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It felt like a door slamming shut inside my chest. My heart slowed. My thoughts…shifted, sharpening. The shadows at my feet stirred, but they didn’t hiss this time. They bowed.
I walked back toward the flat alone, and with every step, I felt less like I was inside my body and more like the light was being squeezed out of me, drop by drop. But somehow, I could not bring myself to take the ring off.
I shift, the weight of the unsaid pressing down. The air in the archive is cold, and the silence is vast.
My voice, when I find it, is a raw scrape. “That damn ring… It wasn’t just metal, Keeper. It was a key. The darkness that was already clawing its way out was unlocked—or perhaps it was just permitted. It…” My voice dropped. “It affected me. Clouded my judgment. Amplified every twisted impulse. What happened next…I…” I shake my head, the shame a physical weight.
“Cassiel…”
“No.” I meet the keeper’s gaze, a wall of ice in my own. “I can’t speak of it. Don’t ask me. Some doors are best left sealed. Some monsters are best left in their cages.”
The keeper pauses. A long silence stretches, punctuated only by the faint rustle of its shadowy robes. It does not press or coax. It simply waits, its ancient eyes holding an unreadable depth, as if acknowledging a boundary even the archive must respect for now.
18. Remiel
I didn’t wait. Not after that. The second Cassia slid Valden’s ring onto her finger as if it was a mere trinket, I turned and walked away. I couldn’t bear the look on her face, not because it was cruel but because it wasn’t. It was something far worse: hungry.
I moved through the snow-dusted Prague streets like a blade tearing through unwilling flesh, my breaths turning into ragged steam in the frigid air. My hands itched, a phantom sensation of power I couldn’t unleash, and my chest burned with cold celestial fire. I felt the cuffs, the ones I’d placed on her, flare like a brand on my wrist, a tether pulling like a chain I desperately wanted to sever but knew, with a sickening certainty, that I couldn’t.
I was reaching for the door to Cassia’s flat, my mind a chaos of accusations and a pain too deep to name, when I felt her. As if the very air had thickened and crackled, her rage touched me even before her voice did.
She caught up just as I stepped inside, the door slamming shut behind her. “You walked away,” she said, her tight voice slightly panting from her pursuit. “Again.”
The accusation was a fresh twist of a knife. I turned slowly, every movement an effort. “And you let him touch you. Again.”
Her lips parted, a silent gasp of outrage. “You don’t get to lecture me!”
“Don’t I?” I took a step forward, and the room felt charged, suffocating. “You let him into your head, Cassia. You took his poison.”
Her chin was set high, defiant. “I made a choice.”
“You made a mistake.” A fatal one.
“No,” she snapped, her eyes blazing. “You made a mistake the second you thought I needed your permission for anything.”
My blood, what was left of my celestial composure, spiked. “This isn’t about permission! It’s about survival! That ring he gave you—”
“It’s mine now.” She stepped into my space; her presence was an almost physical blow. “Or are you going to try to take care of that too, Guardian?”
Something inside me—something vital, something I hadn’t even known was still holding—broke. “I don’t care about the fucking ring!” I shouted, the raw sound torn from me.
“Then what is it?!” she shouted back, her own control shattering. “What in all the hells do you want from me, Remiel? My compliance? My purity scraped clean for your celestial approval? My silence? Do you want me bent to your will? Or broken entirely?”
“I want you to stop giving yourself away to every damned creature who speaks your shadowed language!”
She laughed then, a sharp and bitter and broken sound. “Oh, and what language is that?”
“Darkness,” I growled, the word torn from the depths of my being.
She lunged forward then and devastatingly kissed me.
She kissed me as if it was a dare, a challenge. Like she wanted to see if I’d break first. It was a collision of mouths, a brutal mix of teeth and tongue that tasted of venom and something achingly sweeter. Her hands were inside my coat, not fumbling with the fastenings but using the fabric to shove me backward with a strength that belied her slender frame.
It was not her.
I hit the couch with a grunt, my spine slamming against the unforgiving cushions. My breath was knocked out of my lungs. “Cassia—”
But she was already on top of me like a furious predator, her knees bracketing my hips and her fingers tangling in the collar of my shirt as if she might tear it. I reached out, a reflexive gesture, to steady her, or perhaps myself, against the storm.
