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“It’s still…intact?” I asked, an almost hesitant note lacing my words. The memory of that dress, of the night I’d worn it last, was a dangerous ember.

“Restitched where necessary and polished to a high sheen. It’s also deeply resentful of its long confinement,” he answered, his tone both impeccably dry and subtly wry. “Much like its owner, one might venture.”

A soft, unexpected laugh escaped me, despite the foreboding atmosphere.

Leta’s expression twisted into a grimace of profound disapproval. “Or,” she said, her voice tinged with a desperate pragmatism, “we could set the invitation—and perhaps the dress—on fire and take it as an omen. An obvious, very sensible omen.”

“No,” I whispered, softer now. “Let it burn on me.”

In that suspended instant, the very air in the ancient fortress—each particle of dust, every wavering shadow—seemed to still, as if in shared fearful apprehension.

I returned to the solitude of my study, where the relentless rain pounded against the glass. Before me, on the desk, lay the reply card. It did not lie inert as paper should. It seemed to radiate a faint, sickly heat that pulsed against the wood like a severed limb refusing to cool. Revulsion curled in my gut. Every instinct I possessed screamed to cast it into the hearth, to let the fire cleanse this lure disguised as a gift.

Then a sharper chill prickled at the edges of my awareness. Remiel.

He was there. Watching. Judging.

My anger flared white-hot, incinerating the creeping horror of the card. He did not get to dictate my safety. He did not get to stand in the rain, a silent sentinel of morality, and decide which poisons I could swallow.

With deliberate, almost theatrical slowness, I reached for the quill. I dipped the nib into the inkwell and picked up the token. It had gone cold, stiff as parchment should be, and I signed my name with a flourish bold enough to earn a devil’s appreciative grin.

I lifted my eyes then. Through the window’s rain-streaked distortion, I met his gaze. With a resolve forged in the fires of his betrayal, I pressed my coiled serpent ring into the molten bloodred wax.

I let him watch. Let him see me accept the invitation.

I rang the silver bell for Aldric, and it was only as I handed the token to the butler that I saw a smear of ink on my thumb that refused to dry. It was not black but a bright crimson—a single drop of fresh blood where there was no wound.

I violently wiped it on my robe, ignoring the tremor in my hand, and told myself it was just the light.

9. Remiel

Heavens…

I blinked. The grit of the crumbling stone ledge was cold and sharp beneath my boots. Rain, relentless and chilling, worked its way down my collar, soaking me through to the bone. I still clenched my hand on the ramparts, frozen as if time itself had stalled. Even my breaths seemed to hang heavily.

She had felt me. Again… And her reaction had been a deliberate strike.

But then she flinched, and I saw the sharp swipe of her thumb against her robe, as if wiping away a stain I could not see. The wind shifted, carrying the coppery tang of fresh blood and the cloying sweetness of crushed flowers up. It was the smell of a trap.

What the hell had I been expecting? A sign? Some flicker of the woman I once knew buried beneath layers of pain?

I kept trying to frame my constant observation as duty, as penance. Kept telling myself that angels—even ones as compromised as I had become—did not harbor possessive urges. But watching her had long since twisted from a celestial assignment into a self-imposed ritual of longing, a chain I could not, or perhaps wouldn’t, break.

I pushed myself up, my spine groaning in protest. Every muscle was stiff, aching from the hours spent hunching on that exposed ledge. My knees throbbed with the damp cold, and a weariness settled in, a familiar companion in these long years of watching her.

Though one question always beat against my mind: Why was it so damn hard for her to just let me watch, even from a distance, without this performance of disdain?

Even Heaven had ignored my prayers for many centuries, if it had ever truly listened to the pleas of a guardian angel who had failed his charge so spectacularly. Absolute truths and unwavering lines forged angels. Cassia, though, danced in the fire, a creature of beautiful and terrifying contradictions that defied every celestial law I had once held sacred.

And now she was walking into the Undermarket. Because of me. Because of this cursed, tangled connection between us.

The thought was a cold, hard knot in my gut. My fault. It always seemed to circle back to being my fault.

I pictured that signature again—the elegant, damning flourish of it. V. Valden. The vampire overlord on earth.

A memory of him scraped against my mind: a century back, wreathed in the cloying fogs of some forgotten European city. A room where threats were traded like currency. He was not a physically imposing figure, not like some brutes I’d faced in Heaven’s wars. But there was a predatory stillness to him, an elegance honed to the sharpness of a razor. His hair, that unnatural fall of white gold, had gleamed like a freshly drawn blade. His voice…was a low, melodic promise of slow decay, every word chosen with deliberate precision.

I’d disliked him on sight. Trusted him less.