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My heart stops. I know that shadow. I had seen the figure he had walked toward.

But…he was his brother?

The text blurs.

The book falls from my hands, hitting the obsidian table with the sound of a body hitting the floor.

“He didn’t leave me,” I whisper. The realization is a hammer shattering the ice Krevna had put in my chest fifty years ago. The void inside me, that cold and hungry thing I had nurtured, recoils from the heat of the truth. “He didn’t choose Heaven over me.” I look up at the keeper, my vision blurring with thick red tears. “They took him from me.” My rage rises like bile. “He was stabbed in the back. Forced into stasis.”

Tears splash onto the bronze pages of the book, mingling with his words and searing the truth.

“He loved me,” I sob, the words tearing their way out of my throat. “He loved me the whole time. Tried to save me. Killed the seraph for me. Walked into a trap for me.”

Sera grabs the book, her eyes scanning the lines I pointed to. Her face goes pale in the dim light. “Malakar lied,” she hisses, fury igniting in her green eyes.

“No, Cassiel,” the keeper says, its voice almost gentle. “He did not leave. He was erased. Taken to the tribunal and forced to forget. They carved you out of him piece by piece until only the soldier remained. They stripped the bronze from his skin and painted him white again.”

I stand there, shaking. I had traded away the light that connected me to him. I had bartered it to a witch because I thought it was a tether to heaven, to the traitors. But I was left with a tether to a martyr. I spent fifty years hating a man who died—in every way that mattered—to ensure I had a head start.

“I-I left him,” I wail, clutching my chest. My fingers dig into the fabric of my shirt as if I can rip the pain out. “I signed the paper, and I ran. I left him to the blade.”

“You survived,” it says. “That is what he wanted. He accepted the blade so that you would have a head start. He bought your life with his memories. That is the nature of Balance.”

I wait for its judgment. I wait for the price of this knowledge.

But the silence is only broken by a low, vibrating growl that seems to emanate from the floor itself.

I look up. Sera stiffly stands beside the table. The massive obsidian panther, the manifestation of her own awakened power, is no longer sitting at her feet. It prowls toward the edge of the darkness, where the shelves vanish into the void. Its ears are flattened, its tail lashing and its teeth bare.

It is growling at the shadows deep within the archive.

“Sera?” I whisper.

“Something is there,” she says, pointing at the far corner of the room. “Something that doesn’t belong to the keeper.”

The panther snarls, a sound of warning, and backs away, fur raised.

Then, from the absolute blackness between the towering shelves, four points of light ignite. They are not the golden light of angels nor the violet of the fae. They are deep, smoldering red, like coals buried in ash.

Scents hit me. Smoke. Rain. Ancient fur.

My breath catches in a sob before I even realize what I am seeing.

Two shapes detach themselves from the gloom. Massive. Shoulders as high as a human’s waist. Fur blacker than the void of the archive. They move with a silence that is heavy and absolute and step into the dim light, their heads low as they approach the table.

The first wolf, with a jagged scar running down his muzzle, looks at me. His eyes are the color of dried blood, wise and filled with infinite patience.

The second wolf, sleeker and radiating a heat I can feel from here, has an intense and burning gaze.

Fate and Fury.

They hadn’t died at the threshold of Hell, as I had believed. Hadn’t dissolved into silver dust. Hadn’t abandoned me.

They had…shifted.

They became the shadows that have trailed me for fifty years. The silent sentinels watching from the corners of my vision when I thought I was alone. The whispers I mistook for me losing my mind. The cold noses I felt in the dark when the loneliness became too much to bear. The presence that guarded my back when I hunted.

They waited. They endured the silence just as I had, waiting for the truth. Waiting for me to remember that I was never truly alone.