“You cannot be serious.”
High Bishop Malachi’s pen paused over the parchment.
“The Grand Inquisitor has invoked ancient inquisitorial rights, Lady Caelia. I’m afraid seriousness has nothing to do with it.”
“Daily inspections. Alone. In the subterranean sanctuaries.” Ren kept her voice level, though her pulse was hammering.
“That’s not protocol. That’s a cage.”
“That’s protocol when a Saintess candidate’s aura reacts with this much instability.” Lucan’s voice came from the doorway, and she hadn’t even heard him enter.
Of course she hadn’t.
“Your light corroded my hand yesterday, Lady Caelia. In front of forty witnesses.”
“So punish the fountain.”
Something almost like amusement flickered across his face.
“I’d rather study the source.”
“There are proper channels for this,” Malachi said, though he didn’t sound like he intended to use any of them.
“Chaperones. Priests present. Standard practice—”
“Standard practice didn’t predict this.” Lucan crossed the chamber slowly, his ruined palm still wrapped in dark cloth, and Ren felt the temperature drop with every step he took.
“I want her isolated. No maids. No priests. Just controlled conditions and my own observation.”
“For how long?”
“Until I understand what I’m looking at.”
Ren stood, chair scraping.
“And if I refuse?”
Lucan looked at her then, fully, and something in his gaze made her skin prickle everywhere at once.
“You won’t.”
“Confident.”
“Realistic.” He stepped closer, close enough that Malachi’s presence in the room seemed to matter less and less with every inch.
“Refusing an Inquisitorial rite is heresy, Lady Caelia. And I don’t think you want to give me a reason to use that word.”
Ren held his stare, hating how her pulse answered him instead of her fear.
“Fine. Private inspections. When do they begin?”
“Tonight.” His eyes dropped, slow, deliberate, tracing down her throat like he could already see beneath her skin to whatever he suspected was hiding there.
“The lower sanctuary. Sundown.”
“How romantic.”
“It isn’t meant to be.” But his voice had dropped lower on the last word, rougher, and for one unguarded second something dark and hungry flickered behind his composure before he shuttered it away again.
She found the dagger that evening, tucked beneath her mattress where Caelia’s soft, sheltered hands would never have thought to search — but Ren’s hands knew exactly where a girl hid a weapon when she didn’t trust the world around her.
Silver.
Thin.
Sharp enough to open a throat in one clean pull.
Someone left this here on purpose.
Whether it had been Caelia’s own paranoia in some buried instinct, or something stranger, Ren didn’t know.
She didn’t care.
She wrapped her fingers around the hilt and felt, for the first time since waking in this body, something close to herself again.
“If you figure out who I really am,” she whispered to the empty room, sliding the blade beneath her sleeve, “I’m not going to the gallows twice without taking something of yours with me.”
The lower sanctuary was colder than the rest of the Citadel, all black stone and guttering candlelight, and Lucan was already waiting when she arrived — no armor tonight, just a dark tunic that clung to a chest built for violence, sleeves shoved up over forearms marked in faint, creeping lines of ash-black scarring.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I’m always early.” His eyes swept over her, slow, thorough, lingering in ways that made her skin heat despite the chill in the room.
“Come here.”
“Demanding.”
“I’m the Grand Inquisitor. It’s the job description.” But there was something rougher under the words tonight, something that hadn’t been there in the courtyard.
She stepped closer, and he circled her once, unhurried, like a man committing something to memory.
When he stopped behind her, his breath ghosted against the shell of her ear.
“Do you know what I keep thinking about?” he murmured.
“Your light burning through my glove yesterday. How it felt.”
“Painful, I’d imagine.”
“It should have been.” His hand came up, resting light against the side of her throat, thumb tracing the line of her pulse with a slowness that made her breath catch despite every instinct screaming at her to pull away.
“It wasn’t. Not entirely.”
“What was it, then?”
“Something I haven’t felt in five years.” His voice dropped lower, rougher, close enough now that she felt the words more than heard them.
“I want to feel it again.”
Ren’s heart slammed hard against her ribs.
“That’s a strange thing for an Inquisitor to want.”
“I’m a strange man.” His fingers pressed lightly into the racing pulse at her throat, and she knew — she *knew* — he could feel exactly how fast it beat, how little of it was fear and how much of it was something far more dangerous.
“Take off your gloves, Lady Caelia.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see what happens,” he said quietly, “when nothing stands between your light and my skin at all.”
She should have refused.
Every survival instinct she owned screamed at her to refuse.
Instead, slowly, she peeled the silk from her fingers, one hand and then the other, and watched his violet eyes darken as her bare palm hovered an inch from his scarred one — heat and cold radiating off each of them like the air itself might catch fire between their skin.
“Careful,” he breathed, and it wasn’t a warning.
It sounded almost like a plea.
“You first,” Ren whispered back, and pressed her palm flat against his.
The contact lasted less than a second before Lucan wrenched his hand back, breathing hard, dark blood beading fresh across his palm.
“Interesting,” he said, voice rough.
“You’re bleeding again.”
“I noticed.” He flexed his fingers, watching gold light chase black corruption across the wound like something alive.
“It doesn’t stop when I want it to. That’s new too.”
“Maybe your body just doesn’t like me.”
“My body likes you fine.” His eyes lifted to hers, dark and unreadable.
“That’s the problem.”
He crossed to the heavy iron doors and dropped the bar across them with a clang that echoed through the whole sanctuary, sealing them both inside stone walls slick with candlelight and shadow.
“Was that necessary?” Ren asked.
“Privacy is necessary. For an accurate reading.” He turned, and something in his posture had shifted — looser, more predatory, like the locked door had stripped away whatever restraint he wore in public rooms.
“Come here, Lady Caelia.”
“You keep saying that like I have a choice.”
“You don’t.” But he said it almost gently, which was somehow worse.
She crossed the sanctuary floor, bare feet cold against black marble, and stopped in front of the ancient stone altar at the room’s center.
Lucan closed the distance behind her, close enough that his chest brushed her shoulder blades, close enough that the cold radiating off him sank straight into her bones.
“Turn around,” he said.
“Hands on the altar.”
“Is that part of the rite, or part of you?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
“Then let’s say both.” His voice had dropped low, rough at the edges, and when she turned and pressed her palms flat to the cold marble, he stepped in behind her, caging her between his body and the altar without ever quite touching her.
“I need to trace the magic along your skin. Your neck. Your collarbones. Wherever the light runs closest to the surface.”
“How thorough.”
“I’m known for it.”
His fingers found the curve of her throat first, dark mana curling cool and sharp against her pulse, and Ren bit down a gasp as it dragged slow along her collarbone, tracing some invisible current only he could see.
“Does that hurt?” His voice had gone quiet, close against her ear.
“No.” It was true, and that terrified her more than pain would have.
“It feels—”
“Tell me.”
“Cold. And then not.” Her breath hitched as his fingers trailed lower, following the neckline of her gown, ash-dark magic prickling against skin that had never been touched like this in either life.
“What are you looking for?”
“A seam.” His mouth was close enough now that she felt the words against her skin.
“Some place where the light doesn’t match the girl wearing it.”
“And if you find one?”
“Then I’ll know exactly what you are.” His fingers pressed flat against her sternum, right over the place where her heartbeat lived, dark and cold and searching.
“And what to do with you.”
Her light answered before she could stop it — a hot, defensive flare surging up from beneath her skin straight into his palm, and Lucan made a low, rough sound that was not pain at all.
“There it is,” he breathed.
His chest armor hissed where the light scorched across it, metal blackening at the edges, and instead of pulling back he pressed *closer*, like the burn was something to chase rather than avoid.
“You’re not stopping,” Ren said, voice unsteady.
“Why would I?” His free hand came up to grip her hip, holding her against the altar, against him, while gold light and dark ash tangled together in the small space between their bodies like something feeding on itself.
“It’s the first thing that’s actually made me feel anything in years.”
“That’s a disturbing thing to admit to a suspected heretic.”
“I know.” His mouth dropped to the curve of her shoulder, not quite a kiss, just breath and heat and the promise of teeth.
“I don’t seem to care.”
Ren’s whole body trembled — not fear now, or not only fear, something far more dangerous tangled underneath it, hot and unwelcome and impossible to name.
“Grand Inquisitor—”
“Lucan.” His grip on her hip tightened, dark magic sinking deeper into her skin, chasing the burn her light kept dealing him like a man addicted to his own ruin.
“Say it.”
“Lucan.” The name came out breathless, and she hated how right it felt in her mouth.
He went still behind her, every muscle locked tight, like her voice saying his name had done something to him no blade or spell ever had.
“Say it again,” he said, low and rough, “and I won’t be responsible for what happens next.”