But my luck, it seemed, held out a little longer. Not a soul.

An empty hallway stood before me. This one, unlike the dark, poorly maintained paths I’d come from, looked like it belonged in this castle. Indigo blue tile floors. Black doors. Silver knobs. Hiaj art framed in gilded presentations on the walls. Eight doors lay ahead of me, four on each side, and then a stairwell that led up, cradled by swooping silver rails.

I hadn’t been here in so long. I didn’t know or remember what all these rooms contained. I tried the first two doors to find them locked. The third. The fourth. Fuck. Maybe they were all locked, and I wasted my precious freedom to come down here for—

The fifth door opened.

I froze. Stopped breathing. Stopped moving.

I stood in the open doorway, my hand still on the knob.

Oh, Goddess.

Vincent’s study.

It smelled like him. For a moment, it felt agonizingly like my father hadn’t died. Like he was in this room somewhere, a book cradled in his hands, a serious line between his brows.

The past barreled over me like splintered steel, just as sharp and just as painful.

It was a small room, smaller than Vincent’s other offices. A large wooden desk sat at its center, and two velvet armchairs in the corner near the fireplace. Bookcases lined the walls, boasting hundreds of black and burgundy and silver and blue spines of old but well-kept books. The desk was covered with clutter—open tomes, papers, notes, and what looked like a pile of broken glass at its center.

When I could make myself move again, I went to the desk.

It was far more cluttered than Vincent usually left things. Then again… at the end, he’d been…

Well. I avoided thinking about the way he’d been in those last few months.

My eyes fell to a wine glass sitting among the notes, dried red caked at its bottom. If I looked closely, I could see little smudges near its stem—fingerprints. I reached out to touch it, then pulled away just short, not wanting to mar those remnants of him.

Even losing Ilana hadn’t prepared me for this. The sheer degree of fucking obsession that grief forces upon you. It took everything I had to force my mind to think about something other than him—it had exhausted me so completely.

But now that I was here, surrounded by him, I never wanted to leave. I wanted to curl up in this chair. I wanted to cocoon myself in the coat left casually slung over one of the armchairs. I wanted to wrap this wine glass in silk and preserve his fingerprints forever.

I picked through the papers on the table. He’d been working hard. Inventories. Maps. Reports about the attack on the Moon Palace. I rifled through the stack of letters, and paused, my hand shaking, at a piece of parchment.

Debrief, the top read. Salinae.

It was written in very matter of fact, straightforward language. A simple accounting of resources and outcome.

The city of Salinae and its surrounding districts have been eliminated.

One sentence, and I was once again standing in the dead remnants of Salinae. The dust. The toxic mist. The fucking smell.

The way Raihn’s voice had wavered when he held that street sign. This is Salinae.

And now here on my father’s desk was this brief, one-page report, outlining so drily how he had destroyed my homeland. Murdered any family I’d had left.

Lied to me about it.

You weren’t going to tell me, I’d spat at him.

You are not like them, he’d snarled at me.

The parchment quivered in my hands. I put it down quickly, pushing it to the back of the pile.

As I did, I glimpsed a faint silver glint. I pushed aside an open tome. Buried beneath it was a tiny, crudely made dagger.

A lump rose in my throat.

I had made this not long after I’d come into Vincent’s care. It was the first time I’d felt comfortable enough to ask for a project to work on and safe enough to actually do it. I’d liked chipping away at stone—I didn’t even remember why, now. But I did remember making this little dagger, and the pit of nervousness in my stomach when I’d presented it to him. I had held my breath when he surveyed it, face stoic.

“Good,” he had said, after a long moment, and he’d tucked it into his pocket, and that had been that. The first of countless times I’d found myself reaching for Vincent’s approval and wondering desperately whether I’d gotten it.

And now here it was, lying with the death warrants of thousands.

Two versions of him that I couldn’t reconcile in life, and now was even further from understanding in his death.

Vincent the king, who would kill my whole family in the name of power, who would slaughter an entire race, who would lie to me for nearly twenty years about my blood to protect his crown.

And Vincent the father, who kept this little makeshift trinket I’d made him, right there with all his most precious possessions. Who had told me he loved me with his final breaths.

How convenient it would be, if I found a letter tucked away in one of his drawers. My little serpent, it would read. If you’re reading this, then I am gone. It would be unfair for me to leave you with no answers…

But Vincent was not the kind of man who wrote down his secrets. Maybe I’d told myself I was coming here for supplies, but really, I was coming here for answers.

A fucking dream.

Because instead, this was a room that made as little sense as he did. I found nothing here but discarded pieces of him, just as disparate in death as they were in life.

My eyes burned. My chest ached. A sob bubbled up inside of me with such violence that I had to press my hand over my mouth to stifle it.

I never used to cry. Now, it seemed like the more I tried to stop myself, the more viciously it clawed its way out of me.

I choked it down with an ugly sound that I was grateful no one could hear.

No fucking time for this, Oraya, I told myself. This isn’t what you’re here for.

My gaze fell to the center of the desk—the pile of broken glass. That was peculiar. It was mirrored, the shards neatly stacked on top of each other, as if someone had assembled them into a perfectly aligned pile. The metal reminded me of the full moon, silver bright and gleaming with hammered indents that shivered beneath the cold light. Elegant swirls adorned its smooth edge, driving to the center before being interrupted by the jagged edge. I squinted and could make out a faint cast in those carved lines—red-black. Blood…?

Why would he keep this broken trinket here? Right in the middle of his work?

I touched the edge of the top shard—

A gasp ripped through me.

The edge was razor sharp. It sliced open my fingertip, leaving a streak of red rolling to the edge—but I barely noticed either the cut or the pain.

Because the shards began to move.

In the span of a blink, the shards of glass spread out, locking into place with each other—forming a shallow, mirrored bowl, the drops of my blood rolling down to be cradled in its center.

And yet, as shocking as this was, what left me staggering was the sudden, overwhelming, disorienting sense of Vincent—Vincent as he’d been in this room, standing where I stood, blood spilling into the same bowl. A sudden, intense anxiety rose in my throat, all in broken pieces—fragmented thoughts of cities, generals, Sivrinaj, Salinae, hundreds of feathered wings staked throughout the city walls. Anger and possession and determination, but beneath it all, a powerful fear.

I yanked my hand away, gasping. I felt nauseous, dizzy.

“Vincent?”

I thought I’d imagined the voice at first.

“Vincent? Highness? I—how can—”

The voice was faint and distorted, as if coming from somewhere very, very far away, and through heavy winds.