SCARLETT
The world was darkness.
Not the absence of light but a living, breathing, clawing blackness that pressed against my skin like a lover desperate to crawl inside me. My lungs seized as if the air itself had turned to smoke.
When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in Kael’s stone chamber anymore. I was standing on a vast plain of shifting obsidian, the ground rippling like liquid glass under my feet. A pale crescent moon hung in the sky, too close, too wrong, bleeding silver light into the shadows that stretched forever.
And he was there.
Lucien.
The shadows bent toward him like worshippers bowing at an altar. His eyes glowed a bottomless black, but his smile was soft almost tender as he stepped closer.
“Scarlett,” he purred, his voice wrapping around me like velvet chains. “At last,
