In the dark, I sense Arwen’s breathing grow steady. Sense the warmth of her presence at my side. Sense the Bloom pulse in my blood, hungry and patient and finally, finally manageable.
SIXTEEN
ZRYNOK
Three days of learning the monastery’s secrets from a woman who carries them in her scars. The Bloom pulses in my blood—quieter now, manageable, but never gone.
Never going to be gone.
I’ve accepted that. The way I accepted my damaged eye twenty years ago, the way I accepted my parents’ deaths more than two centuries before that. Accepting doesn’t mean forgetting. It means adjusting. Moving forward with the damage incorporated.
Arwen sits across from me in the storage chamber we’ve claimed as a war room, scratching lines into the stone floor with a piece of charcoal. The charcoal dust stains her fingers gray. Her hair falls forward when she bends over the rough diagram, and I find myself cataloguing the curve of her neck instead of the strategic positions she’s marking.
The Bloom makes focus difficult. Not impossible. Just difficult.
Circe is somewhere in the upper passages. She moves while we plan—quiet errands through the servants’ corridors, a cipher Arwen taught her the morning she first asked to leave thechamber. Arwen agreed reluctantly. The girl needed something to do that wasn’t waiting, and we need eyes the cult won’t recognize.
“The Garden.” I drag my attention back to the map. “The concentrated Bloom. How do we neutralize it before burning?”
“We don’t.” Her charcoal pauses against the stone. “The Garden has to burn with everything still in it. The spores, the flowers, the cultivation beds. Trying to extract the Bloom first would just spread it faster.”
“And the people in the Garden? The ones already transformed?”
Silence. Her hand doesn’t move, but I see the tension crawl up her arm, lock her shoulder, tighten the muscles along her jaw.
“They can’t be saved. The transformation is too advanced.” Flat. Reciting. “Burning them is mercy.”
I’ve killed people who begged for mercy. I’ve killed people who deserved none. But killing people who were once victims, whose only crime was being broken beyond any hope of restoration?—
That’s new. That’s personal in a way my work has never been.
“What else?” I push forward because pushing forward is what I do. “What other locations need to be addressed?”
She adds marks to the map. The Confession Chamber. The Burning Chapel—already damaged from our first assault but not destroyed. The Abbot’s Sanctum in the highest tower. And then, deep in the monastery’s lower levels, a sprawling area marked with cross-hatched lines.
“The Initiation Pools.” Her voice changes when she says it. Drops. Flattens. The same tone she uses when describing tactical positions, but underneath there’s something else. Something that makes my hands want to close into fists.
“Explain.”
“Natural hot springs. The cult repurposed them for—” She stops. Starts again. “New initiates are brought there. The water is infused with Bloom essence. Prolonged immersion saturates the skin, makes the body more... receptive.”
I wait. She’s not finished. The tremor in her fingers tells me she’s not finished.
“How long?” The question comes out rougher than I intend. “How long were you kept there?”
Her charcoal snaps against the floor. She stares at the broken pieces like she doesn’t understand how they got there.
“Three days. The first time.” The words come slowly. Each one dragged from somewhere deep. “They kept me in the water until I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and the heat began. Everything felt... too much. Every ripple against my body registered with intensity I couldn’t process. The Bloom was already working on me, making sensation overwhelming, making want impossible to ignore.”
She picks up a new piece of charcoal. Her hands are shaking. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“Then they touched me.”
The storage chamber goes cold.
Not literally. The candles still burn. The air still hangs heavy with the monastery’s ever-present sweetness. But something in my chest freezes solid, and the Bloom in my blood surges in response—not with desire this time but with something darker. Something that wants violence.
“Who?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Who touched you?”
