The plan is working.
A Keeper meets me with a blade—longer than the others, better trained. We exchange strikes, testing each other, and I feel the spores singing in my blood. Everything is sharper. Brighter. The impact of steel against steel sends pleasure rolling down my spine, and that’s wrong, that’s the Bloom working on me?—
I push through it. End the Keeper with a disemboweling cut that spills his insides across the floor. Step over him. Keep moving.
The Abbot hasn’t moved.
He stands at his lectern, watching the massacre unfold with an expression of patient amusement. No fear. No urgency. Just calm assessment, as if I’m a performance he’s judging rather than a threat he needs to escape.
That should concern me. Doesn’t. I’m too focused on the killing, too wrapped in the Bloom’s influence, too close to finishing what I started.
Arwen reaches the altar. I see her hands working the restraints, fingers fumbling with buckles designed to resistexactly this rescue. Circe is sobbing, saying something I can’t hear over the screaming of the congregation.
More Keepers pour through a side entrance. Reinforcements. Fresh and armed and very inconvenient.
I adjust. Intercept. The first one dies trying to reach Arwen; the second dies trying to avenge the first. My arms burn with exertion. My lungs labor against the spore-thick air. The Bloom sings in my blood, demanding more—more violence, more sensation, more of everything?—
I reach the altar steps. The Abbot is right there. Ten feet away. My sword arm rises, prepared to end this, to fulfill the deal I made to a woman I’ve known less than a day?—
My arm stops.
Not by choice. By force. Some invisible hand has wrapped around my muscles and squeezed, turning my body into a puppet with severed strings.
The wanting hits me.
Not the background hum I’ve been fighting since entering the monastery. This is a tsunami—every unfulfilled need I’ve ever experienced, compressed and magnified and screaming for satisfaction. Hunger, though I ate this morning. Thirst, though I’m not dehydrated. The desperate need for touch, for warmth, for something I can’t name?—
And beneath it all, specific and undeniable: her.
Arwen. The curve of her neck. The sound of her voice. The way she looked at me when I gave her my cloak, as though no one had shown her kindness in years.
I want. I want. The wanting drowns everything else, pulls me under, fills my lungs with honey-sweet need until I can’t remember why I’m here or what I’m supposed to be doing.
My sword drops from nerveless fingers. My knees buckle. I hit the stone floor hard enough to crack the marble, but the pain barely registers through the overwhelming tide of desire.
The Abbot smiles.
“The spores in this room are specially concentrated.” His voice washes over me—warm, gentle, horrifying. “Even an executioner’s will can break against sufficient desire.”
Arwen’s face appears in my vision. She’s there suddenly, abandoning the half-freed girl on the altar, her hands on my face, her gaze boring into mine with desperate intensity.
“Listen to me.” Her voice cuts through the fog. Sharp. Demanding. “You’re stronger than this. The spores work on desire. You need to want something more than what they’re offering.”
Want something more. She makes it sound simple. But the wanting is everywhere, is everything, is consuming me from the inside out?—
“What could I possibly?—”
“Want me to survive.” Her hands tighten on my face. Her breath warm against my skin. “Want to finish the job. Want anything real and hold onto it.”
She’s so close. I can smell her beneath the monastery’s floral rot—sweat and fear and something uniquely her. The hunger intensifies, focuses, becomes something sharp enough to cut.
But she’s right.
Wanting her alive is stronger than the Bloom’s artificial hungers. Wanting to see the Abbot dead is stronger than the need for surrender. Wanting to stand there when the bastard finally falls, to give her that one thing she asked for?—
I force myself upright. Every muscle screams resistance. The Bloom fights back, sending fresh waves of need crashing through my blood. But I’m standing. Sword in hand. Eyes fixed on the Abbot’s suddenly uncertain expression.
“Impressive.” His composure cracks. Just slightly. The first flaw in his perfect facade. “But futile. You can’t fight indefinitely. The Bloom has you now.”
