The room was warm.
A soft, golden hue spilled from antique wall lamps, casting blurred shadows against concrete and velvet. Though the bed was modern — crisp sheets, sterile corners — the scent of the room was a mixture of disinfectant and eerie fragrance.
Ramiel stirred.
His wounds were sealed, but the pain remained, and with it.....memory. Zariel's blade. The look in the Valkyrie's eyes as he whispered heaven's defiance.
And now, silence.
He turned.
She sat by the window, legs crossed, silhouetted against Istanbul's neon night — a mixture of elegance and stillness in a world always burning.
"Couldn't sleep?" he rasped.
Varyselle didn't answer. Not immediately.
Then, without looking at him: "You always dreamed horrors. Even when you slept in my arms."
He sat up, slowly.
"You remember that?"
She turned, just slightly. "I remember everything."
The silence between them thickened.
He ran a hand through his hair, now streaked with silver that hadn't been there before. "I thought you'd forgotten me. After—"
"After you vanished?" she cut in. "After your realm was turned to bone and salt? After you walked into a war you knew you had almost no chance of winning and left nothing for me to follow"
He met her gaze.
"You shouldn't have followed."
She rose and walked toward him.
Every step was quiet, but deliberate. She wore nothing formal — just a black tank top, jeans, her hair undone, her feet bare. But to him, she was a cathedral of dusk.
"You don't get to decide that," she said.
Their eyes locked. Neither blinked.
She stopped inches from him, the scent of rain and old nights lingering on her.
"I mourned you, Ramiel," she whispered. "I buried you in my heart. And now you're here, bleeding on my sheets and acting like we can just return to what was."
"I'm not trying to return," he murmured. "I don't even know what's left of me."
She reached out. Brushed her fingers across the ancient scar under his collarbone — the one she gave him centuries ago, when they fought on opposite sides. When Vampires wanted to try their shot at taking over Djinns.
"You're still a flame," she said. "Just buried under ash."
Her hand lingered. Then settled.
He caught it.
Held it.
Lust and something else took over.
He pulled her forward roughly and crashed his lips down on hers.
Their lips met.
It wasn't fire at first. It was recognition. A mourning of everything lost — and a protest against what might still be taken. Her fingers slid into his hair; his hand pressed against the curve of her waist.
The kiss deepened — raw and unrestrained.
She pulled back first, her lips just a breath from his. "This isn't forgiveness," she whispered.
"I wasn't asking" he replied.
She smiled then — slow, dangerous, familiar.
"You still taste like starlight."
And then she kissed him again.
The window stayed open. Istanbul's lights blinked against the glass.
And in the room with no mirrors, the last Djinn and the vampire elite made something that exceeded love.
Flesh entangled with flesh.
Each move and stroke pulling, searching.