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But it didn’t matter.

I thought of Cassia—of her eyes, of her fire, and of her pain. I had given up Heaven for her. Had given up my ignorance. Had become a murderer of my kind.

And I would do it again.

I rose from the ashes of my betrayal, but I did not run. I simply walked out of the ruined laboratory and into the city’s night. The cold air bit at my skin, but I felt nothing but the fire still smoldering in my veins.

The cobbled veins of Prague bled with her scent. I breathed Cassia’s residual despair, a cold ash settling deep in my lungs. An ancient feeling stirred beneath my ribs, a dark resonance that made the surrounding architecture recoil from my path. An impossible gravity was anchoring her to my core. A terrifying emptiness radiated from her soul, a consuming void I could not name, and dragged me through the labyrinth streets with the relentless force of a massive planet claiming a doomed moon. Surrender became my only absolute. I followed the psychic trail of fractured magic until the alleys narrowed and the daylight rotted into dusk. The path ended at a forgotten square, facing a crumbling church with a listing bell tower.

My palms pressed against the heavy oak doors. Crossing the sacred threshold cemented my existence as an eternal trespasser. Stale air filled the cavernous nave, thick with the decay of neglect and the hollow resonance of dead prayers. Ruin claimed every shadowed corner. There she remained, kneeling at the broken altar—a complete study in desolation.

I knew she heard me but chose not to grant me the dignity of her gaze. Her head was bowed, her shoulders slumped. Fractured moonlight bled through a shattered rose window high above, haloing her in tarnished silver. She looked…hollow. Gutted.

For a breath, a phantom image slammed into me: Cassia in Heaven. Before the fall, the blood, and the betrayals. When light had been her natural state, not a stolen commodity. When she knelt in devotion, not this aching despair. A cruel memory that was conjured in this all-forsaken, decaying sanctuary.

The crueler truth lay in the chasm between then and now.

Her voice, as low and brittle as frost, cut the silence. “Are you here to gloat?”

“No,” I said, my voice barely there and echoing in the cavernous space. This was it. The end of my watch, the end of my torment. “I’m here to say goodbye.”

A long pause stretched as thin as a noose.

“How noble,” Cassia uttered.

I took a step forward. The crunch of my boot heel on the debris cracked the silence like a gunshot.

Her laugh was hollow, more brittle than breaking glass. “Isn’t that how everyone courts me? They come, take a piece of me, and say goodbye.” Another pause, a breath held too long. “I think he knows something about me. Something I don’t.”

I lifted my gaze and saw Michael’s crumpled statue. His name was a silent curse on my tongue.

Another step. A magnetic suicidal pull. I needed to close the distance. Needed to feel her fire and taste her despair, if only for one last damned night.

“Don’t,” she said. The word was small. Fractured. A plea.

My feet froze. Every fiber of my being screamed to obey that broken request, to grant her the solitary misery she seemed so determined to drown in. Stepping closer felt like another violation.

But the protest in my soul died quickly. This was my last chance to be near her, so I crossed the remaining distance until I stood directly behind her, my shadow engulfing her as it always did.

She still didn’t look up.

I looked past her to the altar again. Past the crumbling stones. At Michael’s damaged statue. She’d knelt before him. I’d seen this tableau before. Not here but in another life. Another world. A sanctum of white marble and merciless judgment.

They had both knelt.

Sera, facing away from me and her eyes squeezed shut. Perhaps praying for mercy Heaven never bothered to stock. She never saw the blade coming.

But Cassia… Cassia—my defiant, heartbreaking kil’yati—had faced me. Her wide eyes, blazing with fury, had been locked on mine. She knew. She had watched me lift the Blade of Mercy, its light a sterile fire, and didn’t flinch. Not even a single tremor.

The look she gave me then wasn’t just loathing. That scorning gaze would haunt me long after eternity forgets our miserable names. She hadn’t screamed. She had stayed unnervingly still until the blade met bone and wing roots. The sickening sheer of it echoed in the profound silence, the air suffocating.

And I was the one who had swung that blade.

Not Michael, who’d given the order with heavy regret in his voice. The hypocrite. Not the tribunal representatives, who were cold and implacable in their cosmic bureaucracy.

I. Remiel. Heaven’s loyal sword hand.

Every day she lives, every time she tolerates my presence, that was what she saw. Not a guardian. Not an ally. The golden child who had mutilated her soul.