Astra blinked once.

Fog smeared the greenhouse panes while industrial fans blew full blast, stirring her silver hair. Artificial heat swirled in even waves around her.

Knee-deep in wilted anthuriums, she wore nothing but a white tank and shorts. Her dagger rested in one hand, facets fracturing light into prisms that never returned her face.

On reflex she snipped browned edges from her drowsy tropicals. Winter had stolen half their strength, her neglect the rest, and every cut left them barer.

Guilt prickled. Why had she ignored them for so long? She could not remember.

Porcelain chimed behind her.

Eydis drifted in wearing Astra’s royal-blue silk robe, a marble tray balanced in her hand, two cups steaming. The humid air turned rich with dark roast and a sigh of Mānuka honey.

Astra slid onto the pergola bench; Eydis copied the motion, a teasing smile curving her lips.

“Taste,” she purred, gaze gliding over Astra’s bare legs and the sweep of her collarbones. “French press, medium-dark, a whisper of Mānuka. Your shameless admirer wants her grade.”

Warm china fit Astra’s palms. She glanced past the timber poles where the ivy sulked, then drank. The coffee swept over her tongue, smoky and fruity.

Perfect.

Eydis watched, pleased. “Have I improved?”

“You’ve levelled up,” Astra admitted.

“I’m a quick study in every art that pleases you.” Eydis winked, leaning across the little table. “Maybe I deserve more than praise.”

Astra’s chuckle was low. “Say what you want without riddles. Just once.”

“I thought I’d been blindingly straightforward.” Eydis drew lazy circles on the back of Astra’s hand.

Her eyes shifted toward the bedroom, then back. Her bare foot slid along Astra’s calf unhurriedly. “But if you want it spelled out… being near you burns my restraint to ash.”

“Straightforward?” Astra arched a brow. “Then answer honestly. Do you actually enjoy this? Sitting here, drinking coffee, pretending this is an ordinary morning rather than whatever it is you truly prefer?”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.” In a single liquid movement Eydis rose, slipped onto Astra’s lap, and lifted her face. “You enchant me.” Her whisper skimmed Astra’s ear. “Always—”

A flash of light. The diamond dagger rotated in Astra’s grip and kissed flesh. Where metal met skin, shadows bled out, hissing like plum-coloured steam.

Eydis, or rather Lust wearing her skin, snarled. “So… what slipped this time?” Sugared yet jagged syllables tumbled out. “When did you begin to see me?”

Astra gave no answer.

The Sin learned from her reactions, her words, perhaps even her memories. Eydis had warned her: Lust was cunning.

And while it hadn’t perfectly mimicked her, it had captured too many intimate details. The robe, for instance. Astra was the only one who had ever seen Eydis wear it.

No one else.

Astra swallowed a snarl.

Lust rested its cheek upon an elegant palm. “So perceptive. Was the coffee my undoing? Did perfection betray me? Mmm, what a tragedy.”

Astra’s stare hardened. Of course it was the coffee.

Eydis never got coffee right, never tried to, precisely because she didn’t have to. French press wasn’t that difficult, and she was brilliant with her hands, capable of sketching perfect, intricate sigils Astra had watched in secret awe.

The incompetence was an act, a game Astra let her play, pretending not to notice.

“You borrow her skin, her voice,” Astra said flatly, “but you’ll never be her.”

Lust laughed, voice fractured into sugar crystals, though beneath it simmered a burning rage.

“One hundred fifty times you have told me that. One, hundred, fifty.” Then its voice lowered. “But even diamonds crack, eventually. And I wonder… what’s the shape of your ruin?”

“One hundred fifty?” Astra’s tone sharpened. “How long have I been gone?”

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Whether born of dreams, simulations, or some twisted hallucination, she couldn’t tell. Eydis had told her she captured Lust fairly easily in her own realm and locked it away. So she never bothered to learn what it could do beyond casting illusions.

Only one way to find out.

The impostor melted, black fluid sliding to the floor, then rose again as a panther shaped from fresh ink. It stretched once and bounded onto a tree that blinked into being.

“Afraid your lover will find you broken, darling?”

“Do I look like I’m breaking?” Astra rose.

The panther roared and lunged.

Astra shot upward instead of bracing. The glass dome burst. Shards unfurled into waves of teal and amethyst, swept past her head, then flipped and fell as rain.

Colour spiralled inches from her skin yet never touched it; until she couldn’t tell whether she was flying or falling.

Disoriented, she squeezed her eyes shut and flew by instinct, by feeling. The sky offered no ceiling, no edge. It was endless.

Unbound.

She blinked. Snow covered her knees. Overhead hung a crimson moon with a neat crescent bitten away.

“Is this your idea of pleasure, Lust?” she muttered.

The moon puckered into a mouth painted red. A tongue traced its top lip. “Oh, darling. Breaking the unbreakable… it’s rapture,” it drawled. “And you—”

The moon collapsed. Ink bled into the snow and rose again as a black panther with green eyes. “You tempt her; so you tempt me in.”

“Bold to put yourself beside her.”

“Careful. That almost sounded like lo—” Lust’s last word split in half as Astra sliced through the beast.

It re-knitted behind her, unharmed.

“This is not real,” she said, breath fogging the night.

“I thought we’d moved past that,” the panther replied, head tilting in amused curiosity.

What Astra meant was that none of this belonged to her reality. Hallucinations clung to walls, to ceilings, to floors. Even illusions warped by the mind still obeyed the laws of the waking world.

Only dreams broke every rule at once.

Astra’s gaze sharpened. She was cocooned inside her own mind, layers on layers. Each loop built to collect her memories. One hundred and fifty repetitions proved it.

Was it her Lust meant to break?

Or Eydis, through her?

Memory is power, she decided. If I claim each forgotten dream, I reclaim control of my mind.

Twin blades formed in her hands, light crawling along the edges.

“Round one hundred and fifty-one,” she said, and met the shadow head-on.

Beep beep beep. Click.

“You’ve reached the voicemail of…”

The synthetic voice cut out as Eydis stabbed the call icon again. Astra still would not answer. The last sound she’d heard on that line was Astra shouting Adam’s name in panic.

Lust had found him, sigil or no sigil.

Her earlier victory over the Sin was due in part to its hubris, born from how easily it had broken Elias. Now Lust had learned, plotted, sharpened its resolve. This time would not be easy.

Her gaze strayed to Elias, gaunt and slumped in the passenger seat. If she had never bothered to save him, Lust would be bound by now. Yet here she was, pinning the accelerator down the western freeway, the electric motor keening while city lights tore past like screams.

Why had she saved him?

Maybe because the supposedly detached hacker had starved himself to protect a friendship. She had seen that kind of rare devotion before.

Gidion had bled for it.

Fools, all of them, irrigated by love. And worst of all, her own thoughts forever circling back to Astra. Lust reveled in that.

She redialed and mapped contingencies in her mind. If the Sin still clung to Adam, the game stayed simple; Astra could subdue it.

“You’ve reached the voicemail of…” She cut the line and tapped again.

But if Lust had targeted Astra…

It would almost certainly drag her into its own domain, a place where thoughts turned liquid and Sin’s influence edged toward omnipotence.

Please let it be Adam. Let Astra fight where the rules were firm, where flesh still had meaning.

The Saintess’s mind was wrapped in divine light; the Sin could not read her thoughts or touch her memories. But it did not need to break the door. A single dream would suffice.

Or many.

Lust was nothing if not imaginative.

Eydis clenched her jaw hard. The steering wheel warped beneath her grip before she forced her fingers to relax.

She slammed the brake, the electric sedan skidding sideways until it faced an abandoned warehouse at the edge of the old industrial zone, a dead zone for cameras and microphones.

She thumbed the fob. The steel gate groaned upward. Twin ravens burst from the darkness, woven from Greed’s own shadows to shield her from Lust.

Inside, monitors slept and servers muttered to themselves. Nothing looked disturbed until she found two bodies on the gray concrete.

Adam… and Astra.

Ice filled her veins.

She dropped beside Astra, willing her hands to stay steady, and lifted an eyelid. A thin violet corona glowed where crimson should have burned. Adam’s eyes, however, remained blue. Lust had skipped him and speared straight into Astra.

Eydis stood so fast her breath caught, pacing, raking her hands through her hair.

“One tidy solution, Your Majesty,” suggested a raven. “Cage it… ahem, bind Lust. Feathered and done.”

The other clicked its beak. “But it piggy-backed into Lady Astra’s mind. Clip the Sin’s wings, and you ground her soul, too.”

“Silence.” She raised a hand. “Leave.”

Consent? That’s rare. Our queen usually sent us spiraling into The Deep, the ravens thought, and they vanished in a puff of smoke.

She shrugged out of her blazer, folded it, and slipped it beneath Astra’s head. Lavender glyphs spiraled from her palm as she pressed it to the cracked concrete, gears of light grinding into place.

From her finger she slid her ruby ring, one of many she had collected since clawing her way out of poverty. Natural gems resonated with this realm and magnified her sigils. Emeralds or sapphires would work.

Yet rubies called to her for reasons she refused to name.

She set the ring at the sigil’s heart. Over the past few days she had perfected this pattern for nights like this and hoped she would never use it. Astra would be furious when she learned the risk.

It no longer mattered.

Eydis lowered herself beside Astra and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. She watched the Saintess’s face, the twitch of an eyebrow, the healthy flush in her cheeks. Temperature normal. Astra was fighting.

She laced their fingers and shut her eyes.

Entering another mind demanded delicacy; invading the Saintess’s dream required audacity bordering on suicidal.

But she was the Queen of Shadows. She would not latch onto Astra’s power, which would weaken her own. She would ride Lust’s shadow instead.

If she failed to drag both of them out… well, life and death had always been her favourite tightrope.

Gold flared behind her eyelids. Purple mist pooled around her body, and the sovereign of shadows stepped into a dream already blooming into a battlefield.