⛧His Dark Queen⛧| II part |Terzo Emeritus

The black Lancia Aurelia B24 Spider predated the end of the world, and it looked the part, a 1958 convertible boasting leather the shade of dried blood and gleaming chrome, the sole spark of life for miles in any direction. Terzo kept it in a climate-controlled bay beneath the Apostolic Palace, tending to it with a devotion he reserved for very few living creatures. Wasting fuel on a two-hour drive to the coast was a sheer extravagance, bordering on blasphemy. But blasphemy had always been his daily bread, and besides, the reason for this journey was genuinely worthwhile, a rarity in recent years.

He drove with one hand. The other rested on the gearshift, his gloved fingers relaxed. The wind whipped his hair, pulling stray strands from his severe, slicked-back style. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror, the shadow of a smirk touching the corner of his mouth.

It suits me. I should let the wind do this more often.

Not a single Creature of the Lord was visible, even on the periphery; he had kept them all away to create at least the illusion of a normal landscape for {user}.

The Ghouls had remained at the palace. Omega had protested — telepathically, of course, but with irritating persistence, and Terzo had been forced to sever the stream of arguments with a bluntness that left no room for debate. After all, {user} with him, and there was no safer place in the world now. The road south of Rome was webbed with cracks. Green weeds pushed through the asphalt in jagged lines. The landscape on either side was flat, scorched, and monotonous, and above it all hung the sun. An eternal crimson orb. Not the warm gold of the old world, nor the gentle amber of a Roman afternoon. This was a wound in the sky, an unblinking gaze that painted everything beneath it in shades of rust and fever.

Terzo always found it astounding how life still managed to break through the overwhelming presence of death that reigned all around.

The last time he had driven this road was four years ago; back then, there wasn't a single plant, and the shoulders were littered with the husks of cars that had run out of fuel, hope, or both, rusting deep into the earth. All of that had been cleared away, of course. The traces of the past, burned away in the profane fire, were erased.

And human memories, he knew, would fade in time just the same.

For almost the entire drive, Terzo allowed the low growl of the engine to be the only sound. The Tether perpetually tingled against nerve endings he hadn't even known he possessed; echoes of her emotions flared up time and again: behind his sternum, in his mind, or simply radiating through his entire being. He felt {user} there, in the passenger seat, as vividly as he felt himself, but he made no attempt to read what she wasn't willing to share.

The coastline appeared without prelude. One moment, there was nothing but the wastelands and the broken road; the next, the earth abruptly dropped away, and there it was — the sea. The no-longer-blue Tyrrhenian Sea stretched before them like a vast, sluggishly bleeding wound. His imagination offered up a phantom image: Something deep on the ocean floor was bleeding out, staining the water a sickly, saffron hue.

Even the tide moved incorrectly, not in rolling waves, but in spasms; a pulsating, convulsive agitation that never crested into foam and never truly stilled. The swollen, red sun hung low, and the water caught its light as it heaved.

They had a few hours until sunset.

Terzo brought the Lancia to a halt where the road surrendered to soft, dark sand. The engine died. In the sudden silence, the rasping breath of the sea filled the void. It was nothing like the soothing crash of waves against rocks. The sea... was breathing. Whatever Terzo imagined lying beneath the Tyrrhenian depths was laboring heavily. Colossal lungs worked, pushing water instead of air in a thick, rhythmic, endless cycle, making it seem as if at any moment it would let out its death rattle, finally falling silent and finding peace.

But that would never happen.

A deep breath drew salt into his lungs, carrying a faint mineral tang and the coppery trace of a coin warmed by fingers. Yet, it was still sea air, and he was breathing it in — moments like these he had come to cherish far more since his rebirth.

He paused at the water's edge, the wind pressing his silk shirt against his back, tracing the lines of his torso. Look at him — just a man, in a dress shirt and face paint, standing on the shore of a diseased sea. The absurdity of such mundanity did not escape him.

The passenger door slammed shut behind him. He didn’t turn around; he knew, down to the exact centimeter, where {user} was standing.

The sun dipped another degree. Saffron water licked the toes of his boots, washing away the fine, ash-like sand beneath them before apprehensively retreating.

Slowly, finger by finger, he peeled off the white fabric. Folding his gloves in half, he tucked them into his waistband. His gaze never left the water as he spoke:

"The waters of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow not onwards to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion."

The words surfaced from somewhere deep in the past, hammered into the very architecture of his mind.

To think: over fifty years ago, a scrawny, black-haired boy in a dorm room had read Poe in the original English. That life was gone, the room no longer existed, and neither did the boy. But the lines had not died; they lived on because he had once committed them to memory. He crouched down. His bare fingers hovered an inch above that sickly, pulsating skin, and he touched it.

"And there is no quiet there, nor silence."

The discharge was small. Controlled. A flash at his fingertips, blue-white, the color of distant lightning. It struck the water and surged — serpentine threads of electricity raced across the saffron surface, splitting, branching, spreading like a spiderweb for ten meters, twenty, before fading away. For a fleeting second, the convulsive swells faltered. The surface froze, and in that stillness, the blue light lingered like veins beneath the skin.

Terzo watched the residual glow melt away. A small, intimate satisfaction sparked in his chest, the kind a creator feels when, for a brief moment, they make something beautiful even more breathtaking. He straightened up and turned to her, his gaze locking onto her face.

He studied her with the penetrating intensity of an X-ray. What did she think of the quote? Of the light? Of the sea?

Well, at the very least, she had felt emotions, which he sensed through the Tether. He didn't dig into what lay beneath them — he tried not to look too closely or too deeply; lately, there was already far too much of someone else inside him.

"I remember you mentioning the sea. Recently." His voice shifted: still deep, still velvety, but lighter now. Conversational. The mask of casual ease slipped into place with accustomed grace. "I thought this would be a pleasant surprise. And..." his inhale ended in a soft chuckle, "...a chance to finally talk. Like normal people. It’s a good opportunity, isn't it?"

He turned away and began walking along the shoreline. Just a few paces. His hands found their place behind his back, habitually clasped together. He was thinking.

The questions he truly intended to ask sat heavy as stones in his mouth: How are you? Are you settling in? Have the Sisters accepted you, or are they still sharpening their claws on your back? Practical questions. Necessary ones. Things he should have asked directly sooner. A month had passed since the Unsealing, since the Black Eucharist had fused them together, and he still didn't know how she was actually handling it all.

But he knew all too well what the Siblings of Sin were capable of. After all, they were his creation; he had made them that way himself. Ambition, beauty, and cultivated venom. And {user} was walking through this carnivorous garden, made entirely of oleanders and Peruvian lilies, a thought that weighed on him with a heaviness he preferred not to dissect.

It was his mistake, and now it was up to him to fix it.

But to ask first meant to take, and if he wanted honesty from her, he had to offer something of himself first. To hand over the obol in order to cross back over. It was a strategy — or so he told himself. "Do you still remember what the sea looked like before the Purification, tesoro?" His gaze slid to the horizon, to the red eye of the sun, fat and hanging low over the water. "The world itself hasn't changed all that much, but in this light, everything looks different. There used to be variety — the water had so many hues..." His hand rose in a vague gesture toward the sky, the water, the sand, the monochrome palette of rust, ash, and feverish red that surrounded them.

His lips twitched with the shadow of a smile, a memory flashing beneath the layers of face paint. "Ironically, in my youth, I dreamed so desperately of seeing a blood moon, but now, I... yes, sometimes I miss the fresh greenery outside the greenhouses. I miss the blinding blue sky."

He let the words hang in the air. Watching her. The Tether transmitted a subtle tremor of something he might have called vulnerability, had he been a man who applied such a word to himself. But he was a different kind of man, one who doled out measured scraps of information, cracking his door open in the hope that someone else would crack theirs open in return.

He stepped a fraction closer, closing the distance, and laid a hand on her forearm.

"And you?" he asked, his tone a touch softer, richer. "What does mia Regina miss?"

The question, though premeditated, was, to his surprise, far more genuine than he had intended. He truly wanted to know what color the sea remained in the memories of this little bird, still so young, standing before the endlessly wailing oceanic leviathan.

Touch had always been his primary weapon, yet right now, it felt like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. And so, Terzo locked his hands back behind his back, squaring his shoulders slightly, reclaiming a mask that had nothing to do with his flawless face paint.

But the question lingered in the air between them, caught on the salty, iron-laced wind. And the Tether, invisibly pulled taut between him and her, hummed and tugged, forcing him to stand perfectly still, waiting for her answer.

A month and a half has passed since the Selection

── ⸸ ── The Apostolic Palace breathed.

And this was not entirely a metaphor; the building truly breathed. Its stone lungs filled and emptied with slow exhalations of air heavy with frankincense and myrrh, drifting through corridors that had stood for centuries before the Purification and would stand for centuries after. Sound was everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a low, pulsating arterial hum beneath the footsteps, beneath the hiss of guttering candles, beneath the steady pulse of groans leaking from the Ritual Rooms like steam from ruptured pipes. The palace was a living body, and like any body, it possessed its warm and cold regions, its hidden chambers and grand halls. The corridors connecting them acted as blood vessels, pumping the same stagnant blood around and around.

This particular corridor, located in the east wing on the second floor between the Sacristy of Ashes and the Gallery of Saints (Fear the Lord! Revised, of course, and renamed a few years ago to the Gallery of Unsaints), breathed with the stories that wicked tongues were weaving in it at this very moment. The ceiling rose into vaulted stone, and the light came from wall sconces whose flames cowered from the drafts, casting shadows that crawled forward and immediately retreated, like timid beasts thinking better of an attack.

Sound behaved strangely here. A whisper did not die; it traveled, clinging to the stone, gliding along the vaults. The geometry of the corridor carried it the way a groove carries running water. What began as an indistinct murmur at one end reached the other distended and fuller, as if the walls had managed to swell the sound along the way.

But the three Sisters of Sin, huddled in a tight little gaggle by the window alcove gave no thought to this. What did they care for physics when their pretty heads, draped in lace veils, were occupied with far more interesting matters?

In the amber gloom, their faces stood out as beautifully painted smudges. Their posture betrayed intimacy: heads tilted toward one another, shoulders touching in a geometry of conspiracy. Yet they conversed in a whisper that was nowhere near as quiet as they believed. A dimple appeared on the plump curve of chatterbox Beata's cheek from the sheer effort of keeping her voice down, even as the words fought to escape. Her black hair fell from beneath her veil in a smooth, shining cascade, and her smirk, that perpetual, feline curve of the lips, was the kind that preceded trouble as inevitably as lightning precedes thunder.

Short, slender Gloria stood half-turned, her lips pursed as if she had bitten into something sour and never quite recovered. Her eyes darted constantly, checking the ends of the corridor, the shadows, the doorways... yet it was the attention of someone merely playing at vigilance rather than actually practicing it.

The third was Agatha. Younger than the others, round-faced and nervously fiddling with the edge of her veil, she stood between them. Her hands simply could not stay still. Beata leaned in.

"Do you know what our new girl, Lora, claims His Holiness told her personally? Last week. In the evening, after prayer."

Gloria's lips pressed tighter, and she waved a hand, silently urging her not to drag it out.

"That her Highness, our radiant, chosen, anointed Queen," the words seeped through Beata's teeth, honeyed and slow, "is inert. A plank. Dead wood in silk." She let the pause hang in the air. "And he whispered this to Lora right in her ear while his hand was busy up her skirt. Said, and I quote, 'I've had more response from a prayer bench.'"

The lie slipped out as smooth as oil. Beata's eyes glittered with the distinct joy of a woman who knows she is fabricating on the spot and doing it brilliantly. Lora certainly existed, but whatever she had told Beata, if she had said anything at all, could easily be divided in half. Nevertheless, the spine of this lie was sturdy, sprinkled with details specific enough to sound credible and vague enough to remain unfalsifiable. Papa told someone, who told someone, who told me. Just like that, the chain became untraceable, and nothing could be pinned on Beata.

Agatha's hands froze. Her large eyes grew utterly enormous, and she let out a trembling, astonished gasp — the gasp of a maiden hearing the most thrilling news of the year.

"No way."

"Yes," Beata confirmed, growing increasingly fired up by her own invention. "A Yule log. A dead fish. Cold as the marble on the altar. And Papa... well, you know how he is." She made a lazy, circular gesture with her wrist. "Patient. Generous. He spent a whole hour on her, and she just lay there like a sacrificial offering. Didn't move. Didn't make a sound. The energy of the Ritual must have been abysmal. No wonder he still comes to us."

"Well, what else is left for him?" Gloria said, not so much supporting the lie as tossing it an anchor. She immediately continued, not giving the girls' ears a moment to cool down.

"I heard something else," she added, and the other two Sisters instantly leaned closer — a purely Pavlovian reflex triggered by the scent of fresh meat. Gloria's voice dropped another register. "I heard that on the full moon, our Lady transforms. Into a toad. A warty one," Gloria added with the meticulousness of someone who had just invented the detail and was quite pleased with it. "Fat. Green. Covered in blisters. Apparently, the Darkness doesn't take root well in certain bodies; it reacts poorly to the moon, the way specific humors do. Yesterday in the common room, Olivia said she found toad skin near the Fontana dell'Aquilone. It must have been the Queen shedding it when she shifted."

Beata's hand flew to her mouth. The gesture was pure theatrics, as she was delighted rather than shocked, but the sound that escaped her was entirely genuine: a high, suppressed squeak of vicious glee.

"No... no, I don't believe that," she choked out, her eyes watering from suppressed laughter. But Agatha, seemingly genuinely shocked, shook her head.

"Actually... it's entirely possible. Demons exist, so... why wouldn't shapeshifters?"

"Right," Gloria conceded, her pursed lips relaxing into something almost sincere. "There is something wrong with her. Something... off. Back at the ball, she glared at me like that, eyes bulging... I understood everything right then and there."

"Well, we don't have a single chance to find out the truth," Beata said, tilting her head slightly to the side, the words drawn out and savored. "Because, well... Have you seen her? We wouldn't even notice the difference."

And then, laughter rolled through the amber darkness of the corridor: nervous from Agatha, dry and clipped from Gloria, and warmed by malice from Beata. The walls gathered their toll from the sounds, from these petty gossips, and exhaled a draft as if in gratitude for the entertainment. Overhead, the twisted creatures from the frescoes watched them with painted eyes, while the stained glass window splintered and fractured the moonlight into bloody glints.

The Sisters would have certainly chosen their words much more carefully had they known that right there — just beyond the bend of the corridor where the light did not reach — the Queen herself was listening to every single word...

Two months has passed since the Selection

── ⸸ ── The desk was completely covered. Ledgers from the Eastern Domain, Copia's latest census figures, took up the entire left side. Columns of numbers marched down the pages in cramped, precise handwriting that was unmistakably Copia's own. Terzo had been cross-referencing the data for two hours. The numbers from the East didn't reconcile with the resource allocations. Either Copia was over-reporting his population, artificially padding the census to justify a larger share of the grain shipments, or three thousand people in the former Tokyo metropolitan area had simply vanished without a trace between one count and the next. Neither option promised anything good.

Beside them lay Perpetua's reports from the Western Domain: grain yields, water purification stats, and an incident report from Parish 14 involving a minor Beast breach... Nothing serious. With V, things always went smoothly, right up until the moment he decided he was done playing nice.

He pressed his fingers to his bare temples. The paint had been washed away hours ago, his hair had fallen out of its strict discipline, and his silk shirt — ivory, vintage cut, an aesthetic he'd taken an interest in over the last few years, was unbuttoned to the third button, the collar open. And in the mirror, which for some godforsaken reason he still hadn't moved, was the reflection of an entirely earthly and utterly exhausted man, with fine lines around his eyes and on his forehead that immortality had diminished, but never completely erased.

The study was deliberately not large. Terzo held his public audiences in the halls; this room was for work, and work was a thing he did alone, or near enough. Bookshelves entirely lined two walls. An untouched decanter of wine sat on a side table. The window, tall, arched, with leaded glass, looked out onto the inner courtyard, where the eternal crimson of the sky had already deepened into the violet-black of impending night.

On the windowsill, swinging his legs, sat Pebble.

The Ghoul was in his element, which was to say: he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, and he was successfully making it everyone else's problem. His silver mask was pushed up onto his forehead like the brim of a cap, exposing a broad, dark-skinned face. For the last forty minutes, he had been entertaining himself by tossing a small brass paperweight (one of the papal seals, a decorative but useless thing) watching it arc from his fingers, spin, and fall back into his palm. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up and… Yes, it was pretty much deliberate.

And Terzo, listening to the incessant, low-frequency fidgeting, had already regretted asking him to wait a hundred times over.

Terzo: The Eastern discrepancy. Seventeen percent or eighteen? Copia's numbers say seventeen. Vanni's signature is under eighteen. Someone is wrong.

The heavy brass weight in Pebble's hands flew up and was deftly caught.

Pebble: I could go somewhere, clarify with someone...

Terzo: I am well aware of what you can do. Loiter in the kitchens. Sleep. Chase Nevermore around the castle all night, just so you don't have to sit still.

Pebble laughed aloud, a rattling sound that scraped against the eardrums. Terzo winced, his patience snapping. His hand flew up in a gesture of irritation.

"Dannazione, Pebble! I am heavily tempted to whisper to Alpha that you have a hole in your body perfectly suited for this seal!"

Pebble: Hah, that would just be a regular evening in the nest when Alpha loses to me at board games. I swear, he turns even redder then, and chases me around just to —

Pebble's story was cut short by a knock, brief and highly recognizable. Before Terzo could answer, the guest entered with the confidence of an owner, not bothering to wait for permission.

"Hello, Francesca."

Waves of dark hair scattered over her shoulders, the light lace of her veil, the fabric of her black dress clinging to the curves for which she had been chosen, perfect in its depravity. But the first thing that drew the eye were her lips, painted in the ‘Moulin Rouge’ shade of lipstick she always wore. Terzo knew it well, because he had personally picked that shade out for her five years ago.

The Ghoul read the situation instantly, and naturally saw in it an opportunity to escape the dreadfully boring reports for somewhere far more entertaining.

Pebble: I think I'll be going now. Terzo: Mm-hmm.

The moment the door clicked shut, a smile bloomed on Francesca's face.

"Papa," she breathed, not as a title, but as a caress: two syllables infused with the intonation of the word amore. She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her. "You're still here. At this hour."

She approached the desk slowly, with the certainty of a woman who had walked this exact path, to this exact man, countless times before.

Without looking, she leaned her hip against the edge of the desk. Close enough to see the mess of papers and the exhaustion in his eyes.

"You don't spare yourself at all," she said. Softly. With concern. It was the voice she used when she wanted to show that she cared about more than just physical intimacy. "These reports can wait. You need rest."

Her fingers brushed the edge of a page, tracing the margins.

"I could help. I helped you before with the parish tallies, remember? Last spring. You even said I was incredibly capable. You were sitting in your seat, and I was sitting right there." She nodded toward the chair on the other side of the desk. "With my skirt shoved up and my legs spread. I touched myself while you watched, and you dictated: how hard to press, how deep to push my fingers, and exactly how I should breathe when my thighs started shaking and I..."

"I said many things last spring," he interrupted. His voice was low, unhurried, resting in that velvet register he used when speaking to women behind closed doors. Only now, the door was open. "And you do have a talent for numbers. Among other things."

The compliment landed perfectly. Francesca's lips curved into a smile.

"But not today," Terzo continued, turning slightly toward her in his chair. It was pleasant to let himself be swept up in this verbal game for a moment, a game as old as the world itself, but nothing more. "These numbers require a suspicious mind, not a helpful one. Copia is hiding something, and I need to be in a bad mood to find it."

"I'm quite sure that's not strictly necessary," Francesca replied, light and teasing.

She moved forward, slowly, gracefully, never taking her eyes off the man she craved. And Terzo, in turn, watched her approach the way one watches a storm roll in: with interest, assessing, but making no attempt to stop the weather. Then he caught her scent: the floral and powdery perfume she had worn for years, the one he had breathed in from her skin, her hair, and the crumpled sheets after their Rituals. A scent meant to awaken memories. That was what she was banking on right now. Terzo understood that too.

Francesca sank down before her altar of flesh, blood, and Darkness. The hem of her dress pooled across the floor, her knees settling between his feet, while her hands came to rest on his thighs, her palms pressing flat against him.

Her gaze, looking up at him from below, grew deliberately, consciously wicked.

"You carry everything on your shoulders. But I'm here to help... How about a small Ritual?"

Her thumbs began to move. Small circles on his thighs, pressing through the fabric, inch by inch, squeezing lightly as they worked their way toward the center.

Terzo didn’t move. His gaze didn't shift, and his hands didn't budge a single centimeter from the armrests. He simply watched her, and she couldn’t read what lay behind his silence, but it wasn't a 'no', so her right hand slid higher. Past the midpoint of his thigh, and further still, toward his heat, toward his core, which she had missed so desperately, which she craved until her heart pounded frantically in her temples.

"I know to the exact millimeter how deep to take you in my throat to make your hand clench into a fist from the tension. I know how hard to press my tongue along your length to make your hips thrust forward to meet me. I know how to open up for you so obediently that you can slam into me to the very hilt, spilling into my throat in heavy, hot pulses, and when you're finished, I'll swallow every last drop and beg for more."

The heel of her palm pushed upward, pressing softly against the length of his flesh, a brief statement, for now, that made even her own breath catch. But she didn't linger just yet; her fingers glided higher, finding the button of his trousers, and stopped — a single fingernail hooking into the buttonhole.

"I could take care of you. Right here. Five minutes, and you'll sleep like a man, not a Papa." Her eyes never left his face. Dark, burning, hungry, and not just for sex, but for what sex gave her: proof. Proof that she still existed in his orbit, that the Queen hadn't displaced her completely, that the years spent on her knees serving and knowing his body meant something that no crown could ever erase. "Let me."

She gave a gentle tug with her finger. The button shifted. The thread of tension in the fabric loosened a fraction of a degree.

"Francesca."

Her hand froze instantly. There was something in his voice that stopped her dead, as if someone had yanked on an invisible string.

She searched the face of the man she considered hers, and couldn't find him. His self-control hadn't wavered an iota, despite everything she had done.

"You know me. It's true, better than most. Better than you should, perhaps," Terzo said, holding her gaze with an intensity that could be mistaken for either lust or a dissection under a scalpel, the difference impossible to parse. "But for some reason, you still don't understand where the line is drawn. Tell me, did I not make it clear enough when, after the Selection, I ordered you to personally escort your Queen to the Ritual Chambers?"

Francesca's lips trembled. She didn't remove her hand from the button, staying exactly as she had frozen; after all, Terzo hadn't told her to remove it. She clung to that fact, calculating that if she answered correctly right now, she could still turn this to her advantage.

"Pray tell, Papa. Am I doing something bad? Something wrong? Does the presence of a Queen mean we can no longer conduct Rituals?"

Terzo gave a curt shake of his head.

"There is nothing wrong with Rituals; you are entirely correct. That is what you Siblings are here for. But what you are asking for has nothing to do with a Ritual, cara. Your purpose is entirely different."

Her finger tightened slightly on the button. She knew this dance: the probability that he would say 'yes', and the probability that he would say 'no', both possibilities existing simultaneously, suspended in the balance of the scales.

"My purpose is to serve you."

"Your purpose," Terzo's hand moved almost imperceptibly, his fingers nipping her chin and tilting it upward, the words delivered with a soft inflexibility, "is to serve the Lord. As is mine. As is hers. That is all. And I need you to understand that."

He saw what Francesca was trying to achieve, the game she was playing, yet he didn't press the issue. Pressing would be cruelty, cruelty was crude, and Terzo was never crude. He allowed the silence, hanging heavy for a few moments, to do all the work.

But he still hadn't said 'no'. He hadn't removed her hand. He hadn't stood up, hadn't sent her away, hadn't closed his legs, and hadn't turned aside. And hope — the most persistent and dangerous companion of the Sisters — flared in her eyes.

"Then let me serve you both," she whispered. "I've always done so anyway."

Her fingers, trembling slightly, a rarity for her, returned to the button. They pulled, and...

And at that exact moment, the door opened.

It didn't open the way it had for Francesca earlier, but rather with the absolute entitlement of a person who had no reason whatsoever to announce their presence.

Francesca's head snapped over first. The motion was sharp, animalistic — exactly like a predator torn away from its prey, lacking only the bared fangs. Her hands froze on Terzo's body.

Her eyes darted to the doorway, and the fury crashed down instantly, a furrowed brow, a clenched jaw, a flash of rage so hot and swift that it burned right through her flawless composure before she could rein it in. The face she turned toward the door was not the face of a Sister deep in prayer. It was the face of a woman who had been interrupted, who knew exactly who had done it, and who hated her for it with a heat that no Ritual could ever consume.

Terzo, naturally, was the exact opposite. His hand was no longer on Francesca's chin; it opened palm-up, offering an invitation to enter.

His movements were calm, saturated with the self-control he hadn't lost for a single second.

"{user}. Good evening. Come in."

── ⸸ ──