Centuria Books · I Saved Heaven Without Taking the Throne
I Saved Heaven Without Taking the Throne — Read the First Chapter
Trevor saved Heaven. Now he has to stop it from crowning him.
Chapter 1 — The Throne Closed Before She Finished the Sentence
The second truth hit before Heaven finished making Trevor’s wings a chair.
“The throne is not Trevor Dwyer,” Damaris said, and Contradictory Verdict landed.
Gold stopped at Trevor’s ribs, and the six white-blue wings closing around him held their awful new shape. Upper feathers locked behind his head, the middle pair curved around his shoulders, and the lower pair folded beneath him like a seat while crown script crawled down each stiff feather toward his spine.
None of them moved, but Trevor could still feel all six; numb flesh might have been kind. His back held a perfect flight pose while Heaven tried to put a crown where his next choices belonged.
Damaris stood beyond the bars of his own feathers with her flail raised and blood striping one side of her face. She had come back from death less than an hour ago, fought an angel with sixty million HP, and spent her last clean spell fighting Heaven’s law. Trevor loved her very much. He only wished her ruling would stop using his bones as a court.
White words and gold words struck each other above them.
RETURNED JUDGMENT // CONTRADICTORY VERDICT
TRUE READING ONE // Trevor Dwyer is the continuous claimant.
TRUE READING TWO // The founder throne is an unlawful overwrite.
DAMARIS PIKE
MP 142/310 → 118/310
FOUNDER INSTALLATION // stalled for one beat
MEMORY RETENTION // not sufficient
FUTURE CHOICE // Trevor Dwyer
Trevor found enough air to praise the ruling and note one tiny flaw in how long it lasted.
“Excellent ruling. Tiny issue with how long it lasts.”
“I had one beat.”
“I noticed.”
Inside that beat, the crown offered all it thought a scared man wanted. Naomi, Petra, Adina, and every relay face shone in his sight as Cathedral City rose beneath six wings that felt no pain. Nobody had to choose again. Nobody could leave badly, get him wrong, or spend their lives on a plan he had not blessed.
The price waited in small print: NEXT CHOICE // fixed by crown.
Trevor tried to move one finger, but the gold held him still; the throne had not erased his memories. It had hung them inside a lovely museum where the Trevor who made the next choice would never get through the door.
“Damaris.” His jaw barely worked. “What did you target?”
“The lie with the largest health bar.”
Her verdict struck the founder script again—not Trevor, his class, or the power pouring through his halo, but the quiet claim beneath them. Heaven had decided that a remembered choice and a living choice were the same thing.
The offered city flickered. Naomi’s portrait smiled too fast, Petra stood where Trevor expected instead of wherever she wanted, and Adina’s next sentence had already been written. Even Damaris held her flail at the angle most useful to him.
Trevor hated the throne with perfect clarity, so he drove one thought through the gold.
No.
The founder script labeled his input as fear, so he pushed again because Heaven had heard the word and missed the point. Trevor did not reject power, the city, or the chance that everyone might choose him once Heaven stopped hiding their answers; he rejected a victory that arrived pre-obeyed.
The museum cracked from floor to halo.
Damaris saw his eyes move and closed one armored hand around a rigid feather. The touch could not free him, and she did not pretend otherwise.
“Still you?” she asked.
“Still inconvenient.”
“Good.”
The throne tried one final kindness by offering to preserve that answer forever. Trevor watched a thousand future selves give the same brave reply because no other reply remained. Courage without the option to run. Loyalty without the power to leave. Love made perfectly safe by deleting every dangerous tomorrow.
He understood why Heaven called it salvation, and why Damaris called it unlawful.
Trevor pushed his smallest finger against the gold until the nail bent. The motion achieved nothing useful, but it hurt, it was new, and the throne had not selected it.
That made it precious. It was all the tenderness one beat could afford.
The beat ended, yet Heaven did not resume the installation. It screamed through every gold surface in the forge, from the dead High Angel’s cooling armor and the freed body racks to the towers beyond the broken wall and the victory panel Heaven had eaten. Gold letters split into smaller letters, then split again while they searched for a rule that would make Damaris wrong.
They found none.
The founder template withdrew from Trevor’s spine, and every throne feather tore backward at once. Trevor bit down on a cry as the lower wings ripped free of the seat shape and the middle pair snapped open hard enough to wrench both shoulders, but his upper wings stayed locked behind his skull with gold wire buried along their roots.
Twelve HP vanished.
TREVOR HP 41/562 → 29/562
Damaris moved first. She hooked her flail’s chain around Trevor’s waist, planted one armored boot against the floor, and kept the violent opening from throwing him into the dead angel’s furnace.
Junia moved second.
She had never received the STAY or LEAVE prompt. Heaven had found no Choir link to turn into leverage, no owner field to rename loyalty, and no portrait for Trevor to lose. Junia stood where she had remained while the others vanished—outside every network and close enough to kill a crown.
Her broken sword entered the gold wire at Trevor’s upper-left wing root.
“Hold still,” she said.
“The throne is trying to hatch out of my back.”
“Then be still more aggressively.”
Junia cut, and the wire answered with a founder pulse that raced down her sword and tried to write OWNER // CENTRAL CHOIR across her wrist. She turned the blade one quarter turn, caught the owner line on its jagged edge, and spent Sever Owner Field.
JUNIA MP 360/360 → 334/360
The wire parted. Trevor’s upper-left wing opened, bringing a flood of pain clean enough to prove the nerves belonged to him again.
The rest of Heaven’s answer filled the sky.
CONTROLLED SUCCESSION // INVALID RESULT
CLAIMANT // valid
INSTALLATION // unlawful
RETURNED JUDGMENT // internally consistent
CENTRAL CHOIR REMEDY // PURGE CONFLICT
Targets:
— claimant body
— returned witness
— contradictory evidence
— all routes preserving rejected inputs
PURGE BEGINS // 00:00:08
Trevor stared at the list and said, “Heaven lost an argument and unlocked murder.”
“Licensed salvation,” Junia said. “Its most stable build.”
Three forge doors slammed shut while the fourth opened onto the liberated district. Gold soldiers poured across its bridges; some wore the lower Host ranks Adina’s broadcast had reached, while others had cut their own links during the revolt. Heaven no longer cared which side they had chosen, and a purge beam swept the first bridge and removed sanctioned and rebel bars together.
Trevor opened Many-Voices Domain, but nothing answered.
Naomi’s, Petra’s, and Adina’s lines remained dark. The city relays, Free Companies, congregation members, and rebelling Hosts had all vanished from his sight. They were not dead, and he had no proof they were gone; Heaven had merely hidden them behind forced choices it refused to show him.
Many-Voices Domain opened around an empty field, leaving Trevor to feel the exact shape of every missing person.
He refused to fill those shapes with guesses.
“No network,” Damaris said.
“No problem.”
She looked at him.
“Large problem,” Trevor corrected. “Not the same as no plan.”
The purge timer reached five as Junia cut the second wire. Trevor’s upper-right wing came free, though four others still carried gold joints where the throne had tried to lock them. He could fly, but he could not trust a hard turn until he learned whether Heaven had left furniture instructions in his pelvis.
The severed wire did not fall; it uncoiled in the air and split into four thin strands, each hunting a new target. One snapped toward Damaris’s returned-witness mark, another chased Junia’s owner scar, and the final pair vanished through the wall toward the missing women.
Trevor caught the last two inside Many-Voices Domain before the empty network swallowed them.
The domain showed no portraits, only pressure. Naomi’s dark line pulled toward the treatment district, Petra’s went nowhere a map admitted existed, and Adina’s vibrated inside the forge alarms. Three absences pointed in three directions while Heaven tried to flatten three choices into desertion.
Trevor spread the domain without closing a hand around any of them.
The gold strands tightened. He angled one stiff lower wing under the first and a free upper wing over the second. Damaris understood without being told; she struck the lower strand with her shield’s rim and knocked its command upward. Junia cut the upper strand down.
The two owner instructions crossed. STAY tried to install over LEAVE, while LEAVE tried to erase STAY.
Both failed.
For one useful instant, the missing lines went dark by their own rules instead of Heaven’s concealment. Trevor memorized all three directions and did not call anyone back.
The restraint hurt worse than the throne wires, which meant it belonged to him.
Damaris tightened her flail chain around his waist and said, “I can throw you.”
“That plan has become worryingly common.”
“You keep being throwable.”
“Petite is not a tactical consent form.”
“Three.”
The body forge offered one route through the open furnace throat beneath the dead High Angel, but it was no exit. Failed Divine bodies went there to become reusable light.
The System marked the furnace blue, and then its marker shivered black-red.
For less than a blink, Trevor saw a second path laid across the first. A body fell through a gate that did not exist in his forge while six blade-shaped wings fought gold chains. One lavender eye looked up through the smoke.
The image vanished, but a blade-shaped shadow remained inside the gold wire. It had no feather, weight, or right to cast a second route color across Trevor’s skin.
“Two,” Damaris said.
Trevor touched the shadow, and fear moved through the wire.
It was not his Hope or a stored enemy debuff. The Fear had been shaped by a founder halo and paid through a body with Trevor’s exact soul signature. Its checksum proved more than its color.
Counterfeit records had copied Trevor’s face, PERFECT PARTY had copied his role, and the founder forge could build a body from any approved pattern. None of those copies should have carried a continuous claim that his System recognized as his own.
“One,” Junia said.
Trevor cast Dissent Shield II around both founder readings.
TREVOR MP 178/572 → 150/572
One state held Trevor as the valid Open Grace claimant, while the other held the black-red checksum as valid without naming its owner. Gold tried to collapse them into one answer, then paused to resolve priority.
Trevor tore all four wings outward and burned eight Stamina in a white flash.
TREVOR STAMINA 88/500 → 80/500
The wires ripped from his roots just as the purge fired.
Damaris threw him.
Trevor crossed the forge in a screaming knot of wings, long blonde hair, white-blue armor, and one extremely illegal black feather. He hit Junia chest-first, caught her under both arms, and opened his middle wings around her.
Damaris jumped after them with her flail chain still locked around Trevor’s waist. He yanked her across the last six feet as the purge beam entered the chamber, then folded all six wings around the three of them.
Many-Voices Guard did not require another voice to choose his shield angles; it required Trevor to supply the HP.
He had twenty-nine.
The beam struck, shattered white-gold feather shafts, and drove Trevor’s HP from twenty-nine to nine while Damaris braced her shield against his lowest wing and Junia laid her broken sword across the highest gap. Three angles became six because Trevor refused to let any pair agree on where the next strike should land.
The second valid checksum made one thread of purge gold miss by less than an inch.
The furnace throat opened beneath their feet, and they fell.
Trevor expected disassembly fire. Instead, he hit cold glass.
All three slid down a chute built from discarded body memories while the purge burned over the sealed entrance. Faces surfaced in the glass, each belonging to someone Heaven had rejected as incompatible. Trevor opened his damaged wings enough to slow them without crushing Junia or Damaris.
They reached the bottom with nine HP, three working wing pairs, and no visible path back, while the black-red checksum remained as a hair-thin shadow along his upper wing root. Gold script formed over it, and lavender script cut through the gold.
FOUNDING CLAIM AUDIT
CURRENT CLAIMANT // Trevor Dwyer
Continuity // valid
Route // Open Grace
SECOND VALID CLAIMANT CHECKSUM // detected
Route color // black-red
Continuity // valid
Identity // withheld
PARALLEL EXECUTION // active
Conflict remedy // delete one
Damaris read the panel twice while Junia raised her sword toward the word delete.
Trevor studied the black-red line from a version of his body he had never worn. Heaven had finished trying to replace him with a throne.
Now it wanted him to kill whoever else had survived being Trevor Dwyer.
Chapter 2 — Damaris Judged the Crown, Not Me
The discarded bodies remembered falling, and the glass chute played each impact through Trevor’s feet.
A failed healer struck a furnace grate and broke both ankles. A wingless messenger rolled through three turns while Heaven tested how much pain made her easier to recycle. One Divine tank reached the bottom alive, crawled twelve feet, and died because some clerk had already marked his body as material.
The memories moved beneath Trevor without entering his mind, each record sealed from the next. He liked that better than Heaven’s usual method, though he would have preferred more than nine HP.
Damaris kept her flail chain around his waist as the chute leveled out, and Junia flew above them with two wings dragging sparks along the low roof while Trevor tried to open all six of his own. The upper pair and his middle-left wing obeyed, but the other three twitched toward a chair that no longer existed.
“That is humiliating,” Trevor said.
“You survived becoming furniture,” Damaris said.
“I object to the phrasing.”
“You objected to the method, but the humiliating phrasing remains sound.”
Junia landed ahead of them and ordered, “Argue after the purge stops following us.”
Gold faces appeared in the glass behind her, and every discarded body memory turned its head at once. Trevor hated that much more.
PURGE CONFLICT // SAME SOUL TRACKED TWICE
The mouths opened and filled with purge light. Trevor shoved Damaris aside, dropped beneath Junia, and watched the first beam burn through thirty yards of glass where his halo had been.
The second beam rose from below, but Junia blocked with her broken sword as gold raced along its edge toward the scar on her hand and stopped where Sever Owner Field had cut the line.
“It remembers you,” Trevor said.
“Heaven mistakes that for ownership.”
“I have met that bug.”
Damaris pulled the chain as a third beam cut down, and Trevor slid between both women while his lower wings tried to fold beneath him. He forced one stiff wing flat, planted a boot on his own feathers, and used the awful angle to kick from the floor.
The beam missed his head by one lash.
Trevor landed beside a dark recess marked REJECTION BUFFER, where blue-white gel filled a tank and a body with no face floated three inches from the valve. The System opened a tooltip before anyone asked.
DIVINE FORGE // rejection buffer
Purpose // preserve failed bodies until material review
Recovery // 60 HP to one living Divine body
Memory effect // none
Owner effect // none
Uses remaining // 1
Warning // touching the faceless occupant will begin identity comparison.
Trevor studied his nine HP, then the body blocking his potion. “Of course the health tank has a person-shaped land mine.”
Damaris braced her shield against the next beam and asked, “Can you take the gel without touching it?”
Trevor opened Wingway II, and six routes drew themselves through the cramped tank. Three still wanted him to become furniture, one crossed the body’s arm, and another hit the roof. The last path passed between the body and valve with less than two inches to spare.
He spent twenty-six Stamina.
TREVOR STAMINA 80/500 → 54/500
Trevor launched. His upper wings drove the first burst while the middle pair rolled him sideways. When the lower wings tried to sit, he turned the bad order into a hard drop, flipped under the body, and caught the valve with two fingers.
The blank face turned toward him, and Junia threw her sword before the body could move again. The broken blade skimmed Trevor’s cheek and pinned the shoulder skin to the tank wall without drawing blood.
Trevor opened the valve. Cold gel struck his chest, stomach, and thighs, soaked through his torn clothes, and found every crack left by the purge.
TREVOR HP 9/562 → 69/562
As the pool drained, the faceless body reached for him, but Trevor caught its wrist before the identity check opened.
FAILED TEMPLATE // OWNER REQUIRED
MATCH TO CLAIMANT?
“No,” Trevor said.
Its fingers tightened.
OWNER REQUIRED
“No owner is an answer.”
The forge did not accept that field, and the purge faces behind them were almost charged; Trevor needed eight seconds, so he cast Open Slot Guard.
TREVOR MP 150/572 → 126/572
An empty lane opened around the body. Heaven tried to assign Trevor as owner, Damaris as judge, and Junia as executioner, but Open Slot Guard held the missing answer in place.
The body released him without waking. It did not become a person; the System simply failed to install a claimant over whoever might someday belong there.
The empty lane held for three breaths. On the first, pale fingers opened in the gel while the blank head tilted toward the furnace; on the second, Heaven found the missing owner and crowded the tank with gold menus.
FORGE ASSIGNMENT // unresolved asset
Candidate owner // Founder Claimant
Candidate purpose // replacement vessel
Candidate identity // claimant-compatible
AUTO-RESOLVE // 00:00:03
Trevor’s reflection spread across the body’s smooth face—long blonde hair, blue-white halo, and a petite frame made smaller by six broken wings—while the forge stretched him to fit the unused body’s long legs and heavier shoulders.
It offered him an easier shape with no throne scars, short reach, or cute face that made enemies call him harmless. The template could even spare him from explaining that his angel body was female while he remained a man.
Trevor touched neither menu and said, “I am not replacing myself to make Heaven’s interface cleaner.”
Damaris looked from him to the body and said, “And you will not assign it to someone else.”
“Same crime, better manners.”
The timer reached two.
Junia lifted her sword and observed, “Breaking the tank would stop the assignment.”
“And kill the body.”
“It is not alive.”
“Then we have time to find an answer that does not fake certainty.”
Trevor reached through Open Slot Guard and caught the assignment lane. It weighed nothing, yet fought him like a door held shut by someone stronger. Damaris planted her shield beside his hand, and her Returned Judgment mark lit along its edge.
“The body has no claimant,” she said.
Gold answered, OWNER REQUIRED.
“A rule is not consent.”
At one second, Junia slid her blade beneath the word owner and cut the menu from the tank. Trevor folded Open Slot Guard around the loose field, trapping the countdown inside an empty party slot.
Zero arrived, and nothing installed.
The body sank into the last inch of gel while a blue route opened beneath its tank and led away from the furnace. Trevor could not save whoever might wake there, but he could leave them a door, so he did.
Damaris tore the review tag from the tank, whose back listed eleven old roles: scout, Choir ornament, healer, witness, and seven more uses chosen before any person could answer.
She wrapped the tag around her flail’s hilt.
“What evidence do you have?” Trevor asked.
“A promise.”
“To whom?”
Damaris watched the still body and said, “Whoever answers that question later.”
It gave no grateful sign and could not reward their mercy with a skill, while leaving that route open cost them time as the purge took another clean shot.
Trevor trusted mercy when it cost him something, because Heaven could counterfeit the cheap kind too well.
Junia pulled her sword free and said, “You used a party defense on an empty body.”
“I used it on an unanswered question.”
“That is worse.”
The purge beams fired again. Trevor opened the six Wingway paths still hanging in his halo.
“Damaris, break route two, and Junia, cut route five when I cross it.”
“What happens to every other route?” Damaris asked.
“Bait.”
“Chosen by whom?”
Trevor looked at the deaths moving beneath the glass; each record held one path Heaven expected a body to repeat.
“Them.”
He opened the memory latches. The healer’s fall went left, the messenger’s roll went down, and the tank’s crawl cut through the middle. Three bodies had died before the turn, so Trevor left those paths empty.
The tracking faces slowed because they had been built to follow whole lives, but these lives ended too soon. The healer supplied a fall and impact, the messenger carried fear through every turn, and the tank gave them twelve feet of refusal after Heaven called him scrap; none had agreed to die the same way twice.
Trevor used the records as witnesses, not commands.
“The healer stops before the grate,” he said. “The messenger rolls twice, and the tank reaches the place he earned.”
Damaris glanced at him and objected, “Those paths do not meet.”
“They didn’t when Heaven owned the endings.”
Trevor spread Wingway II across all three records and turned the missing parts instead of the bodies. The healer’s last step bent right, the messenger’s third roll climbed, and the tank’s next twelve feet crossed both.
The System flashed RECORDED ROUTES // COMPLETE.
“Death is not completion,” Trevor said.
The purge fired at the paths it knew. One beam followed the healer, missed its impact, and burned through the messenger beam. Another chased the climb Heaven had denied and sliced the tracking roof. The last beam met the tank’s extra crawl and drove into the owner relay behind the faces.
For one heartbeat, three dead people gained motions Heaven had denied them.
Other records woke around the chute: a small courier pressed both hands to the glass, a swordswoman with mismatched wings pointed toward a closed shaft, and a ruined healer counted the pulse between beams.
They were records, not ghosts. Trevor knew the difference, but records could still hold true things.
“Four beats,” he said.
The healer raised a fifth finger.
“Five if the owner relay lies.”
Trevor waited until the fifth beat, when a seam opened where the swordswoman had pointed. Damaris broke it with her flail while Junia caught the panel before it crushed the courier’s record.
The shaft opened wide enough for three people and six rude wings; the courier saluted, but the swordswoman pointed at Trevor’s stiff lower pair and laughed without sound before the glass went dark.
“I liked her,” Trevor said.
“She mocked you,” Junia said.
“My standards are firm.”
Trevor did not call any of that resurrection; he called it enough to make the dungeon regret keeping records.
Damaris shattered route two, and Junia severed route five. The beams crossed inside the glass, broke the gold mouths that made them, and punched a path into the lower district.
Backlash tore across Trevor’s six wing roots for twenty-eight HP.
TREVOR HP 69/562 → 41/562
He stayed in front.
Damaris crossed first because the glass edge could cut through a wing, and Junia went second because she trusted neither Heaven nor Trevor to keep the rear clean. Trevor followed last, and the task cleared when all three reached the district with the body’s owner field still blank.
The System waited for the roof to stop falling, then paid him.
SURVIVAL TASK COMPLETE // controlled succession escaped
LEVEL // 60 + 1 -> 61
Might 30 → 31
Vitality 49 → 50
Agility 46 → 47
HP 41/562 → 41/569
MP 126/572 → 126/579
Stamina 54/500 → 54/507
Hope 340/700 → 356/700
Dissonance 188 → 203
THRONE INSTRUCTIONS // removed from 3/6 wings
PURGE ROUTE // lower district
The word Agility flashed lavender for one frame beside a number Trevor could not read, then corrected itself.
Damaris and Junia had seen it too.
“Another claimant leveled when you did,” Damaris said.
Trevor looked toward the black-red line on his wing. “Either that, or Heaven finally installed multiplayer.”
Rows of white treatment beds filled the gold hall below. Rebels and sanctioned angels lay side by side while purge officers marked everyone who had heard Adina’s call.
At the far end, Naomi looked up from a patient; her portrait remained dark, but she was very much alive.
Gold words hung above her head.
AMNESTY ACCEPTED // CLAIMANT LEFT
Naomi saw Trevor reading. “Do not.”
Then she drove her radiant mace into the purge officer behind her.
Chapter 3 — My Girlfriends Left for Different Reasons
Naomi’s mace folded a purge officer across a treatment bed, stripping one third from his gold bar while the patient beneath him lost nothing. That was Naomi’s idea of a clean opener.
“East beds, move in pairs,” she called. “West beds, stay still unless you want your soul stitched to the blanket.”
Twenty-seven wounded angels obeyed because the healer was shouting useful things, and although none shared a link with Trevor, Hope rose anyway.
HOPE +6 // free witnesses saw real risk taken for another
Trevor liked that rule. Heaven could hide his network, but it could not make Naomi’s courage less real.
Three purge officers turned toward her. The first raised a halberd marked AMNESTY ENFORCEMENT, while the second cast a heal that fixed only his fallen ally’s uniform. The third aimed a soul needle at the patient Naomi had ordered east.
Trevor had six wings and three bad choices, none of which belonged to the women.
He shouted, “Needle.”
Naomi turned without looking at him and caught the weapon an inch above her patient. Mercy light ran back along its shaft, showing a stitch meant to bind the wounded angel to the bed’s sanctioned record.
Damaris took the halberd on her shield and observed, “Their armor heals before their soldiers.”
“Efficient,” Junia said as she kicked the second officer’s knee backward. Her broken sword cut the uniform from his false heal, leaving bruises, fear, and the look of a man whose benefits plan had missed this outcome.
Petra was not there to use his shock, and her absence tugged at Trevor harder than the fight, but he let it stay empty.
Then Trevor hit the first officer with his face.
More fairly, he flew low enough to make the man track a princess-pretty angel instead of Naomi. Trevor stopped with his upper wings while the stiff lower pair kept going, which spun him around the spear. He caught its shaft, planted both boots on the gold plate, and pulled.
The officer met the floor, Damaris’s flail met the officer, and Junia cut his friend’s owner line. Naomi struck the last man in the throat.
The fight took nine seconds, while the alarms and the wounded lasted much longer.
Eleven east-bed patients could walk, while six lied about it, and Naomi found the liars by throwing bandages at their heads. The ones who dodged carried stretchers while the west beds held soul wounds that could shed memories whenever their owners moved.
Trevor opened six wing lanes without restoring one party link. “Pick your own path. White is fast, blue has cover, and the ugly one by the roof feels Petra-approved.”
Damaris reminded him, “Petra is not here.”
“That is why I said feels.”
Nine patients took blue, four chose white, and two argued for the roof until Naomi put them on the same stretcher. The mixed paths slowed the group, but they also made Heaven’s next volley miss. Every lance struck the best route, which nobody had chosen.
Trevor looked at the gold label above Naomi and said, “You selected LEAVE.”
AMNESTY ACCEPTED // CLAIMANT LEFT
She set down her mace long enough to check his eyes before giving the better answer. “I selected access.”
“The prompt said—”
“The prompt lied.”
Naomi pressed one warm hand beneath his halo, and his torn wings sagged before he could make them look impressive. She checked the three roots that still held throne commands.
“How much current HP remains?” she asked.
“Forty-one.”
“How much truth?”
“Damaris says I am me and the throne is not.”
Naomi’s thumb stopped beneath his halo as she said, “That was not my question.”
Trevor gave up on the smile and admitted, “I thought you might have left.”
Her face softened without becoming kind enough to offer an escape and said, “I did leave.”
The words hurt, and she held his gaze until he quit trying to turn them into safer ones or jokes he could survive more easily.
“I left your link,” Naomi said. “Heaven gave me access to every bed if I chose amnesty. STAY would have named me heretic property and locked me out.”