I spare a moment to cast my awareness down the tether that connects my soul to Bryony, sending a pulse of reassurance. Keep moving, vicious girl. Run until I tell you to stop.

Her reply drifts back. Is it Alexios?

My brother. Move your ass, Devaliant.

Then I slam down my mental walls, halting the flow of sensation between us. No need for her to feel every hit I’m about to take as Bastien extracts his pound of flesh.

My brother takes another long inhale, scenting again. “You soulbonded. I can smell her Claim all over you.”

There’s no use pretending. No way to sidestep or spin the truth into something more palatable. So I don’t bother.

“Yes.”

Something flashes across Bastien’s features—a fleeting crack in that impassive mask. It’s there in the tightening around his eyes, the almost imperceptible tic in his jaw.

If Bastien had actual expressions instead of microsecond blips in an otherwise flawless veneer of control, I’d call it incandescent rage.

“You looked me in the eye,” he says with that eerie calm that’s a thousand times worse than yelling, “and swore you’d end her. You lied to me again.”

I dig my nails into my palms until it stings, using the small pain as a focal point—an anchor. Because I deserve whatever’s coming. We both know it. I made a promise to my brother, and pissed all over it the second I fell stupid in love with the one woman I was never supposed to touch.

“I’m protecting what’s mine.”

We want what we want. Even when we know it’ll destroy us.

“Yours,” he says. “The mortal with the blood of our enemies in her veins. That’s what you’re willing to trade your honor for?”

“Don’t—”

But before I can choke out another word—before I manage to throw up my mental shields—a wave of shadow slams into me and lashes through my mind. Frantically, I try to shore up the crumbling bulwarks, but I’m weakened and sluggish. My power is drained after the shit I pulled in Hellevig.

“Do you remember,” he murmurs, “the vows you swore to me after you pulled me out of the Bloody Court?”

Vertigo crashes through me. The sickening swoop in the pit of my stomach. And then the world is pitching around me, Bastien’s shadows rising to blot out the sky as he drags me under.

Down, down, down—into the rawest depths of recall.

The dank stone of the Court’s killing floor flashes through my head in flickers and starts. The stench of sweat and spilled viscera. And there, chained at the center of it all…

My brother.

His wings gone. They’d carved him up like a slab of meat, stole pieces of him that could never be replaced or regrown, even with an Eternal’s power.

And after, when I finally fought my way to him? When I cut him down and dragged his broken body back to Scillari? I swore to him I would make it right.

“They held me down and used me, Evander,” Bastien says, still in that remote tone. “Violated me. Mutilated me until I was unrecognizable. And I never begged, not even when they took my wings.” He straightens, flicking a leaf from his coat. “There’s a very specific sound it makes when they hack through a limb that size. The tendons pop and snap. Bones splinter. And it feels like the worst nightmare imaginable. You get dizzy. Detached. Like you’ve slipped out of your skin, and you’re watching it happen to someone else. You know what carried me through? What kept me fighting?” His eyes meet mine. “Knowing you would come. That you’d rip me out of that place and keep your promise to avenge us. Or have you forgotten that, too?”

I grit my teeth, reaching for composure. But all I see is Bryony, bright and burning in my mind. The glittering mark of my shiny new Claim glowing on her wrist.

You told me once that you would crave me in any lifetime, across every eternity. And I wanted to tell you… I’d find you in all of them.

Bastien’s expression darkens. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

And then he’s on me.

His fist cracks into my jaw in an explosion of agony. I feel the bone pulverize and taste the hot, copper gush of blood flooding my mouth. He hits me again—a brutal impact to the ribs that sends me sprawling.

“Fight back,” he snarls.

Another ruthless blow to the solar plexus.

I hit the dirt. Fire screams along my side. “I’m sorry. I’m so damned sorry.”

He looms over me. “Get up. Get up so I can put you back down.”

Slowly, I force myself to my feet—and I finally understand what this is. What he needs.

He needs to hurt something. Needs to make it bleed and bleed and fucking bleed, the way he’s done for centuries. I’m the only thing that can weather the hit. The only one who’ll let him bruise his knuckles on me and not hit back.

So when Bastien slams me into the dirt, I don’t resist. He tears into me. He cracks me open and pulls me under the thrashing surface of his rage, and I let it fill my lungs. I drown in the cold of his anguish.

There are certain things we do for the people we love. Hurts we willingly hold close and secret, because it’s the only way we remember how to be real. How to feel anything at all. Bas and I, we’ve got no language for kindness, not after everything. The war hollowed those soft places out until all that’s left is scar tissue. This is how we speak without words now. This is our ugly, broken love—the savagery we carve into each other just to feel something.

So I let my brother take his retribution. I let him break my bones and split my skin and rupture my organs. Because I earned this brutality. This is my penance, the only absolution he’ll allow me.

I lie here and take it because I promised him vengeance. Swore that one day, we’d paint the realms red with the blood of everyone who stole from us, who profaned our mother’s corpse for power. Who took his wings. Who made us into what we are.

Instead, I went and fell for a girl guaranteed to rip us apart.

“You selfish, backstabbing fuck.” Bastien punctuates each word with a ruthless blow to my face. “You knew”—Crack—“what she was.” Crunch. “What she meant.” A brutal punch to my nose, cartilage snapping beneath his fist. “But you let her under your skin, anyway.”

I spit out a mouthful of blood. “I love her. More than anything.”

It feels like sacrilege to say the words out loud. Like speaking them here is its own sort of betrayal. As if I’m casting all those vows I swore into the pyre and letting them burn alongside the family we once were.

Bastien goes still above me. Something shifts in his gaze—and for an instant, I glimpse the male I used to know. My steadfast older brother, with a wry slant to his mouth and laughter glinting in his obsidian eyes.

“Then you’re going to lose her,” he tells me, almost gently. “And it’ll rip you to shreds.” Then he pulls his fist back and punches right through my ribcage to wrap his fingers around my heart. “I told you what I’d do if you bonded with her. Warned you what it would mean.”

I cough wetly. “I know.”

I want to tell him to keep going. To pry me open and dig his fingers in. Tear out all the messy, mangled bits. No half measures. No careful handling.

But then a new voice cracks through the haze. “That’s enough.”

The Eternal of Asteria lands in a rustle of red and black feathers, his wings kicking up eddies of fallen leaves.

Alexios’ face is a beautiful mask, betraying nothing as he takes me in. “Get your hand out of his ribcage, Blade. He’ll need at least half an hour to regrow that heart if you crush it, and I want him lucid.”

Bastien wrenches his hand out of my chest. I suck in a gasping breath, swallowing down bile.

Alexios’ power fills the clearing, thick enough to choke on. I snarl weakly as it presses down on me, sinks claws into my mind, and commands me to be still. He crooks a finger, and my spine arches as his magic forces me upright. Fire sparks over my skin. My own power strains against its bonds, begging for release, but there will be no battle here. No contest of wills.