He did not raise his voice. The king rarely shouted. But the edge of his words was just as cutting, just as lethal, as the edge of the blade he handed her.

Now she understood.

This was more than just a lesson. It was punishment. She had disobeyed her father’s tenets. She had allowed someone else into her heart. And now, he would force her to carve it out and lay it at his feet.

“This is a dangerous world.” His voice turned soft, tender. “This is what it takes to survive.”

Perhaps another teenage girl would have hated her father for this moment. And perhaps this one, in some ways, did. Perhaps she would carry a little fragment of that hatred for the rest of her life.

But she also loved him for it. Because he was right. He was forging her. If she had listened to him before, none of this would have happened.

She was not yet cold enough, not yet strong enough. But she could hone herself a little sharper now, even if it meant throwing herself upon the unforgiving steel of her father’s command.

She swallowed.

She lifted the dagger.

The boy wore a thin cotton shirt. It was easy to see the outline of his chest. She picked her target. Slightly to the left, just as her father said.

“You have to push hard to make it through the breastbone,” the king said. “Harder than you think.”

“Wait—” the boy choked.

The girl struck.

The king had been right. She’d had to push harder than she thought. She felt every layer of flesh, had to fight with the blade to get it through. The blood burst forth from the boy’s skin like it had been waiting for this moment.

Bile rose in her throat as her lover cried out. He lurched, but the king held his shoulders tight.

The young woman started to turn her head, but her father hissed, “No. Don’t look away, little serpent. You look them in the eye.”

She forced herself to obey. Forced herself to look the boy she had loved right in the eye until the last dregs of life seeped from them.

She held tight to that hilt long after his head lolled. At last, the king stepped back, allowing the body to flop to the floor. The boy was only recently Turned. His blood was redder than it was black. The crimson bloomed over the marble like rose petals bursting from a bud.

“Good,” the king said.

He strode away. He offered his daughter no comfort, no tenderness. Why would he? The world would offer her none, either. She should learn this.

So the young woman stood there, alone, for a long time.

Strange, that girls are so often told that the loss of their virginity marks a threshold between girlhood and womanhood, as if it fundamentally alters them in some way. It was not the sex that changed the girl forever. Not the blood that spilled between her thighs that shaped her.

The blood that spilled over that marble floor, though…

Those are the stains on one’s innocence that never fade.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I insisted on walking back to the apartment, even though I could barely move. We were far down the hall by the time Angelika, the fourth and final contestant, stumbled through the door to the Moon Palace. She must have turned back in an attempt to find Ivan. But she had come back alone. Her wordless scream had echoed in every crevice of the Moon Palace.

That sound was a mirror to something inside of me that I didn’t know how to acknowledge.

I clutched my abdomen. Blood bubbled beneath my fingers. But I didn’t feel it. I only felt the gritty ash of Salinae—or what remained of it.

I thought of thousands of humans burning in Asteris’s power.

I thought of their lungs withering in that toxic smoke.

I thought of a little boy and a little girl that I only distantly remembered—that I only allowed myself to dream might still live, somewhere—and their bodies lying deep, deep beneath the bones of a war they wanted no part of.

Raihn closed the door behind us. I stumbled, nearly falling to my knees, which seemed to jerk him back to the present. He slid his arms around me. I stiffened.

“We need to patch you up,” he said, before I could protest.

I didn’t have it in me to fight. He picked me up, brought me to my bedroom, and lay me down on the bed. Then he went to our packs and rummaged through them.

I stared at the ceiling. Blinked. Saw the ruins on the backs of my eyelids.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

“We have enough medicine for this,” Raihn said, sounding grateful to have both good news and distraction. He returned, sat beside me on the bed, and poured the potion over my abdomen. I didn’t flinch as my open wound hissed and bubbled, flesh melding to flesh.

I knew Raihn’s grief was everything mine was. Everything and more. I wanted to put my hand over that wound in his heart, even when my own threatened to tear me apart.

When he set aside the glass bottle, I let my hand fall over his. It now felt so familiar beneath mine, knobby joints and scars and the coarse suggestion of hair over the back of his hand.

At first he didn't move. Then he slowly flipped his palm up, closed his fingers around mine, and circled his thumb over my skin.

Just as intimate as his lips on my neck.

I wanted to tell him I was sorry. Sorry for what my father had done to both of our peoples.

This is war, Vincent whispered in my ear. Power demands ruthlessness. What did you expect me to do? Our hearts bleed black.

And the worst thing was, I understood it. I understood it, and still hated it.

“I almost sent Mische there,” Raihn said. “Two weeks later, and she might have been there.”

The thought sickened me even more.

I felt the bedspread shift, his other hand closing into a fist.

“Your father,” he hissed, “is a fucking monster.”

For a moment, I agreed. But just as quickly, a wave of ashamed denial rose up to combat it.

I had to be missing something. Vincent wouldn’t do it unless he had no choice. Not unless the Rishan had already done something worse, or were going to.

He wouldn’t do that to me. Not knowing what I was going to go do. Not knowing why I was in this damned tournament at all.

He wouldn’t.

“There must be a reason. He must have had no choice.”

I hated the way the words tasted. Hated myself for even saying them.

Raihn’s voice was cold and hard. “Five hundred thousand people. Half a million lives. I don’t give a fuck what reason he might have. What explanation could make that acceptable?”

None. There was none.

“We don’t know what happened.”

“I know enough,” he snapped. “I saw the ruins. I could smell the bones in that dust. That’s enough, Oraya. That is enough.”

My fingernails were biting into Raihn’s skin, my knuckles trembling. My jaw ached because I was clenching it so hard.

And when a voice in my head whispered, He’s right. Isn’t that enough?

It wasn’t Vincent’s voice.

It was mine.

The line between anger and sadness is so thin. I had learned that fear can become rage, but rage can so easily shatter into devastation. The fractures spiderwebbed across my heart.

“There has to be something I’m not seeing. He couldn’t have—He wouldn’t—”

“Why not?” Raihn spat, mouth curled into a sneer of hatred. “Rishan lives. Human lives. What the hell are those worth to him? Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

“Because I was going back for them.” I didn’t mean to say it aloud. But the words were too close to the surface, ready to spill forth. “Because he knew. When I became his Coriatae, I was going to go back, and he knew I—”

Raihn went still. His grip tightened around my hand, then released abruptly as he stood, rod-straight.