Consciousness returned slowly, reluctantly, like something dragging itself from deep water into air it no longer quite remembered how to breathe. Selena felt awareness reassembling piece by piece—first the dull throb of her heart beating inside its bone cage, then the strange sensation of blood flowing that wasn't entirely hers, then the weight of the crown that had migrated from skull to chest and now wrapped the organ that kept her alive through sheer stubborn refusal to cease.
She was lying on the floor of the throne room. That registered next. No longer held in Dante's arms, though she could feel him nearby through the binding they now shared, through the circulation that connected them more intimately than any previous merger. The stone beneath her was cold, unforgiving, carrying the chill of a realm built from death and violation and the accumulated suffering of beings who'd been rendered into fuel.
Selena opened her eyes.
