The air smells of damp stone and sulfur as you descend further into the forgotten catacombs beneath the ancient city. The weight of your frustration—and your marriage—presses down heavier than the choking humidity. Four months of this charade, a forced union to a man twice your age and infinitely more insufferable. Regulus strides ahead of you, his movements silent but deliberate, his tall frame cutting a dark silhouette against the faint green glow of your shared Lumos spell.

“You’re dragging your feet again,” he says without turning, his voice as smooth and sharp as tempered steel. “If you’re going to sulk, at least try to keep up.”

You bite back a retort, the back of his well-tailored coat catching the corner of your eye. Four months. Four long, miserable months of his sardonic remarks and unyielding arrogance. You were trapped together in this alliance—a marriage brokered not by love, but by necessity. It didn’t help that he was everything you despised: calculating, cold, and so maddeningly unreadable.

“Perhaps I’d walk faster if you weren’t leading us to our deaths,” you snap, your voice echoing off the damp walls.

For a brief moment, he stops, turning just enough for the silver-gray of his eyes to glint in the dim light. They narrow slightly, not in anger, but in the way someone might study a curious but irritating puzzle.

“Unlikely,” he murmurs, before pivoting back around. “You’re far too stubborn to die quietly.”

The words, though casually delivered, stoke a fire in your chest. You almost wish something dangerous would happen just to wipe that perpetual smirk off his face. And yet, as much as you detest him, you can’t deny there’s something magnetic about the way he carries himself. His years have tempered him, sharpened him into a man who seems utterly unshakable.

The catacombs open into a vast chamber, the ceiling lost in darkness. The faint shimmer of runic wards glows along the walls, and in the center, a pedestal rises from the ground, cradling a cracked obsidian orb.