“My mother built this,” Sylas said, and something in his voice made her look up sharply. “Before she died. She said every fortress needs a place where living things can grow, or its people will forget what they’re fighting to protect.”
Elsa studied the garden with new eyes. The carefully tended paths. The water features that hummed with the same harmonic as the grid sphere. The secluded alcoves that offered privacy in a world where privacy seemed like a luxury.
A Frosted Tears bloom caught the light near her hand, its petals the same pale blue as the faint marks Sylas had left on her skin after they’d reunited in his den, his nest, his furs. Shebrushed her fingers across it, and the flower released a fragrance that wrapped around her senses like silk—sweet and cold and somehow comforting.
“They bloom year-round here,” Sylas said, watching her explore. “Something about the Lux energy in the soil. My mother believed they were a gift from the goddess herself—proof that beauty could survive in hostile places.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s yours.” The words came out rough. “If you want it. A place to breathe when the politics become too much. When I become too much.” His gaze held hers, steady and intense. “I know I’m not easy to be tethered to.”
The honesty of it caught her off guard. She’d grown used to Sylas the King—calculating, commanding, always three moves ahead. This glimpse of something rawer felt like a gift she hadn’t earned.
“Neither am I,” she admitted. “Easy to be tethered to.”
Something shifted in his expression. Through the bond, she felt a pulse of warmth that wasn’t quite hope but wasn’t far from it.
They moved on.
The corridor that led toward the Holy side of the fortress was different from the others—wider, lined with carved reliefs that told stories she couldn’t read and symbols that pulsed with faint Lux energy. Sylas kept her close here, his hand firm against her back, his presence a wall between her and whatever might emerge from the shadows.
“This is where the priests hold power,” he said, voice low. “Vask’s old territory. The succession is still being decided, but the hierarchy remains. The Church of Lux predates the monarchy. Sometimes they remember that more than I’d like.”
“Is that a warning?”
“It’s context.”
A figure emerged from an alcove ahead.
Tall. Robed in layers of white and silver that caught the corridor’s light and scattered it like crushed diamonds. A Lux Priest—not Vask, who was very thoroughly dead, but another one. Older. With the patient, calculating eyes of someone who’d spent decades learning to wait.
“Alpha King.” The priest inclined his head—barely. His gaze slid to Elsa and stayed there, assessing. “And the human who carries Lux’s blessing.”
Sylas’s hand pressed harder against her spine. Not pushing her behind him—not quite—but making his position clear. “High Priest Oran. I wasn’t aware the council had confirmed your appointment.”
“Acting High Priest.” Oran’s lips curved in something too controlled to be a smile. “Until the formal rites can be completed. I’m sure you understand the necessity of maintaining spiritual continuity in uncertain times.”
The barb landed—Elsa felt Sylas’s anger flare through the bond, sharp and hot before he tamped it down. The “uncertain times” were Sylas’s doing. Vask’s death. The coup he’d crushed with extreme prejudice. The power vacuum that left the priesthood scrambling.
“What do you want, Oran?”
The priest’s attention shifted fully to Elsa. Something in his gaze made her skin prickle—not threat, exactly, but assessment. She was being catalogued. Sorted into whatever framework his theology provided for creatures like her.
“The court has noticed your...companion’s changed status.” Oran’s voice was mild. Carefully, deliberately mild. “No collar. No chain. Walking freely through the fortress at the Alpha King’s side, wearing the colors of his house.”
“I wasn’t aware the Church concerned itself with my wardrobe choices.”
“The Church concerns itself with the spiritual welfare of the realm.” Oran folded his hands inside his sleeves, the picture of priestly patience. “Including the proper observance of rituals that bind our society together. Rituals that cannot be circumvented, even by kings.”
Sylas went very still.
Through the bond, Elsa felt something shift. The warmth that had been building between them since they left his chambers cooled into something harder. Warier.
“Say what you came to say, priest.”
Oran’s gaze flickered between them—cataloguing, calculating. “The human cannot be formally recognized as Luna until the Blood Moon ritual is complete.”
The words dropped into the corridor like stones into still water.