“Then I’ll kill you before it finishes.” I take a step forward. My legs want to buckle; I don’t let them. “That’s all the time I need.”
More Keepers pour through the doors behind me. Fresh reinforcements. Too many to fight through with the Bloom tearing at my control.
Arwen’s hand finds my arm. Anchoring. Directing.
“There’s a passage behind the altar.” Her voice is urgent now. “It leads to the lower levels. We need to go.”
“The Abbot?—”
“Will still be here tomorrow. Right now we need to survive tonight.”
The logic is sound. I hate it. Hate leaving the job unfinished. But the girl on the altar is still half-bound, and the Keepers are closing in, and the Bloom is clawing at my thoughts with every passing second.
I grab Circe from the altar—Arwen finished freeing her while I was on my knees—and sling her over my shoulder. We run.
The Abbot’s voice follows us into the hidden passage, echoing off ancient stone:
“Run if you like, Sister. The Bloom has claimed him now. He’ll return to me eventually—they all do. And when he does, he’ll bring you with him. He won’t be able to help himself.”
I don’t look back. Don’t respond. Just focus on putting one foot in front of the other, following Arwen into the darkness, carrying a girl who seems to weigh nothing compared to the hunger eating me alive.
The Abbot is wrong. He has to be wrong.
But the Bloom pulses in my blood, and the wanting doesn’t fade, and somewhere in the deepest part of my mind, a voice whispers that fighting is pointless.
That surrender would be so much easier.
That she smells so good, and I want her so badly, and maybe the old man is right about what happens next.
I crush the thought. Bury it. Keep moving.
But it doesn’t die. It just waits.
FIVE
ARWEN
The passage swallows us whole.
I lead blind, my free hand trailing along damp stone while Zrynok follows with Circe slung over his shoulder. The darkness is absolute down here—no torches, no windows, nothing but ancient air that tastes of mold and forgotten things.
I focus on the path. The passage curves left here, then descends three steps—worn shallow by centuries of secret feet—before leveling out again.
Behind me, Zrynok’s breathing has gone ragged. Wrong. Too fast, too shallow, punctuated by sounds that might be words bitten off before they can escape.
The Bloom has him.
“How much farther?” His voice scrapes against the darkness. Gravel wrapped in broken glass.
“Not far. There’s a storage chamber ahead—hidden, small enough that the spore concentration stays low.” I keep my tone clinical. Practical. The way I learned to speak about bodies and needs during my years here. “You can rest there.”
“Don’t need rest.”
“You need something. Your body’s fighting a parasitic infection that feeds on desire. Either you rest now or youcollapse later.” I pause at a junction, orienting myself by touch. Left branch. The stone here is smoother—water erosion from an underground stream that dried up decades ago. “And if you collapse, I can’t carry you.”
Silence. Then a sound that might be acknowledgment or might be pain.
Circe hasn’t made a sound since we fled the chapel. I can hear her breathing—quick, shallow, the rhythm of someone trying very hard not to exist—but nothing else. No questions. No sobs. The quiet of someone who’s learned that silence is safer.
