DO NOT ROMANTICIZE YEARNING! Yearning is brutal. It's the ache in your chest when you've forsaken everything holy and still find yourself on your knees. It's wanting someone so desperately that staying feels like blasphemy and leaving feels like dying. It's the violence of being seen by someone who doesn't know you've spent years making yourself invisible. Xandra thought she'd outrun God. She thought she'd killed the part of her that still wanted to be loved. But Yarah doesn't ask for devotion-she offers it, freely, the way light offers itself to broken things. And Xandra, apostate and coward, has to decide; Is love another religion she'll abandon? Or is it the first honest thing she's allowed herself to want?