“And if it’s a trap?”
I meet her gaze. Feel the Bloom pulse in my blood, feel the need she admitted sharing, feel the rage that wants every person who hurt her dead at my feet.
“Then the Abbot learns what happens when he baits an executioner.”
Arwen crosses to gather supplies—theremaining herbs, a waterskin, the knife she keeps close. Her movements are efficient, practiced, the motions of someone who’s learned to be ready for anything.
But when she passes me at the door, her hand brushes mine. Deliberate. Brief. A touch that says more than words.
The Bloom screams at the contact. Amplifies it into something overwhelming. But beneath the infection’s demands, I feel something else. Something that might be understanding. Might be promise.
We haven’t finished what started before Circe came through the door. The conversation. The confession. The moment when she pressed her hands to my chest and told me she wanted me without knowing what to do with it.
That conversation isn’t over. It’s just waiting.
“Stay alive,” she murmurs as she moves past. “We have things to discuss when this is over.”
Things to discuss. A future beyond the monastery. Beyond the burning. Beyond the blood that’s about to be spilled.
Two days ago, I didn’t have a future. Just work. Just the next execution. Just the slow erosion of purpose that’s been hollowing me out for decades.
Now I have something worth surviving for. Something worth killing for. Something that terrifies me as much as it draws me in.
The monastery’s stone corridors stretch ahead, dark and dangerous. Somewhere in them, a Keeper with doubts waits to be tested. Somewhere beyond them, an Abbot plans ceremonies that will create monsters. And everywhere, the Bloom waits—patient, hungry, ready to exploit any weakness.
I step into the darkness.
Arwen moves beside me, silent and sharp.
EIGHTEEN
ARWEN
The servant passages beneath the monastery are exactly as I left them.
I lead Zrynok through narrow corridors that smell of mold and forgotten things, following paths I memorized during countless midnight wanderings. The passages connect the kitchen to the laundry, the laundry to the dormitories, the dormitories to a dozen places the Keepers rarely think to patrol. The cult’s hierarchy depends on keeping prisoners too afraid to explore. Those of us who explored anyway found routes the faithful never knew existed.
“This feels wrong.” Zrynok’s voice is barely above a breath. Even that carries further than I’d like in these stone tunnels. “Too easy.”
“It’s not.”
“And Cael?”
“I showed him. Years ago, before his transformation.” The memory surfaces—Cael finding me in the kitchen passage after a particularly brutal conditioning session, asking if I was hurt, offering water from his own ration. I’d shown him the servant routes as payment for his kindness. “He never told anyone. Even after he became a Keeper.”
“That you know of.”
Fair point. I don’t know what Cael has or hasn’t revealed since his transformation. The boy who kept my secret might be gone entirely, replaced by an enforcer serving the Abbot without question.
But Circe’s message came back coded correctly—the cipher I taught her specifically for communicating with people we couldn’t trust completely. Cael agreed to meet. Alone. In the eastern storage cellar where the spore concentration stays low enough for extended conversation.
Either he’s genuinely doubting his masters, or he’s setting an elaborate trap.
“If this goes wrong,” I say without stopping, “you get out. Don’t wait for me. Don’t try to save me. The mission is more important than?—”
“No.”
The word lands hard. Final. I glance back at him—his bulk filling the narrow passage, his scarred face set in an expression I’ve learned to read as stubborn refusal.
