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The moment I do, my free hand drops to my hip where my crossguard dagger sits. The three thermal zones heat against my palm, and the readiness of the steel is a comfort I’m trying very hard to let be enough.

The center woman holds the letter flat on her palm, passes her free hand over the seal, and the dark red wax pulses with light. The two flanking women lean close. One of them murmurs a word I don’t recognize, and the wax seal flares once, then dims back to normal.

The center woman turns the letter over in her hands with a care that tells me she respects what she’s holding.

“The letter is authentic. We will permit you entrance to the mystical realm.” She extends the letter back to me, and I take it, my fingers tightening around the parchment. “But the son of Ares enters disarmed.”

Kieran’s heat spikes against my back, the knives behind his shoulder accelerating in their orbit.

The center woman smirks slightly, her eyes moving past me to lock onto Kieran’s. “Every scrap of steel on your body stays in this temple under our watch. We will return them when you leave. But you will enter the land of the Amazons with empty hands, or you will not enter at all.”

29

EVIE

“No.” The word leaves Kieran’s mouth with the flat, final authority he uses at the Scorched Circles. His thermal output climbs three degrees, his knives orbiting faster behind his shoulder.

The woman’s gaze drops to the floating knives, and the gold in the temple walls brightens. “You carry Ares’s blood into the house of Artemis and presume to dictate the terms of your welcome?”

“I’m not dictating terms. I’m stating a fact.” His hand goes to the hilt of his left sword, and the steel hums at his touch. “The weapons stay with me.”

She steps forward, and the temple shudders.

“You are a guest in a sacred space that predates your father’s worst tantrum by a millennium,” she says. “You will either surrender your steel, or you will leave. If you do neither, the temple will take your steel from you, and I promise you, son of Ares, it will not be gentle in its method.”

Kieran’s knives accelerate to a speed that makes the steel sing. His thermal output emits waves I recognize from the bedroom—the same escalation curve, the same building heat, the same trajectory toward a loss of control that ended with me walking through flying blades and barely making it out alive.

My heart’s pounding in my throat, because we’re going to be buried alive if he doesn’t stop. I have to say something—anything—to help him get it together.

So, I step into his line of sight and press both hands flat against his chest. His eyes are burning amber now, and I need to get him focused, fast.

“Your motto is Steel Before Spells.” I glance at his left bicep, where those words are tattooed on his skin. “The key word is before. Steel comes first in your order of priorities, but it doesn’t mean steel is the only thing that exists. Spells are second, and second is on the list, too.”

All the muscles in his body stiffen, his knives rotating faster around him.

The temple rumbles enough that a few of the far-away columns begin to crack.

“You have telekinesis that went from chaotic to precise in two days,” I say, faster now. “You took down a pack alpha and two wolves at once, and your heart rate barely changed. But your magic is destroying this temple right now. Not your steel—you. Magic lives inside you, whether you want it there or not, and you can control it, the same way you control your blades. Which means when we enter the mystical realm, you won’t be walking in there unarmed. You’ll be walking in there as a weapon, armed with the power that lives in your blood.”

The amber in his eyes flickers as the green pushes back.

It’s working. It has to work. This is our only lead, and if Kieran proves these temple women right by losing himself to the war-blood, then that’s it. Mission failed.

I do not fail.

“You also have me, and I just incinerated every one of those bees,” I continue, holding his gaze as if my eyes themselves are weapons. “I almost killed Jade with my heat dome, and I basically cooked Scylla alive. We’re going to be fine with just our magic to rely on, and if you think I won’t cook anything that tries to hurt you, then you don’t understand how much I care about you at all.”

I keep my palms pressed against his chest, unable to move. If I move, whatever this tension is between us might snap. And I can’t let it snap. I need to get through to him.

But how? What haven’t I tried?

The temple’s shaking more now, and it’s just like that time in the dining hall when I learned Oliver was missing, when the chandeliers went haywire, and Kieran⁠—

I curve my fingers and dig my nails into his chest.

He takes a sharp breath inward and goes still.

“Focus on me.” I dig my nails deeper, in a way that would leave marks if he didn’t have supernatural healing. “Only me. Because I’m not going anywhere. And if you want answers, then you need to trust me, just like how I trust you.”