Mia's voice was a fractured thing in the dark, the syllables breaking apart and scattering into the night wind.

"Damien..." she choked out, her breath hitching. "I waited all night. And when you came back, you were wearing the different scent..."

The words died there. Her tears fell, hot and crystalline, hitting the back of his hand before sliding into the void below. In the silence of the churchyard, you could almost hear the sound of those tears shattering against the stone five stories down.

This wasn't Mia.

For two years, the Mia Damien Lancaster knew was a surface without a ripple. Great joy and Great sorrow were foreign countries to her. Even when her heart was a bruised, ink-black sea of pain, she masked it with the stillness of a bamboo forest—quiet, desireless, and unyielding. It was as if the world could collapse at her feet, and she would simply offer a polite smile and swallow the blood.

In a single heartbeat, the Sovereign's iron self-control snapped.

He felt his heart soften—a rare, dangerous glitch in his programming. It was as if his conscience had suddenly roared back to life. He hurriedly hauled her back over the railing, pulling her into the crushing sanctuary of his arms.

"I was wrong," he whispered against her ear, his voice dropping into a register of devastating, melodic softness. "I shouldn't have left you. Not tonight. Not on your birthday. I shouldn't have been with her, and I definitely shouldn't have lied to you. Mia... I'm sorry."

Mia pressed her hand over her mouth, her fingers wet with the flood she couldn't stop. She couldn't find the words.

She knew this man. Damien Lancaster never bowed. He never apologized. Yet here he was, offering her a rare, velvet-wrapped "sorry," intentionally luring her deeper into her obsession with him.

Buried against the expensive silk of his chest, Mia finally lost herself to the grief.

"I wasn't like this before," she sobbed, the sound muffled by his coat. "Before I met you, I was never like this."

Damien stroked her back, his movements practiced and soothing. "What are you like now, Mia?"

She didn't want to say it. She closed her eyes, exhausted by the twelve-hour war she had been waging with her own spirit. Finally, the resistance gave way to a raw, jagged honesty.

"I've finally learned how to be a bad person," she whispered. "I know that woman isn't 'evil.' I know she's a good person, deep down. But I still can't look at her with a clear heart. I can't force myself to accept her. I can't even pretend to like her. Knowing you were with her... I can't stop the suspicion from rotting everything. It's exhausting, Damien. Doubting someone is a full-time job. I've been wondering all day... when did Mia Clarke become this person? The suspicion, the jealousy, the resentment... the things I spent my whole life trying to run away from? I learned them all today. From you."

It was the truth of their world: affection in the Syndicate was never a salvation. Regardless of the ending, it was always a liquidation—a killing of others, and a wounding of oneself.

Two women who had loved the same beautiful monster could never be "sisters." They were women, after all, not saints.

"My philosophy teacher once told me there is only one kind of faith that can lead a person to salvation," Mia said, her voice steadying as she leaned into the Lancaster darkness. "He said it had to be a 'negative' faith—something that stands in opposition to everything certain. Something that allows us to become humble, where light and dark no longer matter. He told me that faith was 'God.'"

She looked up at him, her gray eyes reflecting the cold moonlight. "I believed him. Until today. Today I realized... it isn't God."

Damien watched her, his expression unreadable. "Then what is it?"

She tightened her hold on him, burying her face back into his heart. "It's 'Damien.'"

In the prehistoric ages of the soul, the Cambrian was desolate. The Cretaceous was complex.

Then came the Era of No Love—a vast, frozen wasteland where desire was extinct, and heaven and earth remained unchanged because nothing was worth burning for. Mia had lived in that era for twenty-five years. It was Damien who had reached into the ice and dragged her out.

And so, the only person who could redeem her from this jealousy and resentment wasn't a deity. 

"You are Troy," she whispered, her fingers fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. She undid one, then another, her tears wetting the skin of his chest. "A city under the protection of Ares. A fortress that refuses to fall."

She looked at him, her gaze predatory and helpless all at once. "And so, I need an informant. I need the Greek who hides inside the wooden horse. I need someone to tell me where your weaknesses are. Where you are most vulnerable to a siege. Where your scars are hidden. I need to know what you love and what you loathe. Only then can I launch a sneak attack. Only then can I occupy you, occupy every inch of your territory until you fall to me."

Her voice dropped to a possessive hiss. "I don't want other women understanding you. I don't want them knowing your habits. I won't let you be a city that anyone else knows how to navigate."

Damien remained frozen for five full minutes.

It took that long for the weight of her words to sink in—for him to realize exactly what his "quiet survivor" was demanding.

Then, he laughed.

"Mia Clarke," he murmured, his voice rich with a dark, genuine admiration. "Do you have to take such a long, philosophical detour just to act spoiled?"

He tilted her face up, his gray eyes glinting. "Did it ever occur to you that if I were a bit dumber, all this hard-earned honesty would have been wasted?"

"You understand. I know you do," she said, tilting her chin to press a kiss to his jaw. "Don't lie to me, Damien. I know you're more of an expert at this than I'll ever be. I never have to worry about you not following my logic."

Damien pinched her chin, his gaze turning playful.

"So, based on your 'informant' report, the takeaway is this: you want absolute exclusivity. You're forbidding anyone else from coming near me. Am I reading the map correctly?"

Mia's face instantly turned a deep, burning crimson. She managed two words: "...You are."

Damien leaned down slowly, coiling his arm around her waist until they were eye-to-eye. He hovered just an inch from her lips, his voice dropping into a wicked, gravelly rasp.

"I also understand that you're asking me to 'save' you. To delete all that negative data in your heart. And to do that, you don't just want a meeting of the minds... you want a meeting of the bodies. Am I still on the right track, Mia?"

Mia felt as if she were going to spontaneously combust.

She didn't look away. She simply shook her head—a silent, feverish confirmation. No, he wasn't wrong.

She had always known. In this world, there was only one person who truly understood her. And his name was Damien.