“You look pale, my lady.” Mira fussed with the clasp at Ren’s throat, fingers trembling slightly.
“Are you unwell?”
“I’m fine.” Ren studied her reflection — white silk, silver hair braided with pearls, every inch the picture of a saint.
“Just tired.”
“The whole Citadel will be there tonight. High Bishop Malachi doesn’t throw feasts often.” Mira’s voice dropped.
“They say he’s been asking about you. Personally.”
“Asking what?”
“I don’t know, my lady. Only that his steward has visited the kitchens twice this week, wanting to know your favorite dishes. Your usual seat. Small things. Strange things to care about.”
Ren’s stomach turned uneasy.
“Strange indeed.”
The Grand Hall blazed gold with a hundred candles by the time she arrived, crowded with nobles in silk and priests in white, the air thick with perfume and wine and the low murmur of court gossip.
Ren moved through it with Caelia’s practiced grace, though every instinct she owned catalogued exits, weapons, threats.
“Lady Caelia.” High Bishop Malachi materialized at her elbow before she’d taken three steps, robes heavy with gold thread, smile heavier still with something she didn’t trust.
“How radiant you look tonight.”
“High Bishop.” She dipped a shallow curtsy.
“Thank you for the invitation.”
“How could I not invite our most precious vessel?” His hand found her arm, guiding her toward the high table with a grip just slightly too familiar, too proprietary.
“You’ve been the talk of the Citadel, my dear. The fountain. The reaction with our Grand Inquisitor.” His smile sharpened.
“Such passion for a rite that’s usually so clinical.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve nothing to compare it to.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” His gaze slid over her, slow and assessing in a way that made her skin crawl worse than anything Lucan had ever done.
“Tell me, Lady Caelia. Do you find the Grand Inquisitor’s methods… thorough?”
“I find them appropriate to his duties.”
“Diplomatic.” Malachi’s fingers pressed briefly into her arm before releasing her at the table.
“I do hope his thoroughness hasn’t overstepped. Some Inquisitors forget themselves around a pretty vessel.”
Across the hall, she felt it before she saw it — Lucan’s gaze, locked on her from beside a pillar, dark and unreadable, watching Malachi’s hand where it had touched her arm like he was cataloguing exactly how long the contact had lasted.
“I assure you,” Ren said carefully, “nothing improper has occurred.”
“Of course not.” Malachi didn’t sound convinced.
“Sit, my dear. Eat. You’ve had a trying week.”
The feast dragged on in a haze of wine and empty pleasantries, nobles vying for her attention, priests asking pointed questions about her recovery, her power, her devotion.
Ren smiled and deflected and felt Lucan’s stare the entire time, a physical weight pressing against her skin from across the crowded hall.
She caught his eye once, deliberately, and something dark passed over his face before he looked away — jaw tight, hand curled white-knuckled around his wine glass.
He’s jealous, she realized with a small, dangerous thrill.
The thought shouldn’t have pleased her nearly as much as it did.
“Lady Caelia.” Malachi’s voice again, closer now, his chair somehow drifted nearer during the last course.
“You’ve barely touched your wine.”
“I find I have little taste for it tonight.”
“A shame.” His hand settled on her shoulder, fingers curling with unmistakable intent, thumb brushing bare skin above her collar.
“Perhaps something else would suit you better.”
“High Bishop—”
The crystal shattered across the hall before she finished the sentence.
Every head turned.
Lucan stood rigid by the pillar, wine glass crushed to ruin in his bare fist, dark blood — his own, this time, mixed with wine — dripping steadily onto the marble floor.
His eyes had gone that same feral red she’d seen in his study, fixed across the crowded hall directly on Malachi’s hand where it still rested on her shoulder.
“Grand Inquisitor.” Malachi’s smile didn’t waver, though something wary crept into his voice.
“Are you unwell?”
“Quite well.” Lucan’s voice carried flat and cold across the sudden silence, though his eyes never left that hand on her shoulder.
“The glass simply proved… fragile.”
“How unfortunate.” Malachi’s fingers pressed once, deliberately, into Ren’s shoulder before finally withdrawing.
“You should have that seen to.”
“I intend to.” Lucan didn’t move from the pillar, didn’t call for a servant to clean the blood dripping steady down his wrist, didn’t so much as glance at his own ruined hand.
His stare stayed locked on Malachi with an intensity that made half the hall go quiet with unease.
“Along with several other things that require my attention tonight.”
Ren felt her pulse spike at the promise buried in those words, dark and unmistakable, aimed squarely at her.
Malachi cleared his throat, waving over a servant to deal with the mess, steering conversation back toward safer waters with practiced ease — but Ren barely heard a word of it, every nerve in her body fixed instead on the man across the hall, bleeding quietly into the marble, watching her like he was one wrong move away from setting the entire Grand Hall on fire.
The alcove behind the grand chapel was pitch black, and Lucan’s hand around her wrist left no room for argument as he dragged her into it.
“Lucan—”
“Don’t.” His voice came out low, rough, nothing left of the careful composure he’d worn through dinner.
He pressed her back against the cold stone wall, caging her there with both hands planted flat on either side of her head.
“Don’t say anything yet.”
“You’re bleeding on your good shirt.”
“I don’t care about the shirt.” His breath came ragged, chest heaving like he’d run the whole way from the Grand Hall instead of simply walking.
“He touched you.”
“It was nothing. A hand on my shoulder.”
“It was his hand.” Lucan’s voice cracked with something dark and unhinged, eyes still burning that faint ember red in the shadows.
“On your skin. Where I—”
He stopped himself, jaw tightening.
“Where I haven’t finished,” he said instead, low and rough.
“Where I’m not done.”
He reached out, thumb dragging slow and deliberate across the curve of her shoulder where Malachi’s hand had rested, like he could physically scrub the memory of that touch from her skin.
Ren shivered at the contact, heat pooling low in her stomach despite every warning bell screaming through her head.
“You’re not being rational,” she said.
“I know.”
“You crushed a wine glass in front of the entire Citadel.”
“I know that too.” His hand slid from her shoulder to the side of her throat, thumb pressing into her pulse the way he always did, like he needed to feel proof of her heartbeat to stay grounded.
“I don’t seem to care about rational anymore. Not when it comes to you.”
“That’s a dangerous thing for the Grand Inquisitor to admit.”
“Everything about this is dangerous.” His forehead dropped against hers, breath hot and uneven.
“I’ve executed men for less devotion than what I’m feeling right now, and I can’t make myself stop.”
“Then don’t stop,” Ren said, and hated how much she meant it.
Something in him seemed to snap loose at that.
His mouth crashed against hers, hungrier than the kiss in his study, less careful, less controlled — teeth and tongue and the faint metallic tang of his own blood still on his lips from the shattered glass.
Ren gasped into it, fingers fisting in the front of his ruined shirt, and felt him groan low against her mouth as her holy light flared instinctively bright between them, scorching faint gold patterns into the stone at their backs.
“Say you’re mine,” he breathed against her lips, voice wrecked.
“Say it.”
“I’m not something you own, Grand Inquisitor.”
“You are.” His hand slid from her throat down to grip her waist, hard enough to bruise, pulling her flush against him.
“Whether either of us likes it or not, you became mine the moment your blood hit my tongue. I don’t care whose fingers you tolerate at some feast. I don’t care about propriety, or the church, or my vow. You’re mine.”
Ren’s breath caught, some reckless, unguarded part of her thrilling at the raw possession in his voice even as the rest of her recognized exactly how dangerous a man like this could be to belong to.
“You sound like a jealous lover,” she murmured against his mouth, testing the words, testing him.
“Not an Inquisitor.”
He went very still.
For one long, suspended second, she thought she’d finally pushed too far — that the accusation would send him retreating back behind his cold, composed mask, back to denial and careful distance and dangerous half-truths.
Instead his hand tightened at her waist, and his mouth dropped to the shell of her ear, voice dropping to something low and rough and utterly unashamed.
“I don’t deny it,” he said quietly.
Ren’s heart slammed hard against her ribs.
“You should,” she whispered.
“It isn’t safe. Not for either of us.”
“I stopped caring about safe five years ago, the day I signed a death warrant for a woman I’d never met and couldn’t stop thinking about afterward.” His lips brushed the sensitive skin just below her ear, and she felt him smile against her pulse, dark and unhinged and entirely too pleased with himself.
“So no, Lady Caelia. I won’t deny it. Not to you. Not anymore.”
He drew back just far enough to look at her, violet eyes still burning faint red in the darkness of the alcove, and something in his expression had shifted — less predator now, more man standing at the edge of a cliff he’d already decided to jump from.
“Whatever you are,” he said softly, “heretic, saint, or something in between — you’re mine now. And I intend to burn down anyone who forgets it.”