I said, “Yes. I got lucky.”

“I never wanted you to see times like these. I knew they would come, but I never wanted you to see them.”

“It’s the Rishan?” I asked, quietly. “You’re sure?”

For some reason, I heard Raihn’s voice from earlier today, speaking with such certainty: The Rishan didn’t do this.

“Yes.”

“Have they attacked elsewhere?”

His throat bobbed. “Yes. But in some ways, it is a blessing. It has been too long since I’ve had an opening to wipe them out once and for all. This time, I will not waste it.”

He turned fully to me, the light falling over his face. It illuminated a constellation of red-black spatters over his shirt and throat—vampire blood. Darkness smeared his wrists, too, just at the boundary of his sleeve cuffs, and lingered under his fingernails. He’d probably hastily wiped his hands and face before coming here, but if he was trying to hide from me what he’d been doing these last two days, he failed miserably.

Fear, sudden and powerful, clenched in my chest.

I had lost Ilana. I didn’t know if I could survive losing Vincent, too.

If the Rishan were indeed advancing, he would be their primary target. Every Rishan rebel in the House of Night understood that winning their war meant killing either a million Hiaj vampires… or only one: Vincent. He had no children—he knew intimately just how dangerous powerful offspring were. This meant the Hiaj clan had no Heir without him. No one to inherit the Hiaj Nightborn clan’s power. No one to wield it.

When war broke out between the clans, killing the Heir and every person who could possibly inherit their power became the ultimate goal.

This, after all, was exactly what Vincent had done two hundred years ago. He had used his gift from Nyaxia—his prize for winning the Kejari—to enhance his own power and strip the Rishan Heir line of theirs. And then Vincent had used that immense strength to kill every Rishan that had any connection to their line, and kill every Hiaj that came before him in his own. Every Nightborn King, after all, was crowned on a throne of corpses.

I watched Vincent’s gaze go distant, as if he, too, was thinking about that day, and an awful thought twisted in my stomach.

The Rishan had rebelled before, but never like this. This was fighting to win.

“Do you think they have an Heir again?” I asked.

Vincent had killed the entire Heir line two centuries ago. But Nyaxia, cold-hearted bitch that she was, refused to let either clan die out. She liked her children squabbling. She would gift an Heir Mark to another Rishan, one day. The last time that had happened, it had taken more than three hundred years. Still, two hundred didn’t seem impossible.

If the Rishan had an Heir line again, they were much more dangerous than if they didn’t. They’d been known to have small rebellions in the past—like the one that brought me to Vincent—but those were headless skirmishes, driven by nothing but anger and revenge. They couldn’t have ruled even if they had won.

But if there was a Rishan Heir again? Everything changed.

A muscle feathered in Vincent’s jaw in a way that told me he had been thinking a lot about that very question.

“It is possible. If there is one, we will find out.”

Fuck.

“If it is the case,” he went on, “I’ll need you, once we are bonded. We will have the freedom and the power to invade their territories. Liberate them.” He gave me a sad smile. “I know how long you’ve wanted that. My only regret is that it has to be under such circumstances.”

The thought dizzied me. A lifetime of fear and caution, and finally, the opportunity to leave my mark on the world, not with broken fingernails but with teeth that could bite just as deep as theirs.

My parents were dead. Whatever other family I may have probably was, too. I knew that. And maybe… maybe a part of me hoped they were, because by the time I made it to them, I would be less like them than ever. But at least by then, I would be able to do more than pick off individual vampires in the night.

I could be something. Do something.

I swallowed the unexpected wave of emotion and gave Vincent a weak smirk.

“If I win.”

He didn’t return the smile. “You will win, Oraya.”

Sometimes I didn’t know what I had done to earn that kind of faith. I wished I was as certain as he was.

The Halfmoon trial was days away. The grim reminder of the present crashed down over my dreams of the future. As if Vincent realized this too, he reached into his pocket, withdrawing a small vial of silver liquid. “More poison, for your blades. I haven’t been able to get more medicine for you. Next time.”

I winced and tried not to show it. Giving the last of my medicine to Mische might have been a mistake. I’d have to fight with the burn. Then again, I’d fought with worse.

I watched Vincent as he looked to the sky, deep in thought.

He seemed to have softened a bit since our visit began, but I was still wary of bringing up my next request. I knew how cold Vincent’s wall of ice could be if he felt challenged. It always thawed for me—eventually—but I did not want to go into the Halfmoon trial on bad terms with him.

Still… I had to try.

“There is one other thing,” I said carefully. “There’s a girl. One of my allies for the Halfmoon. She was injured very badly in the attack, but the Ministaer rejected her withdrawal from the Kejari. She won’t survive the trial.”

His lips thinned. “Unfortunate. Just more blood that the Rishan will have on their hands.”

“Is there something you could do? To help her withdraw?”

His eyes flicked to me, his stare suddenly sharp. “Why?”

“She’s my ally, and she’s too weak to fight.”

“Then let her die in the ring. Abandon her when the trial begins.”

I fished through my memory of hundreds of hours spent studying the Kejari. “We don’t know what the trial is. It could be something that links our fates. If she dies, I die. That has happened before. The sixth Kejari. The fourteenth.”

Two. Two out of twenty. Still, he hesitated at this. I knew that even those odds were far too great for him.

After a moment of thought, he said, “Kill her tonight. Then she’s no longer your problem.”

I tried so hard to keep my expression neutral. Still, the shock struck me hard.

Why?

Not long ago, there would have been nothing shocking about that proposition. Actually, even more shocking now was that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to kill Mische.

And most shocking of all was that the very thought filled me with revulsion.

Vincent narrowed his eyes just enough to show that he had noticed my change in behavior.

“What’s the objection? The Kejari allows killing between the contestants this year. If she’s that injured, she is useless to you as an ally in the trial itself, and only a danger afterwards if she somehow managed to survive. It’s the clean, simple solution.”

I tried desperately to come up with an argument against this and failed. And now, Vincent was watching me closely. I couldn’t push back more. It would make him question so much about me.

Even now, the fact that I was having this struggle made me question so much about myself.

“No objection,” I said. “You’re right. But I still have one other problem.”

I was pushing. I was pushing hard. But I let the words come anyway.

“That leaves me with only one other ally. And you have him.”

“I do?” Vincent looked back to the sky, as if his mind was already beginning to drift. “Questioning is Jesmine’s task.”

I blinked, taken aback despite myself. Vincent had always been my only pillar of certainty, the only thing in my life that earned absolute trust. And yet… his ignorance felt… disingenuous.

“He was taken with the others today,” I said.

“We need to find who did this, Oraya. And our enemies among the Kejari contestants are obvious suspects. I’m sure he will be returned in one piece before the trial, just like all the others, once Jesmine is confident of his innocence.”