The city was in ruins.

  I stood in the middle of it — dust still settling, the distant sound of something structural giving up and collapsing — and looked around at what remained of Old York.

  Rubble. Smoke. A bell tower that had given up on being a bell tower.

  The relics.

  I moved through the wreckage methodically, checking every chamber I could access, every collapsed shelf and cracked storage vault in what remained of the labyrinth below. Bephelgor's entire operation had revolved around the devil god fragments. They were the spine of his revival plan — the thing that made the demon lord's resurrection possible at all — and if even one of them was loose somewhere in this city, it would become a problem. A very large, very future problem.

  I searched for a long time.

  Found nothing.

  "Where are they," I muttered, to no one, to the rubble, to the city that had just been most of a hivemind and was now just a city.

  Think.

  The fragments were a subplot in the novel — never front and center, always operating in the background, the thing that made the main threat possible. Most readers probably skimmed past the scenes about them. They were the kind of detail that felt tedious until suddenly it wasn't, until the demon was ravaging the continent and you were three hundred pages in going wait, when did this start?

  I knew when it started. I'd read it.

  And I knew what it meant for the version of this world I was currently living in.

  Adele's entire story revolves around revenge. Her arc, her growth, her connections — none of it completes without the full weight of what the demon threat brings. The war. The loss. The things that forge the heroine into the heroine.

  And me — I just wanted to live. Somewhere quiet. Eating what I wanted. Not being anyone's problem.

  Those two things were not compatible with an active demon revival plot.

  That's what had led me here. I'd spent months running every branch of the story through my head, every variable, every subplot, and it kept pointing back to one name. Bephelgor. His influence stretched across the entire first half of the novel like roots through soil — every disaster, every obstacle, every seemingly unrelated catastrophe traced back to something he'd set in motion. Getting rid of him wouldn't fix everything. But it would clear enough of the path that the story could breathe.

  For Adele.

  And honestly — for me.

  I didn't want to face him either, I thought. For the record.

  But I had. And it had worked. And now that it was done, I was standing in a demolished city with no robe and diminishing holy power and the quiet, creeping awareness that I had potentially overcorrected in several directions at once.

  When that time comes, I'll figure it out.

  I found the exit — the hole I'd dropped through, still intact, which felt like a small miracle given the state of everything else. I climbed out.

  The city above ground was worse.

  Not in the catastrophic, nothing-left sense — more in the way that's actually harder to look at. Buildings half-standing. Streets cracked open. People sitting in the rubble of their own front doors with the blank expression of people who haven't decided yet whether to cry.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  A lot of them were already crying.

  I stopped at the edge of the main square and looked at it.

  This is my fault.

  Not all of it. Not the years of Bephelgor's control, not the assassinations and disappearances and the slow rot of a city run by something that wasn't human. But the physical damage — the buildings, the streets, the general state of Old York right now — that was the fight. My fight. Me, going through it like I didn't have anything to protect here because technically I didn't.

  I should have been more careful.

  "Imagination," Cassian's voice said in my head. "That is the key to my power."

  I looked at my hands.

  Clenched them.

  ...Fine.

  I lifted both hands, felt for the holy power still sitting in me — diminished, but there — and said, "Gods, in your wisdom and will, grant your blessing to these people. Or something like that. Ha—"

  The light that came was significantly larger than I'd intended.

  It flooded the entire city in one sweep — warm and immediate — and I felt it pulling from somewhere deeper than I'd meant to reach. People stopped mid-motion. Wounds closed. The crying didn't stop all at once, but the quality of it changed — from despair into something closer to confusion, and then into something else entirely.

  "A miracle—!" A child's voice, somewhere below me.

  "The gods — the gods haven't abandoned us—!"

  "Their grace, after a thousand years—!"

  I was standing on a half-collapsed bell tower watching all of this unfold and I had absolutely nothing to say.

  "...This is not what I imagined," I said, to the air.

  The city kept celebrating.

  I was limping by the time I got back.

  The holy power was nearly gone. My clothes were destroyed. I had several opinions about this and none of them were polite.

  [Hecatia tells you that your divinity isn't high enough to sustain a city-wide miracle without consequence.]

  "I figured," I said.

  [Hecatia adds that even if anyone in the city saw you, it isn't a significant concern.]

  I slowed down.

  "...Why do you sound like that when you say that."

  [Hecatia says nothing further.]

  Why does she sound suspicious. What does she know. Why—

  You know what. Fine. I don't have the energy.

  The mansion was dark when I pushed the door open. Everyone asleep. I made my way to the kitchen on autopilot, lit a candle, and stood there for a moment in the quiet.

  The pie.

  Right. They'd baked a pie earlier. I could see the lid still on it from across the room.

  I reheated a slice in the oven, sat down at the table, and ate it with what I can only describe as the last of my functional humanity.

  "...It's delicious."

  And then, without warning or permission, I was crying.

  Not dramatically. Not in the way that has narrative weight. Just — sitting at the kitchen table at whatever terrible hour this was, eating shepherd's pie, crying.

  "I don't want to die yet," I said, to no one. My voice came out smaller than I expected.

  That's the truth of it, isn't it.

  I was tired. I was so tired. I'd been performing competence since the moment I woke up in this body — performing Josephine, performing calm, performing like I had it handled — and tonight had taken something out of me that I didn't have a name for yet.

  "It hurts," I said quietly. "What did I do to deserve all of this?"

  Nobody answered.

  I kept eating.

  [ Jane — ]

  The lady fell asleep at the table.

  I stood in the kitchen doorway with a birthday cake in my hands and didn't say a word.

  Today was her birthday. We'd planned a surprise. Peter was here — I hadn't wanted him to be, but he was here — and we had the cake and the decorations and I had been prepared to be gracious about it for exactly one evening.

  And then she'd come home like that.

  Tattered. Limping. Something in her eyes that I'd only seen once before, in the months before she changed — that look of someone who'd been holding something very heavy for a very long time.

  "I don't want to die yet," she'd said, into the pie.

  I set the cake down on the counter.

  After a while — after the crying had quieted and the pie was half-gone and her head had dropped to her arms on the table — I walked over and stood beside her.

  Her eyes were swollen even in sleep. I put my hand on her head without thinking about it.

  "Lady," I said softly. "Everything will be fine."

  She didn't stir.

  "I don't know what you're doing out there." I stroked her hair. "But I know it's because of your family. I know it's always been because of them." My hand stilled. "They don't deserve you. They never did. Not once."

  I picked her up. She was light — always lighter than she should be for how much she ate, which was a separate concern for a separate day.

  The prince was standing in the doorway.

  He looked at her. Then at me. Then made a small, careful gesture — the kind that meant let me.

  "Don't," I said. Flat. Cold. "I haven't forgiven you for what you did to her."

  He pressed his lips together.

  "So don't stand there looking like you've changed." I held her closer. "Scumbag."

  He didn't follow me.

  I carried her to her room, pulled the blanket up, and stayed there for a moment in the dark.

  "It's okay not to be fine, my lady," I said.

  She slept.