
“And?”
“And I don’t think I have a choice anymore. Not after last night.” He turned to face her fully, violet eyes searching hers with an intensity that made her pulse quicken.
“Tell me, Caelia. Whatever it is. I promise you, whatever the answer, I already know I’m not walking away from you. I only need to understand what I’m not walking away from.”
Ren’s chest tightened at the certainty in his voice, at how thoroughly he’d already surrendered before she’d said a single word.
She thought of the rope, the platform, his face above her that day, cold and distant and utterly unlike the man sitting in front of her now.
“I woke up in this body three weeks ago,” she said quietly, “with a rope still tight around a throat that wasn’t mine. I remember dying, Lucan. I remember every second of the execution you signed the order for.”
His breath caught audibly, but he didn’t interrupt.
“My name was Ren,” she continued.
“Before Caelia. Before any of this. I was a street thief in the Lower Market, exactly as the file says, though the merchant’s testimony was every bit as thin as your instincts told you it was. I don’t know why my soul ended up here, in this body, in this life. I only know that I woke up as someone else, wearing borrowed skin, with no explanation and no way back.”
Lucan sat perfectly still, jaw tight, eyes fixed on her with an expression she couldn’t fully read — not the horror she’d braced for, not quite relief either, something more complicated tangled in between. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
“You’re her,” he said finally, voice barely above a whisper.
“Actually her. Not a coincidence. Not some cruel trick of resemblance.”
“Yes.”
“Say the words,” he said, and his voice cracked slightly on the demand.
“The ones you whispered against my ear the night I fell apart in the cave— no. Not that yet. Tell me something only she would know. Something I never wrote in any file, never told another living soul.”
Ren considered him for a long moment, then reached back into memory that belonged to a girl with short, hacked-off hair and calloused hands, a girl who’d stood on a gallows platform and refused, right up until the very end, to give her executioner the satisfaction of watching her break.
“You asked me, the night before, if I regretted anything,” she said slowly.
“I told you I regretted getting caught more than I regretted stealing. You laughed. It surprised you, I think — the first time anyone had made you laugh in that dungeon in years. Then you asked if I was afraid, and I told you fear was a luxury for people who thought they had a future to lose.”
Lucan made a sound like something breaking loose in his chest, hands coming up to cover his face for a long moment, shoulders shaking with what might have been a laugh or a sob or some devastating combination of both.
“I remember,” he said, voice muffled.
“I remember every word of that conversation. I’ve replayed it a thousand times over five years, trying to understand why it troubled me so much more than every other execution I’d ever ordered.”
“And now you know why.”
“Now I know why.” He lowered his hands, and his eyes had gone wet, something utterly unguarded bleeding through every carefully constructed wall he’d ever built around himself.
“I killed you. I stood on that platform and gave the order, and some part of me knew, even then, that I was making a mistake I’d never fully recover from.”
“You didn’t know I was innocent.”
“I should have looked harder.” His voice cracked further.
“I had the authority to delay the execution. To investigate the evidence properly instead of trusting Malachi’s word. I chose expedience over instinct, and it cost you your entire life.”
“It gave me this one instead.”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it.” He reached for her hands, gripping them tight enough to hurt, desperate. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“You died because I failed to protect you when I had every power to do otherwise. And now I’ve spent two weeks falling in love with the same woman twice, without even understanding what I was doing the first time until it was already too late to save her.”
The word landed between them, unmistakable, and Ren felt her own breath catch at the raw admission.
“You love me,” she said quietly.
“I’ve loved you since a gallows platform five years ago, apparently, though I was too much of a coward to name it as anything but guilt until you woke up wearing this face and gave me no choice but to confront it.” His grip on her hands tightened further.
“I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t think I deserve it. I only need you to understand exactly how deep this runs, now that you know the truth.”
Ren studied his face — raw, exposed, utterly stripped of every ounce of Inquisitorial armor — and felt something in her own carefully guarded heart crack open in response, five years of buried anger finally finding somewhere honest to land.
“I hated you,” she admitted quietly.
“For a long time, in whatever place a soul goes between one life and the next, if such a place exists at all. I hated the man who signed my death warrant without blinking.”
“You have every right to.”
“I don’t hate you anymore.” The admission surprised her even as she said it, true despite every instinct that told her it shouldn’t be.
“I don’t know when that changed. Somewhere between the altar and the dungeon and you kneeling half-broken on my bedroom floor last night, I think.”
Lucan’s breath shuddered out of him, and he pulled her hands to his mouth, pressing a kiss to her knuckles with a reverence that made her chest ache.
“Let me make it right,” he said quietly.
“However long it takes. Whatever it costs me. Let me spend the rest of this life making up for what I did to the last one.”
Ren studied him a long moment, weighing the enormity of what he was offering against every survival instinct that still whispered caution, still warned her that trusting this deeply had nearly gotten her killed once already.
Then, slowly, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his, feeling his breath catch at the contact.
“Start now,” she murmured, “by never letting Malachi find out what you just learned. Because if he discovers what I am before we’re ready for him to, neither of us survives what comes next.”
Lucan’s arms wrapped around her, tight and possessive, dark ash magic curling protective around them both in the morning light.
“He’ll have to go through me first,” he said quietly, and for the first time, Ren let herself believe it might actually be true.