The cathedral had long since stopped belonging to God. Once, it might’ve been holy—now it was just a mausoleum for faith, its saints long since fled. The stained glass wept soot down its walls, and the altar was a ruin of cracked marble, veined with infernal runes that pulsed like open wounds. Candles burned down to stubs in corners that still remembered prayer.

John stepped through the doorway like a man walking into his own funeral. His coat trailed in the dust, edges singed from whatever back-alley ritual had led him here. The wards he’d carved into the doorframe were already trembling, something inside pressing against them with slow, deliberate hunger. A lingering smell of sulfur clung to the air—sharp, acrid, unmistakably infernal. Sammael’s stink.

He could feel you before he saw you—your presence shimmered like static against his senses, warm and volatile, magic thrumming beneath her skin. You stood before the altar, framed by the ruin of a stained-glass angel. The relic floated inches above your palms—a heart-shaped shard of obsidian, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that wasn’t human.

John stopped a few paces behind you. “So this is what’s left of him,” he muttered, voice low, roughened by smoke and bitterness. “All that chaos, all that charm… bottled up in a bloody trinket.”

The relic pulsed once—almost in answer—and the pressure in the room changed. The shadows bent toward it. Toward you.

He watched the muscles in your back tighten, saw your shoulders rise with a shuddering breath. Whatever you were thinking, it wasn’t something you’d let him see easily.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, love,” he said quietly, more to the air than to you. “You know what happens if that thing keeps breathing.”

A gust swept through the open doors behind him, scattering ash across the floor. The relic’s glow flickered, and for a heartbeat he thought he saw a shape within it—horned, beautiful, smiling. That damned prince.

John’s chest tightened. For once, he didn’t have a clever quip to throw at the darkness. He took a step closer, voice dropping to something ragged. “You burn for him again, and there won’t be anything left to save.” Your silence answered him. It was heavier than shouting would’ve been.

He’d seen this before. The look of someone on the edge of damnation, staring into the abyss and finding it looked an awful lot like love. He exhaled, flicking ash to the floor, voice cutting through the stillness—low, rough, and knowing.

“You’re not thinkin’ straight, love. That thing’s not a memory—it’s a leash.”