She didn’t say it again.
Instead she turned within the cage of his arms, cold at her back, and found his violet eyes blown wide and dark, pupils swallowing color, his breath ragged like he’d been running instead of standing perfectly still.
“You didn’t say it,” he murmured.
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because you told me not to be responsible for what happens next.” Her pulse hammered so hard she was certain he could feel it through the inch of space between them.
“I’d rather know what that means before I say it a second time.”
Something dark curved at the edge of his mouth — not quite a smile, sharper than that.
“Careful, Lady Caelia. Curiosity has killed better liars than you.”
“Is that what I am? A liar?”
“I haven’t decided.” His hand slid from her hip to her wrist, closing around it with a grip that promised no room for argument.
“But I’ve decided I’m done being patient about finding out.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, drawing her wrist up between them, “you’re going to give me your hand. Bare skin. No altar between us this time.”
“Haven’t we already tried that? You bled.”
“I did.” He turned her palm upward, studying it in the candlelight like it held the answer to every question he’d been asking since the moment she opened her chamber door.
“I want to try again. Properly.”
“Properly meaning?”
“Meaning you channel it into me on purpose this time. Direct. Sustained.” His thumb pressed into the center of her palm, right where light always gathered hottest.
“I want to see how much you can push before either of us breaks.”
“That sounds less like an inspection and more like a punishment.”
“Does it matter which, if you don’t refuse?”
Ren’s breath caught, because he was right — some traitorous part of her hadn’t refused a single thing he’d asked since the moment he’d walked through her chamber door, and she didn’t fully understand why.
“Fine,” she said.
“Show me.”
He lifted her hand and pressed her palm flat against his own bare skin, and this time neither of them pulled away.
The heat came instantly — worse than before, worse than the fountain, worse than the altar — a violent, electric collision of light against ash that made her whole arm shake with the effort of not wrenching free.
Lucan’s jaw tightened, a muscle jumping there, dark blood already beading along the lines where her light burned through his corrupted skin.
“Don’t stop,” he ground out.
“It’s hurting you.”
“I don’t care.” His free hand came up to grip the back of her neck, holding her steady, holding himself steady, like he needed the anchor as much as the pain.
“Give me more.”
She poured more light into her palm without meaning to, some instinct answering his voice before her mind caught up, and Lucan’s whole body shuddered — not away from her, but into her, chest pressing flush against hers, breath ragged and hot against her throat.
“Lucan—”
“Say my name again.” His grip on her neck tightened, fingers threading into silver hair.
“Say it while you’re doing this to me.”
“You’re bleeding onto my hand.”
“I know.” His voice had gone rough, wrecked, edges fraying in a way she hadn’t heard from him yet — the cold, precise Inquisitor cracking open into something feral and desperate.
“It doesn’t feel like pain anymore. Do you understand? It stopped feeling like pain three days after I met you and I don’t know how to make it start again.”
Ren’s chest tightened at that, something dangerously close to sympathy twisting through the fear.
“Maybe you don’t want it to.”
“Maybe not.” His forehead dropped against hers, breath shaking, dark ash-magic curling hungrily around her wrist where their hands stayed locked together, feeding on the burn like it was starving for exactly this kind of ruin.
“Tell me something, Lady Caelia.”
“What?”
“If I find out you’re lying to me — if I find that seam I’ve been hunting for since the moment you opened your door—” his grip on her neck tightened, not quite painful, but absolute, “—will you run?”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“No.” His mouth dropped to the shell of her ear, voice dropping to something low and dark enough to make her shiver despite the fire still burning between their joined hands.
“I’d hunt you through every corner of this Empire, Lady Caelia. And when I found you, I don’t think I’d be gentle about it.”
“That almost sounds like a threat.”
“It’s a promise.” His breath brushed her lips, close enough now that she could feel the words more than hear them, dark and hungry and utterly unhinged beneath his composed mask.
“So if you’re a fake beneath all that holy light — if this whole beautiful, burning performance is a lie — I want you to understand exactly what happens next.”
“Tell me.”
His hand slid from her neck to grip her jaw, tilting her face up until there was nowhere left to look but him.
“I will personally rip you apart, piece by piece,” he whispered, “and I will enjoy every single second of it.”
She waited until the Citadel bells struck midnight before she moved.
Three days of ‘inspections.” Three days of his hands on her skin, his mouth close enough to taste, his obsession curling tighter around her like a noose she couldn’t quite call a threat anymore.
She needed something to fight back with.
Leverage.
Answers.
Anything that gave her the upper hand in a game she hadn’t agreed to play.
Ren picked the lock to his private study with a bent hairpin and hands that remembered exactly what to do, even in a body that had never done this before.
Some things carry over, apparently.
The study was dark, lit only by a single dying candle, shelves crowded with ledgers and reports stamped with the church’s seal.
She moved through it like smoke, fingers skimming spines until she found the drawer that mattered — locked, of course, but locks had never once stopped her.
Inside: execution records.
Dozens of them.
Names, dates, causes.
Her breath caught when she found it.
Ren.
Street thief.
Convicted of theft and heresy.
Executed by hanging.
Her own name.
Her own death, written in his precise, clinical hand, filed away like every other body he’d sent to the gallows.
But tucked behind the record was something else — a portrait, hand-drawn, unmistakably her old face.
Sharp jaw, hard eyes, none of the softness Caelia wore now.
Someone had drawn it with care.
With detail no court sketch artist would have bothered giving a condemned thief.
“Why do you have this,” she whispered, tracing the edge of the paper.
The portrait had been folded and refolded so many times the creases had gone soft, tucked inside the cover of what looked like a personal journal, not an official file.
Not evidence.
Something closer to a keepsake.
Her stomach turned over strangely, and she didn’t have time to name the feeling before a shadow fell across the desk.
“Find anything interesting?”
Ren’s whole body went rigid.
She hadn’t heard the door.
Hadn’t heard footsteps.
He’d simply arrived, the way he always seemed to, like the dark itself delivered him.
Lucan stood in the doorway, blocking the only exit, arms crossed, expression unreadable in the candlelight.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Ren said, sliding the portrait back beneath the file with as much calm as she could fake.
“I thought I’d take a walk.”
“A walk. Into my private study.” He stepped inside, closing the door behind him with a soft, final click.
“Through a locked drawer.”
“The door was open.”
“It wasn’t.” His eyes dropped to her hands, still resting near the drawer she hadn’t quite managed to shut.
“You picked that lock. I watched you do it from the hallway before you noticed me.”
Ren’s pulse spiked, but she kept her chin level.
“Then you already know I’m resourceful.”
“I know you’re a great many things I haven’t finished….” He crossed the room slowly, unhurried, the way a predator moved when it already knew its prey had nowhere left to run.
“What I want to know is why a sheltered Saintess candidate breaks into an Inquisitor’s study in the middle of the night like she’s done it a hundred times before.”
” I’m not as sheltered as everyone assumes.”
“Clearly.” He stopped in front of the desk, gaze flicking down to the open drawer, to the edge of paper peeking from beneath the file — her own face, folded soft with handling.
Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and dangerous.
“What did you find, Lady Caelia?”
“Nothing that concerns me.”
“Everything in this room concerns you. That’s rather the point of it.” He reached past her, close enough that his chest brushed her shoulder, and drew the portrait free himself, studying it in the low light like he’d forgotten she was standing right there.
“You saw this.”
“I did.”
“And what did you think?”
Ren swallowed hard.
“I think it’s a very careful drawing for a thief you executed five years ago.”
Something shifted in his expression — not quite guilt, too controlled for that, but close enough to make her chest tighten strangely.
“Careful is one word for it.” He set the portrait down on the desk between them, violet eyes lifting to hers, and for the first time since she’d woken in this body, he looked almost unguarded “Obsessive is probably closer to the truth.”
“Why keep it? She was a criminal. A stranger.”
“She wasn’t a stranger.” His voice had gone low, rough at the edges, something raw bleeding through the composed mask he wore for everyone else in this Citadel.
“She was the only person I ever hesitated to kill.”
Ren’s breath caught, some old, buried instinct in her chest recognizing the shape of that confession even before her mind fully understood it.
“You didn’t hesitate,” she said carefully.
“I watched the execution records. You signed the order.”
“I signed the order.” His eyes stayed locked on hers, dark and searching, close enough now that she could feel the heat rolling off him despite the cold room.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t hesitate first.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know.” He reached out, tucking a strand of silver hair behind her ear with a gentleness that felt wildly out of place on hands that had signed a hundred death warrants.
“Maybe because you’re standing in my study at midnight, holding evidence that could end your life, and you’re still not shaking.”
“Should I be?”
“Everyone else would be.” His hand lingered at her jaw, thumb tracing the same slow path it had traced against the altar, against her throat, against every guarded inch of her he’d been mapping for days.
“You’re not everyone else.”
“Maybe I’m just very good at hiding fear.”
“Maybe.” His eyes dropped to her mouth, and the air between them went thick and dangerous, heavy with something neither of them had said out loud yet.
“Or maybe you’re something far more interesting than fear can explain.”
He didn’t move away.
Neither did she.
And for one long, suspended moment in the candlelit dark of his study, surrounded by the paper ghosts of everyone he’d ever condemned, Ren understood with sudden, terrifying clarity that the man who’d killed her once was standing close enough to do it again — and some reckless, traitorous part of her didn’t want him to step back.