“Again.”
Ren’s palm burned raw, but she opened her hand anyway, watching pale light gather and spark against her skin in the empty sanctuary.
It was well past midnight.
She’d waited until the last torch in the corridor guttered out before slipping down here alone, no maid, no Inquisitor breathing down her neck, just her and the cold stone and whatever this power actually was.
Again, she told herself, and forced the light to hold its shape instead of spilling loose and wild the way it always wanted to.
For three nights she’d practiced like this.
Alone.
In secret.
Because if Lucan was going to keep finding reasons to touch her, keep finding excuses to press his hands to her skin and study her like a puzzle he intended to solve, she needed to understand her own weapon before he understood it for her.
She held her palm flat and pictured a blade instead of a flood, and the light obeyed — thinning, sharpening, drawing itself out from a formless burst into something narrow and lethal, a razor-thin thread of white-gold that hummed faintly in the dark like a plucked wire.
Ren stared at it, breath caught in her throat.
“There you are,” she whispered.
She flicked her wrist, testing the thread’s give, and it sliced clean through the edge of a wooden prayer bench without so much as a whisper of resistance, the cut smooth as a blade through silk.
Not a fragile vessel.
Not a saint.
Something else.
Something that remembered, deep in whatever part of a soul carried forward between lives, exactly what it felt like to survive on nothing but sharp edges and quick hands.
She let the thread coil back into her palm and flexed her fingers, testing the ache.
It hurt — everything about this power hurt when she pushed it — but it was a hurt she was starting to recognize as useful instead of just dangerous.
A weapon instead of a curse.
He wants to know what I am.
Fine.
Let him find out on my terms, not his.
She thought of Malachi’s hand on her shoulder at the feast, his smile too knowing, his questions too pointed.
She thought of Lucan crushing a wine glass bare-handed across a crowded hall because a man had dared touch what he’d already decided belonged to him.
Two very different kinds of danger circling her from two very different directions, and she had exactly one weapon that answered to nobody but her.
She drew the light out again, sharper this time, until three thin threads hummed between her fingers like harp strings waiting to be plucked, each one capable of opening a throat from ten paces.
Good. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
If either man in this Citadel decided she was expendable, she intended to make that decision cost them something.
She was so absorbed in the shape of it, in the low thrum of light obeying her will for the first time since she’d woken in this body, that she didn’t hear the sanctuary door open.
“You’ve been busy.”
Ren spun, threads flaring instinctively toward the sound before she recognized the voice and forced them to dissolve back into her palm.
Lucan stood in the doorway, arms crossed, watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read — not suspicion exactly, something closer to fascination edged with wariness.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to watch you turn holy light into something that could take a man’s head off.” He stepped further into the sanctuary, and the heavy iron door swung shut behind him with a low, final groan.
“Saintesses don’t train weapons out of their mana, Lady Caelia. Priests train them to heal. To purify. To sit quietly in chapels and let the light pour out of them like water from a jar.”
“Maybe I’m not interested in sitting quietly.”
“Clearly.” He circled her slowly, the same predatory patience he always wore, though something about it felt different tonight — less clinical, more personal.
“Show me again.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to see it.” His voice had dropped, rough at the edges.
“Because every time you surprise me, some small, foolish part of me falls a little further, and I’ve stopped trying to fight that.”
Ren’s breath caught at the bluntness of it, at how easily he handed her something that dangerous without flinching.
She held out her palm and drew the light again, slower this time, deliberate, watching it thin and sharpen into a single glowing thread that hummed faintly in the space between them.
Lucan’s eyes tracked it with open hunger.
“Beautiful.”
“It’s a weapon.”
“The most beautiful things usually are.” He reached out — not toward the thread itself, but toward her wrist, closing his fingers around it gently, guiding her hand until the humming edge of light hovered a bare inch from his own throat.
“Show me how sharp.”
“Lucan—”
“I trust you.” His pulse hammered visibly beneath the thread, and he didn’t pull back an inch.
“More than I’ve trusted anyone in five years. Show me.”
Her hand trembled, but she didn’t lower it.
Instead she let the thread drift, feather-light, across the side of his throat — not cutting, just tracing, close enough that a single twitch of her wrist would open an artery.
His breath went ragged instead, eyes darkening, and when he spoke his voice had dropped to something low and unsteady.
“Do you have any idea,” he murmured, “what it does to me, watching you hold my life in your hand like that and choose, every single time, not to take it?”
“Maybe I’m simply patient.”
“Maybe you like it.” His hand slid from her wrist up her arm, slow, deliberate, until his palm cupped the side of her face, thumb tracing her cheekbone while the thread of light still hummed dangerously close to his throat.
“The power. Watching me hold still for you. Watching a man everyone fears go quiet and pliant the second you decide to let him.”
Ren’s pulse spiked, because he wasn’t wrong, and the accuracy of it frightened her more than any threat he’d ever made.
“You’re playing a dangerous game,” she said quietly.
“I’ve been playing a dangerous game since the moment I met you.” His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth.
“The only difference now is that I’ve stopped pretending I want to stop.”
She let the thread dissolve, and the second it vanished he closed the last inch of distance between them, mouth finding hers with a desperation that had nothing left of Inquisitorial cold in it at all.
She kissed him back, fingers curling into his collar, and felt his groan vibrate low against her lips as gold light and dark ash sparked violently at every point their skin touched.
“I want to test something else,” he breathed against her mouth.
“What?”
“How much you can take from me before it breaks either of us.”
Ren pulled back just far enough to study his face — flushed, hungry, eyes gone that faint burning red again — and felt something reckless and dangerous unfurl low in her chest, a plan forming out of nothing but instinct and opportunity.
“Then let me choose the terms,” she said slowly.
“Next time. On my ground.”
Something flickered behind his eyes — surprise, then a slow, dark curiosity.
“Bold.”
“You like bold.”
“I like you.” He pressed one last, lingering kiss to her mouth before finally stepping back, breathing hard, visibly forcing himself toward some fragile edge of restraint.
“Choose your terms, then, Lady Caelia. I’ll come find out exactly what you have planned.”
He turned to leave, pausing once at the sanctuary door to glance back at her — silver hair mussed, lips kiss-swollen, the faint afterglow of spent light still humming beneath her skin — and something in his expression, some unguarded flicker of pure, unhinged devotion, made her chest ache in a way she didn’t have a name for yet.
The second the door shut behind him, Ren looked down at her own palm, flexing her fingers slowly, watching light gather obedient and sharp beneath her skin exactly the way she’d trained it to.
He thinks he’s the one setting the terms.
She drew the silver dagger from beneath her sleeve — the one she’d hidden under her mattress since the first night — and pressed the tip lightly against her own palm, testing the sharpness against skin that would bleed gold instead of red.
Let’s see how far his addiction really runs.