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My heart freezes. “What has Thorn chosen?” I whisper.

“Make Étienne fall for a lie,” he answers. “When you do, I want you to claim his soul. Bind it inside the Eternal Tree. Cut Thorn off from his Regent.”

Suddenly, I understand. The realization of this turns me cold, colder than death, than grief, than fury. The terror coils itself tight in my chest, and suddenly I’m picturing Étienne’s face, pale and still, his body lying on the ground at my feet.

Raven has been setting me up for this endgame the entire time. Keep your enemies close, Rose.

He wanted Étienne to love me.

I am going to use Étienne’s love against him. And if I win this final test, I become Raven’s Regent.

“Étienne is the Regent of Lies,” I start to stammer. “He’ll know I’m trying to trick him.”

“He’ll know that you, too, love him,” Raven replies.

I swallow hard at that. “I don’t,” I answer. But my words sound empty and unconvincing before Raven.

I don’t, do I? Except … everything about this is a lie. It is in every moment I think of him. Every time I look at him. It is in my anticipation of arguing with him, the way I suck in my breath at the sight of that nonchalant smile on his face, the shiver that turns me warm whenever his hand touches my skin. It is in my furious denial of him. It is in my anger at him, the hurt of knowing his betrayal, the reopening of the wounds of my heart.

“He despises his patron god,” Raven says to me now. “He knows that letting you win will benefit Thorn. So let him love you. We will use him as our sword.”

My third test isn’t just a confirmation for Regent. It is my entry into a brewing war between the gods. And I know what my answer needs to be.

Yes. For what he did to Laine, to me, to my life. For what he has done in the name of his patron god.

But tears well in my eyes. “I can’t do this,” I whisper. Why am I crying? I should be glad for this opportunity to strike back against him, to get revenge for what he did to me.

“You can.” Raven bends down to me again, lifting my chin so my face is tilted up to his. “You have the soul of an immortal, Rose,” he murmurs. “You belong here, at my side.”

I swallow, feeling everything and nothing at once, my bond to my patron god pulling so painfully within me that I can hardly bear it.

Then he leans down and kisses me.

And everything in me shatters.

He tastes like heat, power, darkness, flooding my veins all at once. It is a kiss and not a kiss at the same time, the union between a god and a mortal, a kiss that feels like a linking of power, a reunification of energy, a breathing of immortal life into me.

Unwind the DNA of a living cell, and you will see a creature that is programmed with every fiber of its being to survive. That arches forever toward the eternal state, hungers perpetually for more time. It is the soul of life, this want. It is the reason my mind seems to ache for him, manifesting that into desire in my bones, an irrational hunger that binds me, his Harbinger, to him, my patron god. I want him because he is immortal and I am not, because he is powerful and I am not.

Release me.

My thoughts form and break apart in the same beat. My heart is pounding so fast that I think it might break into a million fragments. He tastes like everything. He tastes like eternity.

The heat in me becomes too intense to withstand. My body is crying out for air, for mercy, for space. And suddenly, all I can think of is the weakness in my body before my confirmation, before Raven had handed me the glass of champagne.

The immortal world is poisonous to your body.

Raven pulls away at last.

The bond between us breaks, and I gasp for air in the sudden emptiness. When I catch a glimpse of his eyes, I realize that they have gone entirely black, gray irises swallowed up by the pupils so that it looks like I am staring into the depths of an endless pit, a cavern yearning to swallow me whole.

And in this moment, I don’t care. I want to be swallowed. I want him to claim me. It fills my mind and dissolves all thought and logic, silences any warning and protest my instincts throw at me. My soul screams for it, every fiber in me pulling for the toxin of immortality, for him to fill me, for his power to be bestowed onto me.

Raven looks at me with an expression of approval.

And suddenly, I understand why he kissed me. This was not a moment of love, nor lust, nor any semblance of mortal emotion. This was an act of deception.

Gods influence what they touch.