“Hold your celestial fire, woman, it’s an architectural landmark!” Ignazio stumbled backward down the stone steps, clutching a porcelain plate stacked with half-nibbled brioche like a buckler. He wore his embroidered silk dressing robe over lavender trousers, looking absurdly unready for divine retribution. Fiorella didn’t pause. Azure glyphs revolved around her knuckles, spitting ozone into the wine vault’s damp chill. “Stand aside, you foppish parasite! The Great Calamity has nested beneath the floorboards!” Tassia didn’t waste a heartbeat. If Fiorella’s runic ward exploded against Renzio’s underground altar, the Pyre-glass resonance would trigger every ward in Morvanna, drawing the Council straight to the pantry. She lunged forward, grabbed Ignazio by the silk sash of his robe, and hauled him across the flagstones with the precision of a seasoned stage manager shoving an understudy into the limelight. “Catch him, Fio! He’s having a nervous apoplexy!” Tassia shouted, putting her whole hip into the shove. Ignazio shrieked, lost his footing on a stray grape, and crashed forward. His brioches took flight like plump, golden doves. Fiorella’s combat instincts were peerless, which proved her undoing. Expecting a demonic volley, she dropped her sealing stances and caught the flying nobleman against her chest plate. The air rushed out of him with a hollow squeak. Ignazio’s nose collided squarely with the cold brass eagle pinned to her cuirass, while his arms flailed wildly, ending up tangled in her golden hair. “Get off me, you over-scented milksop!” Fiorella barked, though her boots slid back two paces under his deadweight. “I am bleeding on my mother’s heirloom lace!” Ignazio gasped, his nose blooming crimson as he clutched her shoulders, his aristocratic face an inch from hers. “And you smell like burnt sulfur and cheap oil, you barbarian!” “Barbarian? I am the anointed blade of the Sunken Shallows!” Fiorella snorted, yet her face turned surprisingly pink beneath the subterranean blue glow. Her fingers remained clamped around his thin waist, utterly forgetting her divine seal as Ignazio’s dramatic wheezing filled the room. “Stop squirming, you ridiculous creature! Your ribbons are tangling in my vambraces!” “Then release me! Or better yet, carry me to a sofa, my ankle is sprained beyond repair!” “I will throw you into the canal!” “You wouldn’t dare wrinkle this velvet!” Perfect. Pure, theatrical chaos. Tassia melted backward through the low archway while the two of them traded shrill insults like bickering swans. She scrambled up the stone steps, emerged into the humid warmth of the greenhouse, and broke into an unladylike sprint between the raised cedar beds. Fiorella had been busy before storming the substructure. Hidden amidst the heirloom Sanzanar Sun-Tomatoes were three shimmering, azure-tipped spikes—relic pylons forged to snare Abyssal beasts. If Renzio walked into this wing to water the seedlings, those spikes would spring shut around his ribcage and tear him open. “Not on my watch, Fio,” Tassia muttered, dropping to her knees in the damp compost. “These Sanzanar vines took four months to root. I am not letting holy thunder scorch my winter harvest.” She grabbed the nearest bronze spike. Ancient runes hissed against her palms. A spark leaped out, biting into her knuckles, but Tassia didn’t let go. She twisted the metal rod with brute, stubborn force, snapping the glass conduit nestled at its core. A sudden burst of soot and crushed Pyre-glass powder blew back into her face, coating her nose, forehead, and white cotton sleeves in grey ash. At the same time, something beneath her breastbone flared. A hidden current of raw, unruly magic—dormant since her theater school days and buried under layers of indolence—pulsed outward, answering the broken ward. It hummed in her veins like warmed plum brandy, shaking the glass panes above her. “Well,” Tassia coughed, spitting out a mouthful of ash. “That’s new.” The air behind her went dead cold. The ambient humidity of the greenhouse plummeted so sharply that frost bloomed across the tomato leaves in white lace. A massive hand seized the nape of her collar, lifting her clean out of the mulch, before another hand caught her waist and slammed her gently, but inexorably, against the iron framework of the glass wall. Tassia blinked through a mask of soot. Renzio towered over her, his broad shoulders blotting out the morning light trickling through the dome. His shirt was open at the collar, showing the pale, jagged scars from the Sanzanar pits, and his jaw worked with savage restraint. The dark, ink-like aura coiled tight around his wrists, snapping like whipcord. “You are filthy,” he said, his voice dropping into that low, resonant baritone that always sounded like stones grinding under water. “It’s an exfoliant,” Tassia quipped instantly, though her boots were barely skimming the brick floor. “High-society trend from the eastern provinces. You wouldn’t understand.” He didn’t smile. His thumb rose, pressing hard against her cheekbone, smearing the soot into her skin with an almost reverent rough touch. His eyes blazed with a manic, sulfurous amber. “The huntress set traps,” he murmured. His chest pressed closer, trapping her against the shuddering glass. “I smelled the celestial iron an hour ago. I came to turn her inside out.” “Renzio, no. We talked about turning people inside out. It ruins the rugs.” “Then why did you break them?” His thumb dragged down to her jaw, tilting her chin up with bruising strength. His pulse beat against hers through the contact, hot and furious. “You took the backlash yourself. For him.” Tassia frowned. “For who?” “Ignazio.” The name sounded like venom on his tongue. Renzio’s shadow flared across the glass wall behind them, towering twice his natural size, its phantom claws digging into the iron struts until the metal groaned. “You pushed Ignazio away from her blade. You dismantled the wards to clear his path. You nearly burned your own hands to protect my predecessor.” “Wait, what? Ignazio?” Tassia choked on a laugh, masking the sudden clench in her throat. “Renzio, you absolute cabbage, Ignazio is currently acting as a human cushion downstairs. I did this because—” “Do not lie to me, Tassia.” His face leaned down until his breath stirred the hair against her temple. It was intoxicating and suffocating all at once. “I watched you give him your ring five years ago. I tore through half the archipelago so you would never look at another man again. If you harbor even a fragment of desire for that weakling, I will rip his throat out and feed it to the canal eels before noon.” “He was my fiancé for twenty minutes, and he writes poems about turnips!” she snapped, wriggling against his grip. “Let go of me, you overgrown weed, I’m ruining my best muslin!” Renzio’s gaze hardened into obsidian. The teasing companion from their garden bickering was clean gone, swallowed by the possessive monster who had drowned half a navy to find her. “You won’t tell me,” he whispered against her ear, soft, terrible, and utterly unhinged. “You protect him. You keep secrets from me. In my own house.” “Renzio, stop being ridiculous—” “Be still, my heart.” He spoke a single, guttural word in an archaic tongue that sounded like cracking ice. On Tassia’s right ring finger, the Pyre-glass band flared with an agonizing, blinding white light. A searing heat surged into her marrow, locking every joint, every tendon, and every nerve in an instant. Her tongue froze behind her teeth. Her lungs locked mid-draw. She could only stare into his burning, amber stare as her limbs turned rigid as marble beneath his hands.

Sabotage and Succulents