(blood · betrayal · love · death)
The first drop of blood does not fall. It floats—ruby-bright in the torchlight—before the wind steals it from my cheek.
"Saint Selina Valebright," the High Inquisitor intones, "by decree of the Holy Crown, you are condemned to death by fire for consorting with forbidden love and heresy."
Betrayal has a taste. Iron and ash. It tastes like the kiss the knight gave me in the sacristy an hour ago—salt from his lips, smoke from my hair, and the final word we weren't brave enough to speak.
"Do not look for me," he had whispered, helm under his arm, eyes a storm that never broke. "Do not say my name."
I say it now, silently. Cassius.
Chains groan as the acolytes haul me onto the pyre. The square is a cathedral of winter—black sky, blood moon, crows like punctuation on the crenellations. The crowd presses close, a living wall of breath and doubt. I search for the knight the way a dying woman searches for God.
He's there. Front rank of the Imperial Guard. Black cloak. Black vow. That jaw made of commandments. The man who vowed to keep me safe from the world…and from myself.
"Strip her of the mantle," the Inquisitor says.
They tear the saint's white from my shoulders, revealing only skin and stubbornness. My sigil—the crimson shard over my heart—glows once, like a coal hiding under parchment. The crowd hisses, holy fear twisting into hunger.
"Any last words?" the Inquisitor asks, bored already, as if saints burn every afternoon.
I raise my chin. "Yes. Look at me when you kill me."
The Inquisitor blinks, amused. The guard captain shifts, a shadow rippling—his shadow. Cassius doesn't look away. Not when the rope bites my wrists. Not when kindling clicks beneath my feet. Not when someone in the crowd screams witch and throws a stone that misses my temple by a prayer.
The torch lowers.
"Crown and church have weighed you," the Inquisitor says, "and found you—"
"Wanting?" I laugh. It breaks. "No. Found you afraid."
Flame licks, curious as a child, then roars like a choir denied their hymn. Heat palms my calves, then climbs with greedy fingers. Skin tightens. The sigil over my heart flares—answering to something older than scripture. The first scream is not mine; it is the wood's.
Cassius steps forward.
"Hold," the Inquisitor snaps.
Cassius stops. He obeys like a blade obeys a sheath. For a heartbeat, his eyes soften—blue-lit steel drowning in a private ocean. Then his face becomes the empire's again.
This is the part where I should pray. Saints go meek into the dark. Saints go singing.
I go remembering.
The library vault where we touched hands across relics, dust glowing like tiny worlds. The oath he carved into the underside of the pew with a dagger point: I will not fail you. The secret corridors where we were both young and untrained and certain that love was a kind of proof.
The sigil pulses. A second blood moon opens behind my ribs. I feel the old thing under the city answer, turning in its sleep, listening for me. The empire says it was bound centuries ago by holy fire. They never mention who lent the flame.
"Repent," the Inquisitor calls. "Confess your consort with the old night, and your soul may yet be spared."
I look Cassius in the eye. "Ask your knight where he goes when it's midnight and the bells pretend not to hear."
A sound like glass deciding to shatter. The crowd murmurs. The Inquisitor glances at Cassius. A flicker of doubt? Or calculation.
"Light it," he says, sharper now.
The torch kisses the pyre. Heat finds marrow. The world becomes a red mouth swallowing me whole.
I do not close my eyes.
I open them wide enough to take the city in with me—the spires, the bells, the little windows where lovers clutch each other in the dark and lie about mercy. I breathe smoke and old vows.
"Selina," Cassius says. It's the first time he has spoken my name in public in two years. His voice is a blade wrapped in velvet. "Please."
"Please what?" My throat is a scraped violin.
"Do not make me watch you die."
I smile through my tears. "You already did."
His jaw locks. Something breaks in him that I can't name, a string pulled too tight.
The sigil over my heart burns white.
The old thing under the city lifts its head.
The flames reach for my hair, my hips, the soft inner of my arms—every place his hands learned first. Pain is a language, and my body is fluent. When I scream, it's not fear. It's the sound of a door opening in a house I was told was mine, but never given the key.
The square tilts. The crowd lurches back as a wind rises from nowhere—downward wind, as if something beneath the pyre is breathing out. The flames gutter, then coil, then twist around me the way a snake decides if it's hungry.
"Heretic trick," someone yells.
"Hold formation!" Cassius barks. Soldiers lock shields.
The Inquisitor makes a sign of warding. "Bind her mouth—"
Too late.
The sigil splits.
Light—wrong light, red with a center of black—pours from my chest like an unstitched star. The ropes char and snap. The iron ring around my wrists sings and falls. The flames bow, their tongues turning inward, licking the mark as if grateful to be owned.
I step down from the pyre. Wood beams crumble, collapsing in a hiss of cinders. The crowd stamps backward in a ripple of bodies. My bare feet leave prints that smoke and then grow pale as frost.
"Saint," a child whispers from someone's arms. "Are you an angel now?"
I crouch, breath shaking. "No. I am a wrong prayer that was answered anyway."
"Loose!" the Inquisitor shrieks. Crossbows clack. Bolts rise like a flock.
Cassius moves first. He knocks a bow aside, blade flashing. "Hold your fire!"
"Traitor!" the Inquisitor cries.
"Stand down!" Cassius roars—and in that command is the full measure of the man I loved: the one who believes in order like other men believe in rain.
The bolts come anyway.
The first stops an inch from my eye. The second veers, whining past my ear. The third bursts into embers midair, as if each feather remembered it was once part of a bird that wanted the sky for itself.
I touch the black-red light at my chest. It throbs in time with something impossibly old. The old thing under the city is awake now—listening with all its mouths.
"Selina," Cassius says, voice lower. "Come with me."
I should laugh. In another life, I'd run to him. In this one, I'm made of edges.
"Will you hide me," I ask, "like you hid your vows? Will you keep me safe the way you kept me safe last time?"
He flinches as if struck. "I—"
"Do not lie on a night like this," I say gently.
A fissure opens in the cobbles at the pyre's base, hairline at first, then widening with a kitten's purr. Heat leaks up from it—a buried furnace sighing through its sleep. The crowd screams again. Soldiers drag the line back.
The Inquisitor recovers. "She is an abomination. Knight-Captain Cassius, fulfill your oath. End her."
Cassius lifts his sword. He has killed for the empire. He has killed for me. He has killed because the law asked and because the law didn't need to ask. Tonight, the weight of it hangs from his wrist like a second blade.
"Don't," I say.
"Selina," he answers, and my name is the softest war. "Kneel. I can make them spare you."
"Again?" My laugh is smoke. "Spare me like a knife spares a throat?" I tilt my head. The light in my chest curls around his swordpoint like a curious fingertip. "You can't save me from the dark. You brought me to it."
For a heartbeat, everything stills. The crowd holds its breath. The moon leans closer. The old thing doesn't move at all—it just waits.
Cassius breathes once, then twice. His blade lowers a fraction. The Inquisitor hisses like wet wood. "Coward."
Cassius's shoulders square. He raises the sword again. "Forgive me," he whispers.
"No," I say, very calm. "You will beg for that later."
The fissure splits wide.
A pillar of shadow erupts, stitched with embers, braided with whispers I remember from nightmares: names without bodies, bodies without names. It wraps my waist, not like a chain but like a promise. Something cold and velvet slides into my veins, tasting me, finding me worthy or useful—it does not matter which.
I lift my hands. The flames on the wrecked pyre leap up, then bow to me as if I am their altar now.
"Stop her!" the Inquisitor shrieks.
Cassius lunges. The world snaps to a point—the blade, my throat, the air making room for a choice. I see ten thousand futures flicker like moths. In most of them, I die again, and again, and again, and the empire eats what's left.
I choose another.
The light at my chest flowers. Cassius's sword strikes it and sings. Sparks arc, blue on red. The impact throws us both sideways. I skid across stone slick with ash, and he collides with me, gauntlet slamming the ground beside my head. His breath is in my mouth. His eyes are oceans on fire.
"Run," he says, raw. "Now."
"I don't run anymore."
"Then kill me."
We stare at each other, and there it is—the ruinous truth between us. I'm not ready to do either. He's not ready to let me do neither.
Behind him, the Inquisitor lifts a relic—iron circlet, nailed with thorns of meteoric black. He speaks a word that makes the night cough. The relic burns with a color I don't have a name for. Pain lances my chest. The old thing under the city snarls; the stone under our bodies trembles like a horse that knows the rider is wrong.
"Cassius!" the Inquisitor howls. "Hold her!"
He grabs my wrists. Reflex before decision. Habit before hope.
It is enough.
The relic's light spears us both. It tastes like sanctity turned inside out. I scream. He doesn't. His jaw just locks harder. The mark on my chest bucks like a trapped bird. The fissure at our feet exhales frost, then fire, then a silence so deep I hear my own name as if someone else is wearing it.
When the light ends, the square smells of winter and bones. The relic's glow gutters.
Cassius's hands loosen. He looks at me, not like a captain or a penitent, but like a man standing in a church that has finally told him the truth: the altar never loved him back.
"Listen to me," he says, low. "There is a gate beneath the south transept. Old stone. No guards. It leads to the river tunnels."
"Why tell me where to run," I ask, "if you came to kill me?"
"Because both things can be true."
Something breaks a second time, but not in him. In me. A small, soft thing I thought had died on the pyre—some girl who kept relic dust in her hair and believed a sword could be a promise.
"Go," he says.
I stand. The shadow around my waist tightens, then loosens, then trails like a veiled dress. I take one step, then another. The soldiers don't move. The crowd crushes itself backward. The Inquisitor raises the relic again, furious as a king whose mirror has turned.
"Seize her!"
Cassius moves like prayer. He cuts the relic from the Inquisitor's hands.
It falls, ringing, and rolls to my feet.
I step over it.
The city opens its mouth. The old thing speaks without sound.
I look back once. Cassius stands with his sword bare and his oath naked, facing the people he belongs to and the woman he never stopped belonging to more. Smoke and snow drift between us. I lift my chin in thanks or promise or threat; I don't know which. He nods, as if all three are the same.
I slip into the south transept's shadow and vanish into the tunnels, the sigil at my heart burning like a small, constant sun.
The empire will not sleep again.
Not while I remember how to wake it screaming.
—End of Chapter 1—