If you hate the ring (and odds are you do), feel free to weaponize it. Hurl it at someone deserving. Melt it down. Pawn it for a fresh identity and enough funds to disappear into a life of luxury and plausible deniability.
Now, a few things.
I hope my mother hasn’t driven you completely mad yet. Though in fairness, I’ve endured twenty-five years of her curated chaos, so if she’s being unbearable, that’s just her baseline. There’s a reason I avoid her soirées unless physically restrained. But she likes you, that’s the terrifying part.
As for Margaux . . . I told her to behave. Repeatedly. I even bribed her with that ridiculous perfume she hoards and offered to bankroll her next miniature coup. Still, she’s Margaux. You’ll know within five minutes whether she’s playing nice or plottingregicide. I’d offer an apology, but I make it a policy never to apologize for family. It only encourages them.
I miss you.
Not in the tortured, candlelit, sonnet-reciting kind of way. More like the silence is too quiet, too long. No one’s around to insult me properly or threaten to stab me for being unbearable.
I know you think I’m bleeding out in some subterranean dungeon, but I’m fine. Truly. Father hasn’t had cause to drain me yet. Shocking, I know. Either he’s distracted or mellowing with age. (Doubtful, but one can dream.)
Anyway, try not to impale anyone important. Unless it’s absolutely justified. I’ll see you soon. Or not soon enough.
—D
The laugh that escapes me is too raw. It cracks open something splintered in my chest, and the ache I’ve been pretending wasn’t there rushes in. Two weeks of silence and separation, my only tether these notes Raze delivers as if they’re contraband. My throat tightens until breath becomes a struggle, and I press my palms to the table, grounding myself before I unravel completely.
The ring shackles my finger like a diamond-studded sentence. It’s ostentatious and excessive and everything I despise, making it perfect for the role I’m expected to play. I flex my hand, following the way light fractures across the stone’s surface, trying to ignore the cold bite of metal against trembling skin.
Once, when I was young enough to believe in fairy tales, I’d dreamed of a wedding. Something quiet and honest, before I learned that in our world, marriage is another currency. Another leash. Now here I am, dressed in white for a game that stains everything red, where love isn’t sanctuary but leverage.
At least I’ll have Dom beside me in this gilded prison. There are worse men to marry. And I do love him—in the way storms love wreckage, in the way ruin recognizes itself. His darkness speaks tomine. Sometimes, I let myself imagine escape. Him and me, vanishing into some forgotten corner of the world, far from the bloodied legacy we were born to serve. But Eclipsera’s grip runs deep, its claws buried in bone. Every day I remain, I rot a little more.
This city doesn’t just run on power. It’s built on silence, sacrifice, and love that demands blood in exchange for permission to feel.
I fold his note carefully, tucking it into the desk drawer where it joins its brothers. For a moment, I lean my forehead against the wood, breathing in the lingering scent of faded ink and Mom’s vanished presence. A single tear slips loose, and I swipe it away with an irritated hand.
Raze doesn’t check on me. He never does when the quiet turns oppressive. That’s why I trust him. He pretends not to notice when my breath stutters, or when I have to steady myself before I stand. He lets me break without commentary.
I don’t go to bed, instead I settle into the living room, surrounded by the files Kian “generously” provided about the Apex Initiative. The fire hisses low, casting shadows that writhe across sheets of research and fragmented data, making the clinical language seem even more sinister.
I keep glancing at the door. Hoping stupidly that tonight might be different. That Luna will finally come home. We haven’t spokensince the fight. Only the occasional creak of floorboards at impossible hours reminds me she still exists. I want to tell her about Dom, the wedding, all of it. But I already know how it would go. She’d accuse him. Say I’m being manipulated. That I’m trading too much for a boy made of shadow and bad decisions.
And maybe she’d be right. But I made this choice. I signed the contract and stepped into the role. I just didn’t expect the fiction to be so lived-in.
The research in front of me confirms what I’d suspected, detailed protocols for extracting magical essence from creatures to create hybrids. What turns my stomach is the theoretical framework for human implementation.
I remember the screams, the way the creatures writhed during extraction. The pain was beyond anything I’d seen, and these notes suggest the hybrid creation process is even worse. If they ever move to human trials . . . I shudder thinking about who would willingly submit themselves to that kind of agony.
“You know,” Raze says, slicing through my spiral with his usual bluntness, “normal people sleep at night.”
I don’t glance up from the papers. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“At the rate you’re going, that’ll be any day now.” He adjusts his weapon holster, preparing to swap shifts with Kane. “Suit yourself, but don’t blame me when you face Madeline Shaw tomorrow looking half-devoured by void hounds.”
A moment later, Kane strides in and the air shifts. He doesn’t speak, he never does right away, but his presence alone alters the space. That particular brand of stoic scrutiny he’s mastered, as if he’s already mapped ten ways to eliminate threats and slotted me somewhere in the middle.
Built with the efficiency of a siege weapon, his broad frame is wrapped in a long coat, black shirt sleeves rolled to expose sinew and ink, veins etched beneath bronzed skin. His movements are economy incarnate, not a gesture wasted. There’s control in every step, a dangerous quiet threaded through each breath. His featuresare harsh, almost beautiful in the way a cliff face might be—angular jaw, sharp cheekbones, mouth set in that familiar unreadable line.
But tonight, something’s different.
His pale eyes, typically glacial and razor-focused, are ringed with shadows. There’s tension in the way his shoulders slump, not in readiness, but in quiet erosion. His posture isn’t sloppy, but it lacks his usual rigidity. And his hair, usually combed back with soldierly precision, is disheveled, the strands tousled by restless hands dragged through it repeatedly.
He looks frayed. Unmoored. And it unsettles me more than I care to admit.
“You okay?” I ask, because someone should.
