Chapter 67 Chapter Fourteen
The Chapel of Teeth
They summoned me.
How quaint.
I entered the underground as if going back in time. I walked through burial sites of long-gone kings and along hallways lined with bones. My coat swept the floor like spilled ink.
The iron gate screeched open, and the chapel bloomed into view: bone walls and red flame, the scent of copper and rot. The skulls of saints lined the arches.
The long obsidian table stretched ahead, cracked down the middle. Six sins ruled from their thrones, while the seventh throne starved for its king. No power in the world rivaled the ones seated here.
The Order.
I didn’t bow. I never had.
Not to them. Not to gods.
And certainly not to something I helped create.
Reuben looked up first. Blood glistened on his lips. A chunk of something human lay discarded near his fork.
“Well, well,” he rasped. “You do remember your way home.”
I said nothing. Home was a rotted word.
Reuben sat like a bloated carrion bird, all rings and blood-stained sleeves, still clutching power like it owed him something. He gestured to the empty chair at the cracked table—the one they'd never managed to fill after I left.
Not couldn’t.
Wouldn’t.
Because even they knew, some absences echo louder than presence.
“How long’s it been?” drawled a voice to my left. Benedict, maybe. Or Malachi. I didn’t turn to check. “Seven years? Ten?”
“Long enough,” I said.
Ezra was the next to move. A tilt of the head. Nothing more. But it was enough to silence the room. He always knew how to control the silence.
“You look smaller,” he said, Voice clean, clipped, exact — like a scalpel sliding under skin. “Mortality suits you, Lucian.”
Lucian, not vale.
I smiled. Not because he was right.
But because he thought he could still cut me.
“I chose it,” I replied, “Power without chains. You should try it.”
Reuben laughed — low and wet, like something gurgling through fat, “You mean exile. Or was it a tantrum? Walked out because we didn’t kiss your boots fast enough?”
I turned to him. Let my eyes drag across his throne of flesh. Ribs polished into armrests. Spines for the back. He’d made a chair out of every man who’d called him a pig.
“You’ve been eating well,” I said. “What is that? Seventeen? Eighteen ribs deep now?”
His grin widened. “Twenty-three. One was a priest.”
“I see,” I said.
He shrugged. “Well a part of him is still alive.”
“Disgusting.” That was Enoch. Hard-spoken as always, voice dipped in disdain, red eyes sharp as broken glass, “Not the corpse. You.”
Reuben smirked in response.
Then he looked at me like he wanted to unmake me, cell by cell, “Why are you back, Lucian?”
Ezra didn’t flinch. Instead, the boy—no, not a boy anymore, not with that gaze—rose from his throne and walked to the seventh chair. “Sit,” he said quietly, voice full of old magic. “You’re Lust. You’re the last. We’ve been waiting.”
I looked at the seat with disdain, then at Ezra. “No,” I said. “I’m fine right here.”
Enoch chuckled darkly. “Still defiant, even now. Typical.”
Ezra's smirk was cold. “He's always thought he was more than the rest of us.”
Ciel leaned forward, licking her lips like she could taste the tension. “You’ve been running so long, Lust. Doesn’t it exhaust you?”
The others didn’t look at me this time. Not out of fear, but because their fire was gone. Their energy flickered—dimmer, uncertain. Once, we had ruled like gods. Now, they sat like ghosts
“There’s a war coming, Lucian.” Ezra’s voice dropped lower, graver. “The kind we won’t survive at half power. We need to complete the circle. You need to be reinstated.”
A cold, sardonic smile touched my mouth. “Reinstated? You want me back at the table like I’m some missing pawn?”
“You’re not a pawn. You’re the Seventh. The anchor. Without you, we’re fractured.”
He wasn’t wrong. I could feel it in the air. The bond that used to snap like lightning through all seven of us was a dead wire now, buzzing weakly in the silence. They were a dying machine without their final cog.
“We need you,” Ezra said again. “To perform the ritual. To become what we were.”
“What we were,” I echoed, stepping forward now. Slowly. My boots rang against the black stone as I approached the table. “You mean gods of wrath and ruin. You mean power drunk tyrants. You mean the sins.”
“We are still the sins,” he said, meeting my eyes this time. “But without you, our powers are fading.”
I stopped beside the empty chair. My seat. Carved with the seal of lust. The Seventh Sin.
I ran my fingers along the edge of it, remembering the heat, the blood, the madness we once wielded like kings.
“You don’t want me back,” I murmured. “You want to use me to get your strength back. You want to wake the power that sleeps in our bones.”
“Call it what you want,” Ezra said. “We want you back because we can’t win this war without you.”
There was silence.
I pulled the chair back.
And sat. The throne burned under me. A pulse. A heartbeat. Mine, not mine. Old power crawling up my spine.
“My answers,” I said, voice flat, “are still unknown.”
For a moment, the room held its breath.
Their eyes flickered—surprise first, then calculation. They thought I was bending. They thought they had convinced me.
Ezra’s patience cracked. His mouth curled sharp to one side, a smile without warmth, “Full of yourself, aren’t you? You think we can’t drag you by force?”
I leaned back, the throne groaning under my weight. My smile was thin, merciless.
“I’d like to see you try.”
The Chapel shuddered. The air thickened. Our auras pressed like storms rolling over a battlefield. Walls split. Dust rained from the skulls above.
The others didn’t stir. Malachi twirled his blade, metal whispering. Ciel licked her lips, savoring the tension. Reuben only smirked, his fingers twitching like he already had me on a platter.
Ezra’s smile cut deeper. Devilish. Wicked. He leaned forward, voice low, each word a hammer.
“We don’t have to try with you. We can take her instead.”
His gaze glittered, cruel. “The girl… what’s her name again?”
“Salem,” Ciel breathed, like a lover sighing a secret.
Ezra’s head tilted, slow, deliberate. “Salem. Yes. A strange little thing. Lust stains her flesh. Envy in her blood. Wrath in her veins. Pride in her every bone. She wears us already.”
“Not gluttony,” Reuben muttered, rolling his eyes.
Ezra didn’t spare him a glance. His smile stayed fixed on me, sharp enough to split skin.
“She would make a perfect candidate. A new seventh. Better than you.”
Power ripped out of me like fire. The flames bowed. The bone walls cracked and the entire Chapel groaned like a creature in pain. Maybe even whispers or screams caught in the bone walls. Something more alive.
“Careful,” I growled.
Ezra didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He only smiled, cruel and calm, like this was what he’d wanted all along.
“Good,” he said. “That rage. That power. You’ve still got it.”
He stepped closer to the table. Shadows curled around his feet. His voice was a knife pressed slow against my throat.
“But you’re not the only one with fire anymore.”
Ezra’s smile widened. “Maybe she’s better than you. Maybe she’s the true seventh.”
I rose from the throne as my voice thundered, thick with power, “Touch her, Ezra. See if you survive.”
For the first time, his smile faltered—not gone, but thinner, tighter. He tilted his head, and the shadows curled higher around his feet, spilling like ink across the table.
"You'd defend her," Ezra said, voice deep and almost curious. "This Salem. She means something to you."
My hands tightened into fists. The power in the room pulsed like a living thing, the bone walls seeming to absorb the tension. "She's nothing to me," I said, voice flat. "But you'd do well not to touch her."
Reuben laughed—that wet, gurgling sound while Benedict leaned back in his throne, eyes gleaming with interest. Malachi twirled his blade faster.
Enoch spoke up this time, "Vale's got attachments again. How...quaint."