My jaw was tight, my eyes burning. The truth of my father’s words sat heavy in my stomach, leaden with my embarrassment.

Of course, he was right.

I had seen Vincent leap from that very balcony and fly off into the night. I’d seen him fall farther and land on his feet without a scratch.

But Vincent was a vampire, and I was human. He was strong, and I was weak.

“I understand,” I said.

I’d always been bad at hiding my emotions. Vincent’s face softened. He dropped my arm and touched my face.

“You are too precious to be taken away by such a mundane danger, my little serpent,” he said gently. “I wish it were different.”

I nodded. Even young, I knew a wounded pride was better than a wounded body. Better to be ashamed and alive than overconfident and dead.

“Now get ready for bed,” he said, releasing me and rising, turning to his armchair just within the double doors. “You’re on chapter fifty-two of the histories, if I remember correctly. We’ll do two more tonight before you sleep.”

“Yes, Vincent,” I said, grateful that he was giving me an opportunity to impress him in my studies after my embarrassing little misstep. I rose and took a few steps into the library.

Then…

Something prickled at the back of my neck. A strange awareness of realities that didn’t line up.

The realization that this library wasn’t on this floor.

That I read the histories when I was fourteen, not ten.

That Vincent was…

My chest constricted. Breath withered in my lungs.

“We don’t have to look at it, little serpent,” Vincent’s voice said behind me.

So gentle.

So sad.

But the truth was the truth. I did have to look at it.

I turned around slowly. Vincent was in his armchair, a book on his lap, the firelight playing over the familiar planes of his face, a mournful smile at his lips.

I knew that face so well.

Now I grabbed onto the sight of every angle of it, desperately, as if to keep it from slipping away.

“You’re dead,” I said.

My voice now belonged to my adult self, not the version of myself from thirteen years in the past.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid so.”

My shoulders rose and fell faster. Emotion burned in my chest, swallowing everything in its path.

My grief for him.

My love for him.

My hatred of him.

My anger.

My confusion.

All of it wrenched through me at once, too many wildly conflicting thoughts, too many words that I couldn’t form on a tongue that was glued to the roof of my mouth, trapped against a jaw clenched so hard it shook.

He rose, his eyes never leaving mine.

“It’s alright, little serpent,” he whispered. “Ask me. Ask me what you want to know.”

I opened my mouth.

“Wake up, Oraya. Wake up.”

Fear. There was fear in that voice. I recognized the fear before I recognized the words.

The intense kind of fear, the kind that was the flip side of deep affection.

My head pounded. My entire body hurt.

I opened my eyes. Raihn leaned over me, framed against the starry sky. He let out a visible exhale of relief.

“Awful lot of concern for someone who threw me off the top of a building,” I said.

His exhale became a chuckle.

“I wouldn’t let you fall.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “But I knew you wouldn’t let you fall, either.”

“How long have I—”

“Just for a couple of minutes. You took a nasty hit though.”

I felt like it. I was dizzy enough that I actually took Raihn’s hand when he offered it to me, and pulled myself upright. I felt… strange, like my entire body was off balance. I glimpsed something out of the corner of my eye and turned, and he let out a grunt as he jerked to the side, dodging.

“Careful with those things.”

I craned my neck to look behind me—at them.

My wings.

I could only glimpse them, and though I felt their presence on my back, I struggled to isolate the muscles to move them around.

But even at a glimpse…

I stared at them in shock. In silence.

They were Vincent’s wings. Featherless, of course, as all Hiaj wings were. The skin was darker than night, so black light curled up and died within them. The talons were silvery white, like drops of moonlight. And…

And I had the accents of red. Marks of the Hiaj Heir.

Bright, bloody red, running down the wing in delicate streaks, collecting at the edges and along their outline.

I tried to move them and did so, jerkily, in a way that I’m sure looked ridiculous.

Wings.

My wings.

I turned in a circle as I tried to get a better look at them—watching the way the moonlight fell over them with narrowed eyes, like any angle might reveal a flaw that would betray my hallucination.

No. They were real.

I was making myself dizzy.

“Take it easy,” Raihn said quietly. “It’ll take a minute to adjust to them.”

He spoke so gently, with so much knowing calm. He too, I realized, would’ve been an adult the first time he conjured his own wings.

My wings.

My wings.

It seemed like a ridiculous joke. Like a fucking miracle. How many times had I dreamed of having them? How many times had I looked at the sky and wished I could reach out to those stars like the vampires did?

My cheeks hurt because I was smiling so hard. I laughed a little, a sound I didn’t mean to make.

And then suddenly—

Suddenly—

My chest tightened, bracing against a wave of something much more complicated, something that swallowed my joy in a single gulp.

I drew in another breath and instead of a laugh, this time a strangled sob came out, bubbling up before I could stop it. When I inhaled, it scraped through me like a serrated knife, ugly and gasping, red-hot with the overwhelming, searing intensity of my anger.

I was on the ground again.

I barely heard Raihn gasp my name. Barely felt his hands on my shoulders when he was immediately at my side, crouched next to me.

“What’s wrong, Oraya? What’s wrong?”

He spoke with such raw, vulnerable concern, voice low, comforting. That concern twisted a knife in my stomach.

I swallowed my next sob and only half-succeeded.

“How did you know?”

I wouldn’t lift my head, wouldn’t look at Raihn or allow him to look at me. The words were so disfigured I didn’t know how he even understood them.

“What?” he asked, softly.

“How did you know I could do that?”

“I just… knew. You’re half vampire, and a powerful one. You’re made for flying. And I’ve seen over and over again what you’re capable of. It was just…”

Obvious.

He didn’t need to finish. I understood him.

Raihn, someone who had known me for less than a year, had seen that potential in me. And it was him—my enemy, someone who had every reason to cage me—who opened the door for me to seize that power.

The truth I didn’t want to look at now stared me in the face, impossible to ignore, no matter how tightly I squeezed my eyes shut.

In the darkness, I saw Vincent the night of the Halfmoon ball, when we had danced together. He’d been so uncharacteristically sentimental that night. So affectionate.

I had asked him why he never took me flying.

And I remembered now, as clearly as if he was standing in front of me all over again, what he had said:

The last thing I wanted was for you to think you could and start throwing yourself off of balconies.

I choked out, “He knew.”

He knew. He always knew.

It wasn’t about protecting me. He didn’t want me to jump because he didn’t want me to find out I could catch myself.

That night, he had been so sentimental because he knew he was about to order the slaughter of Salinae. He knew he was about to kill any hope I had of finding any family I had left.