Silence followed the Bride's disappearance the way a corpse follows a heartbeat.
Cassian remained on his knees, laughing through the pain as his skin re-knitted itself in wet, tearing
SFX: shrrrk-shrrrk-shrrrk.
Mira kept her bow half-drawn, arrow trained on Rook's back like she expected the girl to sprout tentacles any second. Seraphine's wings dimmed to smoldering gold, her blood dripping onto the black water—each drop vanishing without a ripple.
Leo stood exactly where he had been, hands open, harmless, exquisitely unthreatening.
Rook drifted in a slow circle around the group, bare feet whispering across the water, humming that same lullaby. The silver ring—L.V.—gleamed whenever candlelight dared touch it. She crouched beside the sinking veil and dipped two fingers through it as though testing bathwater.
"It's cold now," she announced lightly. "She won't come back. Not unless someone says his name again."
Cassian spat pink foam and grinned. "Kid, you're creepy as hell. I like you."
Rook tilted her head. "You'll die screaming in four hundred and twelve days. It will sound like church bells."
Cassian's grin didn't falter. "Worth it."
Seraphine stepped between them, voice soft but steel-lined. "Enough. We need to move. The first bell has tolled. The second will change the rules."
She looked at Leo as she said it—searching for fear, for cracks, for something she could protect.
He gave her exactly that: wide grey eyes, shallow breaths, a trembling nod of trust.
Inside, the black flower in Leo's chest opened another petal.
Four hundred and twelve days.
Rook had given Cassian's death an appointment.
And she'd looked directly at Leo when she pocketed his initials.
She knew.
The only question was: how much?
He filed the thought away beside every other blade he hadn't drawn yet.
Seraphine extended a bloody hand. "Come. The Cloister of Broken Voices is closest. It may hold answers."
Leo took it. The silver rune from the dead boy flared under his skin, white-hot. He let the pain flicker across his face—enough for Seraphine to flinch, enough for her to tighten her grip.
Good. Let her think she was the pillar holding him upright.
They moved.
The formation reformed with instinctive precision: Cassian at point, Mira rear guard, Seraphine and Leo between them, Rook drifting like a loose shadow.
The cathedral warped as they walked. Pillars leaned inward as if bowing. The water thinned, revealing marble veined with faintly pulsing roots. Every twenty steps, a corpse appeared where nothing had been moments before—some fresh, some centuries old—all of them wearing wedding rings.
Mira noticed first. "They're all facing the same direction," she muttered. "Like they died walking toward something."
"Or away," Rook chimed, cheerful as a funeral hymn.
Leo kept breathing even. Counting paces, angles, exits. Old habits from a life that never assumed survival.
At the far end of the nave, a stone archway yawned open. Above it, words carved so deeply the stone seemed to bleed dust:
THOU SHALT NOT UTTER
THE NAME THAT WAS STOLEN.
Rook stopped beneath it and read it aloud in a singsong murmur.
"Someone really doesn't want us talking about you, Leo."
Seraphine stiffened. "Rook."
"Just observing." The girl shrugged. "Names have weight here. Some weigh more than hearts."
Cassian shot Leo a grin. "Pretty boy's definitely got 'final boss' energy."
Leo laughed weakly. "I can barely stand. I think you're all safe."
Lie number forty-one.
They stepped through.
Temperature drop: -20°C.
Breath fog.
Walls narrowing until their shoulders brushed cold stone.
No water now—only dry marble and the smell of old parchment and older secrets.
Ahead: warm gold torchlight, flickering like a heartbeat.
The Cloister of Broken Voices.
Shelves rose three stories high, filled with books bound in human skin. Some wept. Some whispered in rusted languages. Others begged, quietly, to be read.
At the center sat a vast reading table. On it lay a single open volume the size of a coffin lid. Its pages were black water frozen mid-ripple.
Rook approached it reverently. "Memory ink," she murmured. "Whatever you write becomes true for someone. Somewhere. Once."
Mira frowned. "That's… bad."
"Everything here is." Rook turned her blind gaze toward Leo. "Want to try?"
Seraphine cut between them instantly. "No. We need maps. Clues. Nothing reckless."
Cassian was already grabbing books. Several bit him. He didn't stop.
Leo drifted toward the central tome, drawn by the same itch that had burned when he touched the dead boy's name.
His reflection grinned back at him when he did not.
He reached out.
"Careful," Rook breathed. "If you write someone's name here, they can never speak their own name again. Not even to beg."
His fingertip hovered.
Seraphine's hand closed on his wrist. Gentle. Firm. "Leo. Don't."
He let her pull him back. Smiled apologetically. "Sorry. Just… curious."
Inside, the black flower in his chest unfurled completely.
He had almost written Seraphine vi Altair.
Almost.
Rook watched him with that same tiny, terrible smile.
Cassian whooped from a side shelf. "Found something!"
A chained folio. When he tore it open, it screamed—a woman's voice, raw with regret—and fell silent.
Inside: a skin-map marked with twenty-three red X's.
One for every other Awakened dragged here.
Below, in elegant script:
Only one seat remains.
Choose wisely whom you trust with your name.
Cassian laughed until tears streaked his bloodied cheeks. "This place has style."
Mira whispered, horrified, "We're already down to six…"
Leo counted silently.
Six.
Himself.
Seraphine.
Cassian.
Mira.
Rook.
And the blurred boy whose face refused to stay in focus, flickering at the edge of sight like a smudge.
Rook closed the coffin-book. THUD. A heartbeat in the dark.
Somewhere deeper in the cathedral, the second bell began to toll.
Wet this time.
Like a throat full of drowning water trying to speak.
The torches guttered.
Every book in the Cloister opened at once.
A single whisper bled from their pages—layered, overlapping, hundreds of voices speaking in perfect unison:
Leo…
Leo…
Leo…
Not his voice.
Not any voice he knew.
But every one of them sounded betrayed.
Heartbroken.
Still in love.
Seraphine's fingers dug into his wrist until bones creaked.
Rook leaned close enough for her breath to stir his ear.
"Don't worry," she whispered, sugar-sweet. "I won't say it out loud.
Not yet."
The second bell finished.
Gravity inverted.
The ceiling became the floor. Books spiraled upward like panicked birds. The map tore itself from Cassian's grip and fluttered into the dark like a wounded animal.
And somewhere far above—
now the new floor—
something wearing Leo's face began walking toward them.
Barefoot.
Leaving bloody footprints that spelled out a name
he was no longer allowed
to speak.