"I choose you," Corvin said, and the words came out rougher than anything Luna had heard from him yet, ten years of careful control finally, fully breaking. "Because I spent a decade in a life I don't remember treating loyalty as a resource to be spent rather than a truth to be lived, and I would rather burn every letter I've ever written and start over with nothing than let information ever again matter more to me than you do."
The pulsing light beneath the altar surged, and Luna felt the blood-bargain's low ache shift into something considerably less painful, as if some ancient mechanism had finally, fully begun recognizing what it was measuring.
One remained.
Draven stood at the circle's edge, amber-gold eyes bright with something that looked, in that suspended moment, like every fea
