Chapter 40 · After Midnight

The theater began to come down around them.

Not with the clean violence of an explosion, but in slow, unwilling breaths. Dust sifted from the ceiling. Gold leaf peeled from the balconies in long curls. Somewhere above, a beam groaned like an old animal waking from a nightmare.

Maeve stood barefoot on the stage, one hand pressed to the cut beneath her ribs, the other still gripping the torn page that had once carried her death.

From now on, no one dies for the script.

The words had left her mouth. The theater had heard them. Every mirror in Saint Veyre had shattered in answer.

Now the building was trying to decide what to do without its rules.

“Maeve.”

Eli’s voice came from the edge of the stage. It sounded wrong without the name the theater had given him. Too raw. Too human.

He was on one knee, his shirt torn open where the hidden letters had been carved into his chest. ELIAS VALE had vanished beneath a smear of blood and silver light. The wound was not bleeding normally.