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Fuck.

Pressing my palms against my eyes, I tried to breathe through the rage clawing up my throat. The stage ritual worked exactly as I’d planned. I manipulated her into a witnessed bargain. I marked her as the House’s next vessel. Set the old contract back into motion.

Everything Evangeline had taught me.

Now the House would finish what it started a hundred years ago.

Unless I stopped it.

Unless I told her the truth.

Unless I chose her instead of my freedom.

Dropping my hands, I stared at the scattered pages.

The problem was that I didn’t know if I could.

But I knew the exact moment I’d recognized her soul.

Not when she touched me in the corridor.

Not when she spoke my name.

When I was inside her on the stage.

Her body tightened around me, pulling me deeper, and her hips tilted up in that same deliberate way—seeking friction, demanding more—and the movement sent a jolt through my spine that had nothing to do with the present. Her breath came hot and fast against my throat, the same rhythm I’d heard a hundred years ago in a narrow room with a single lamp burning low. Her hands gripped my shoulders, nails digging in hard enough to leave marks, and I felt the echo of another night when she’d done the same thing and told me not to treat her like she was fragile.

The way she looked at me.

Dark eyes. Defiant. Hungry. The same expression she’d given me every time I told her to do something she didn’t want to, back when I’d promised we’d leave together and start over somewhere her aunt couldn’t find us.

The sound she made when I thrust deeper.

Low. Broken. A gasp that turned into my name, and hearing it now— “Malachi”—in that same breathless tone made my chest seize because I remembered the first time she’d said it. The first time I’d been inside her, and she’d whispered my name like it was a prayer and a curse at the same time.

Her body’s response.

The way she clenched around me, her thighs trembling, her spine arching off the stage floor. I’d felt this before. The same involuntary tightening, the same shudder running through her when I found the angle that made her lose control. A hundred years ago I’d memorized every reaction, every sound, every place I could touch to make her come undone, and now her body was giving me the same answers.

The same woman.

The woman I’d loved.

The woman I’d promised to choose.

The woman I’d betrayed when Evangeline offered me unlimited power and wealth and I’d taken the deal without thinking about what it would cost.

Horror crawled up my throat because I understood what I was doing.

This ritual wasn’t just a performance. It was the same intimacy we’d shared in that narrow room, corrupted and twisted into spectacle. I was inside her again, but this time I was using her body to bind her to the House, to mark her as Evangeline’s descendant, to trap her in the same cycle that had destroyed us both. The promises I’d made to her—I’m going to choose you, I’m going to get us out of here—were lies I was repeating in a different form, and she didn’t even know it yet.

She didn’t remember me.

But I remembered her.

Every detail. Every promise. Every moment I’d held her and told myself I meant it when I said I’d save her.

And I was doing it again.