When she reached the forest, her knees gave out beneath her. She hit the earth hard, breath shattering in her lungs. A sob clawed its way up her throat, and she crushed her fist between her teeth to keep it contained. She bit down until she tasted blood, until the pain was sharp enough to anchor her, until the scream she had swallowed since Paris tore free anyway — raw, feral, echoing through the trees.

  It felt like something ripping out of her.

  When the sound finally died, the forest stood vast and indifferent around her.

  A tree loomed ahead — tall, broad, and ancient. She dragged herself upright and moved toward it as if pulled by an invisible thread tied somewhere deep inside her ribs. Her vision blurred, but she did not stop.

  That was when she saw it.

  Faint, half-swallowed by years of bark growth, but still there.

  Liza + Jack, carved inside a jagged heart.

  The sight split her open more cleanly than any blade.

  Tears spilled freely now, hot and relentless, burning down her cheeks and settling like ash in her throat. Her bitten hand throbbed, blood smearing as she lifted it to the carving. Her fingers traced the uneven lines, the grooves he had cut with shaking teenage bravado.

  When she reached his name, her touch softened.

  She curved her fingertip around Jack with a tenderness she had not believed survived inside her.

  For a moment — just a moment — she let herself remember who she had been before Paris took everything.

  But she knew she couldn’t stay here. Not when Lucien had spent the last eight years studying every synapse in her skull with predatory precision. Not when his followers were hunting her like prey.

  She pressed her lips once to the carving — a farewell to the girl who had stood here with scraped knees and ink-stained fingers and a boy who laughed too loud — and then stepped back.

  She closed her eyes.

  This was the part that still frightened her, even now. Not the magic itself, but the way it answered to her. Too readily. Too hungrily. As though it had been waiting all her life for her to stop pretending it wasn’t there.

  She drew it up from somewhere beneath her sternum, the way she had learned to do alone in Lucien’s castle with no teacher and no permission, practicing in secret in the hours he left her untouched. It rose like heat through water — slow, then sudden, then everywhere at once.

  She thought of London.

  Not the postcard version. Not the monuments or the bridges gleaming in tourist photographs. She thought of the specific and the small: the cracked tile outside the Bethnal Green tube station, the smell of rain on hot pavement and fried onions from the cart on Cambridge Heath Road, the particular quality of grey light on a Tuesday morning that felt, even now, like the closest thing to safety she had ever known.

  The forest dissolved.

  There was a half-second of pure darkness, of existing in the space between places, where she was neither here nor there and the wind had no direction — and then the world reassembled itself around her.

  She came back to herself in the single-occupancy bathroom of a pub she had spent half her teenage years pretending she was old enough to be in. The lock was still broken in the same way — you had to lift the handles as you turned it. Her hands remembered before her mind did.

  She braced both palms on the edge of the sink and let her head hang for a long moment, breathing through her nose until her pulse found something resembling a rhythm.

  Then she made herself look up.

  The mirror was flecked at the corners, old silver bleeding through the glass, but it was honest enough.

  The woman looking back at her was thin — too thin, the kind of thin that accumulates over years rather than days. A slow erasure. Her dark hair fell past her shoulders in a state somewhere between disheveled and destroyed, tangled with what she hoped was only forest debris. Her skin was pale, not fashionably so, but with the waxy translucence of someone who had not seen enough sunlight or eaten enough warm food in longer than she cared to calculate.

  And her eyes.

  She had always had her mother’s eyes, or so she had been told time and again by Aristide. They were hazel — not the simple kind, not a settled brown or green, but something that shifted depending on the light, depending on her mood, depending, she sometimes thought, on what the world required of them. Right now, in the flickering yellow wash of the bathroom bulb, they looked more grey than anything else.

  But it was not the color that stopped her.

  It was what lived behind them. Something she hadn’t put there deliberately and could not seem to remove. Something coiled and watchful that hadn’t existed in the girl who carved names into trees and believed, with a teenager’s absolute and catastrophic confidence, that love was enough to keep people alive.

  She wondered if a stranger on the street would notice it. She suspected they might, and she suspected they would look away quickly, the way people looked away from things that reminded them the world was not as manageable as they preferred to believe.

  She turned on the tap and ran cold water over her bitten hand, watching the blood thin and spiral down the drain. Then, she cupped water to her face once, twice, and pressed her wet hands flat against her cheeks until the cold became grounding.

  She had no bag. No money. No phone. No plan beyond the immediate.

  What came next, she already knew, at least in its broadest shape. She had been thinking about it for months in the castle, in the forgotten hours, in the language she had built for herself out of careful observation and the particular patience born from having nowhere to go.

  Lucien was not going to stop.

  She had understood that long before she escaped. He did not think of her as a person who had left him. He thought of her as a thing that had been misplaced. And what Lucien Nox misplaced, he recovered.

  Always.

  Which meant she could not simply run. Running was a delay. Running was buying time while he closed the distance between them, unhurried, because he had never once believed she could outpace him for long.

  She needed something he wouldn’t anticipate.

  She needed people he hadn’t accounted for.

  She needed — and this was the part that sat uneasily in her chest, because she had learned the hard way what happened when she let herself need things — she needed help.

  Her reflection looked back at her, hazel eyes steady now, the haunted thing still present but no longer alone.

  She turned off the tap, shook the water from her hands, and got to work.

  The bathroom was small enough that she could brace one foot against the door while she stood at the sink. She combed her fingers through her hair until the worst of the tangles surrendered, then twisted it back from her face and held it there with a broken elastic she found wedged behind the tap. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do.

  She examined her hand. The bite had already begun to close — one of the few useful things the magic did without being asked. She pressed the hem of her sleeve against it anyway, blotting the last of the blood, and rolled her cuffs down to cover the bruising at her wrists.

  She looked at herself one final time.

  Passable, she decided.

  She exhaled slowly and she reached into the darkest recesses in her mind for some memory that could save her.

  She found it.

  A neon light flashing Nocturne.

  The way Lucien pushed past the bouncer with the practiced ease of a man who had never asked for what he wants.

  Music so loud it seemed to pulse through her veins.

  Eyes that burned so blue finding her through the dark.

  Then bodies dropping like hail in a storm.

  Low growls.

  Sharp teeth.

  Blood.

  She closed her eyes tight, and she drifted away.

  She opened her eyes outside Nocturne.

  Not the memory of it, but the place itself.

  The teleportation was rougher this time — she landed hard in the alley beside the building, one hand catching the brick wall, her knees threatening a repeat of the forest. She breathed through it. The magic must cost more when the anchor was something fractured. When the thing pulling her forward was grief dressed up as instinct.

  She straightened, smoothed what could be smoothed, and walked around to the front entrance.

  The bouncer was a mountain of a man with a shaved head and the particular blank expression of someone paid to ask no questions and answer fewer. He looked over her once — the ruined hair she had done her best with, the black dress, the eyes that she could not fix no matter how much cold water she threw on them — and stepped aside without a word.

  She wondered what she looked like to him. She suspected she looked like someone who belonged in a place that opened after midnight and didn’t check names.

  She supposed, in every way that currently mattered, she did.

  Inside, Nocturne was dim and deliberate. Low red lighting bled across the walls, turning everything the color of something half-remembered. The music was low enough to be felt rather than heard, a bass frequency that settled into the sternum and stayed there. The crowd was thin — it was later than some could withstand — and scattered in clusters around booths and high tables, talking in the lowered registers of people who were accustomed to keeping things to themselves.

  She moved to the bar.

  The bartender appeared after a moment — young, watchful, with silver rings on every finger and the impression of someone who had chosen this particular darkness carefully and found it comfortable. He set both hands on the bar and looked at her.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Whiskey,” she said. The word felt like gravel in her throat. “Neat.”

  He poured without asking her which kind and set it in front of her. She wrapped her hands around it and stared at the middle distance, listening to the music move through her chest.

  She didn’t touch her drink. Just swirled it in her glass for as long as it took the bartender to reappear.

  “That’s twelve,” he said.

  She set the glass down. “I don’t have any money.”

  He looked at her steadily. Not unkindly, but not with any particular inclination toward flexibility either.

  “I’ll take that,” he said finally, gesturing toward the ring on her left hand.

  He leaned in, examining the ring with more attention than most people gave to anything. His eyes traced the deep red stone, the white-gold band, the way the metal sat against her skin as though it had grown there.

  “It won’t come off,” she said. “It’s… bound.”

  His eyes moved from the ring to her face.

  “Bound,” he repeated.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  He straightened slowly, and something in his expression shifted — not alarm, not quite respect, but something adjacent to both. The recalibration of a man who worked in a place like Nocturne and had learned that the categories of things in the world were wider than most people knew.

  “You a witch?”

  She held his gaze. “Yes.”

  He was quiet for a moment, polishing a glass with the automatic quality of a man who thinks better with his hands occupied.

  “Know any conjuration?”

  “Some. In theory.”

  “Gemstones.” He said it like a suggestion, not a question. “There are buyers. Black market, but clean, if that means anything to you. They deal in unusual acquisitions. No provenance questions. I’ve brokered introductions before.”

  She looked at him. “For a cut.”

  “Twenty percent.” He said it without embarrassment. “Standard.”

  She turned her hands over and looked at her palms. The bite had almost fully closed now, just a dark crescent remaining, the skin knit together by something that had no business working that efficiently.

  She had never tried to conjure deliberately. She had only ever done it in extremity — objects pulling themselves out of nothing in moments of terror or fury, stone and metal coalescing from the raw panic of her magic looking for somewhere to go.

  But tonight, she had learned that she was capable of things she had never been taught.

  She focused inward. She thought of the earth — deep and cold and patient, the slow violence of crystal forming in absolute darkness over thousands of years, compressed grief taking permanent shape. She thought of the feeling in her sternum when she held the room’s fear inside her, all that dense and gathered sorrow.

  She let it go downward, through her hands.

  Something hot gathered in both palms. She turned them over and opened them.

  Four stones sat in the shallow cup of her hands, rough and irregular, catching the bar’s red light in uneven flashes. Two were milky and pale, nearly colorless, their facets barely suggested. One was a deep and clouded amber. The last was small and dark, almost black in this light, though she thought in daylight it might be green.

  They weren’t beautiful. They looked like something the earth had not quite finished with. But they were real — she could feel their weight and their temperature, which was slightly warmer than stone should be, still holding some residual heat from whatever process had produced them.

  She set them on the bar.

  The bartender looked at them for a long moment. He picked up the dark one, turned it toward the light, set it down. He did the same with the amber. His expression was professionally neutral in the way of someone doing arithmetic.

  “I’ll give you sixty for the four,” he said. Then, with the faint emphasis of a man being charitable and acknowledging it: “The dark one might be a tsavorite. Might. Hard to say in this light.”

  Sixty pounds. She would take sixty pounds and feel wealthy right now.

  “Fine,” she said.

  He counted the notes out and pushed them across the bar without ceremony. She folded them and tucked them into her jacket.

  “Give it a few days before you contact the buyers,” he said. “Things need to settle. If you want the introduction, come back.”

  She nodded. She would not tell him she didn’t know if she had a few days. He had been straight with her, and she would return the courtesy.

  She picked up her whiskey and held it for a moment, not drinking.

  The music shifted — something with more edge to it now, a frequency that scraped pleasantly against the inside of her skull. The crowd had thickened slightly while she sat. She could feel it at the edges of her awareness, the gathering weight of other people’s living emotions, the ambient current of it that her magic drank without asking her permission.

  She was so absorbed in managing it that she almost missed it.

  Almost.

  She registered them in two seconds before she heard the footsteps.

  Two presences cutting through the crowd with a directness and density that was categorically different from the people around them. Not the vague warmth of emotion. Something sharper. Something that moved like it knew exactly where it was going and had already decided what it would do when it arrived.

  She had barely set her glass down when she felt the claws on her back. They didn’t puncture her skin, but they were placed with just enough pressure to promise they could. They shoved her head down into the bar and brought their face so close to her ear that she could feel their breath.

  Then, a male voice, hot and sticky against her skin, growled: “I remember you.”