“You’re welcome.”

6

SÉVERIN

All night, Séverin turned the divine lyre in his hands, counting down the moments until dawn. He could hear the Fallen House members standing guard outside his chamber. Carmine and garnets studded the four walls. A Forged chandelier of red Murano glass rotated slowly overhead. There were no windows, but dozens of candles flickering in bronzed sconces conspired to make the red walls look shiny with blood.

In the center of the chamber stood a claw-footed golden bed with a scarlet canopy and matching silks. Every time Séverin looked at it, he remembered a different bed, one carved of ice and draped in frost and gossamer. He remembered Laila astride his lap, looking down at him the way a goddess beholds a supplicant.

On that night, he wondered if his touch was the inverse of alchemy. One touch, and she was no longer as golden and distant as paradise, but human and earthly and entirely within reach. When he touched her, he felt her heartbeat beneath the hot velvet of her skin. When he rose over her, he watched her eyes widen, her teeth catch on her bottom lip, turning it a red so vivid, he had to know what it tasted like. Even now, the flavor haunted him. Rose water and sugar, and the faintest trace of salt from where she’d bitten down on his lip, drawn blood, and apologized with a kiss a moment later.

Séverin knew she must have read the Mnemo bug he had left beside her on the ice by now. He’d had only moments to record it, barely enough time to give her the name of the meeting place in three days’ time. But before he had ended the Mnemo recording, he had said one last thing:

Don’t forget that I am your majnun. Always.

Even without sleeping, he dreamt of her face and the faces of Tristan, Enrique, Zofia, and Hypnos. By now, they would understand he’d manipulated them. They would be furious at his lies and all his cruelty until that moment … but they would forgive him, wouldn’t they? They would understand that all he had done, all the ugliness he had committed, it was all for them. Or had he gone too far? He knew he’d made terrible mistakes and broken their trust, but he hoped what they’d seen in the Mnemo bug was enough to earn back a sliver of their belief in him. And once they were together, he would begin to make full amends.

In his hands, the instrument of the divine weighed as much as a bird’s nest. For him alone, the ten strings on the lyre glowed like threads of sunlight, like a hope and a promise real enough to touch. With this instrument, the world would never be able to hurt him or his loved ones again. With this, Laila could live and perhaps even love. With this, Tristan could come back to life. Séverin could remake them all with a touch. He could pour sunlight down their veins and fashion them wings if they wished to fly. And he would. All he had to do was get to the temple beneath Poveglia, enter it, play the lyre.