ZRYNOK
The chapel doors explode inward under my boot.
Crimson haze billows out to meet us—concentrated spores released into the enclosed space, the same trick the Abbot used in our first confrontation. The thick, fermented weight of it hits my lungs with devastating force. My blood ignites. The infection that has been quiet since the Garden roars back to life, surging through my veins with hunger that threatens to consume everything.
The wanting crashes over me in waves.
Arwen’s skin against mine. The sounds she made in the storage chamber. The way her body arched beneath me when?—
No.
I force the memories aside. Replace them with something sharper.
I want her safe. Want the survivors free. Want every loyalist in this chapel dead so thoroughly that no one ever threatens them again.
The Bloom can’t use desire against someone who desires exactly what he’s already doing.
My sword comes up. My legs carry me forward. And the wanting—the terrible, overwhelming need that should break me—becomes fuel instead of chains.
The first loyalist dies before he can raise his weapon.
The second dies reaching for an alarm bell that will never ring. The third manages to get his blade up, manages to block my first strike, but the second takes his arm and the third takes his head.
Blood sprays across the chapel’s stone floor. The pews—fitted with restraints, I notice, designed to hold unwilling congregants—become obstacles I navigate without thought. The stained glass windows paint everything in shades of crimson, light filtering through scenes that depict the Bloom’s supposed divine origins. The founding of the cult. The first Abbot’s ascension to something more than human.
All of it burning now. All of it dying.
More loyalists pour from the side chambers. A dozen of them. Maybe more. They’ve barricaded themselves in the chapel for their last stand, and they fight with the desperate fury of cornered animals who know death is coming.
I give them what they’re waiting for.
The fighting is brutal.
My sword rises and falls with mechanical precision—the executioner’s rhythm I learned in decades of practice, efficient and unstoppable. Bodies pile around me. Blood makes the floor treacherous. The spores keep working on my system, amplifying every sensation until the copper smell of death becomes overwhelming, until the heat of combat feels like fire beneath my skin.
But the wanting doesn’t break me. Not this time.
Every stroke of my blade is a want fulfilled. Every loyalist who falls is one less threat to the woman fighting beside me. Every heartbeat brings us closer to the end of this—to themoment when we can walk out of this monastery and never look back.
A loyalist catches me from the blind side—the left, where my damaged eye leaves gaps in my vision. His blade slices across my ribs, drawing blood that mingles with the crimson already coating my armor. The pain registers as distant, irrelevant. I spin, catch his next strike on my sword, then drive my forehead into his face with force that shatters bone.
He drops. I move on.
Arwen fights at my side.
She’s not a warrior—I know this. Have known it since the moment I met her in the Thornwood, a half-starved escapee who relied on cunning rather than combat to survive. She doesn’t have my training, my strength, my decades of practice with blade and body.
But she has something I don’t: years of learning how cultists think. How they move. Where their faith leaves them exposed.
“Left!” Her voice cuts through the chaos. I pivot, catch the loyalist flanking me with a backhand strike that opens his throat. He gurgles. Falls. Arwen has already moved on, her stolen blade finding gaps in another cultist’s defenses.
She knows where they’re vulnerable. Knows the hesitation that comes before they commit to an attack. Knows the prayers they mutter under their breath and the moments when faith falters and leaves them exposed.
She protects my blind side. Warns me of attacks I can’t see. Moves with me as if we’ve been fighting as a unit for years instead of days.
We carve a path through the chapel’s heart, leaving bodies in our wake.
The loyalists keep coming—emerging from behind the altar, dropping from the galleries above, appearing from shadows thatseem to spawn new enemies with every breath. It doesn’t matter. We cut through them anyway.
