Lasania.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Death was everywhere.

It was all I could smell when I shadowstepped to different parts of the kingdom. All I could see. All I could hear amid the wailing of those who remained. No matter where I looked. No matter where I shadowstepped. Death had come in the moonlight, during the quietest, softest hours, and reigned with supremacy over Lasania’s capital. Neither wealth, power, nor age protected them.

And even though I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I knew. Gods, I knew whose screams I had heard first.

But I couldn’t believe it as I kept moving throughout Carsodonia and saw every one of their faces, each with waxy, stunned expressions. A bone-deep fury sparked.

Bodies hung from blown-out windows. They lay in their gardens in pairs, faces forever frozen in horror, and crowded the narrow streets of Croft’s Cross, having fallen one atop the other. They choked the Nye River and washed in with the tide, some getting snagged on the rocks while others got pulled back out to be forever lost in the Stroud Sea. Bodies dotted the beach’s white sand, their arms and legs twisted. They bunched in scattered heaps along the battlements, forms broken from the fall.

And all the while, shadows moved silently through the city like wraiths, seeking to hide. But I saw them. I saw all of them. And I felt others I hadn’t yet seen. I was not alone here.

My gaze lifted to the towers and turrets of the castle, and I knew. Gods, I already knew what I would find when I shadowstepped beyond walls that had done nothing—absolutely fucking nothing—to prevent the horror that had come this night. Still, what I saw in the courtyard brought me to my knees.

I saw them between the flashes of lightning—silver-and-gold strikes that tore through the night sky. Impaled to the walls of Wayfair just as the gods had been on the Rise outside the House of Haides, staked through the hands and chest with shadowstone. Their heads were tilted back, forced into unnatural poses that exposed their faces as if they wanted to be seen. Needed to be.

I didn’t want to look. A tremor started deep within me, and I made myself see them—see the faces of the servants and guards, maids and stewards I recognized. I saw the dark-haired, pale-skinned serving girl who’d baited me into a trap the day I returned from assisting Ezra at the Healers. I saw the cook Orlando, the mountain of a man reduced to nothing but lifeless flesh and bone.

I saw Lady Kala.

My mother’s most trusted Lady in Wait, who’d made that long walk with me through the corridors of the Shadow Temple upon my seventeenth birthday. Who was always with—

Long, blond strands danced in the wind, tangling with Lady Kala’s brown hair. My chest compressed. A citrine hairpin glittered in the sunlight. A pretty, once buttery-yellow gown now glistened with streaks of red, but I heard her voice as if her lips moved.

I would like that…

I would like that very much.

A spasm jerked me forward onto my hands. There would be no future meetings. No desperately needed conversations. No attempts to try to understand each other. To forgive. No moving forward. Allowing time to tell new stories. No—

I rocked forward, lowering my head and squeezing my eyes shut. It did nothing to stop the rush of raw emotion. My cheeks dampened. I sucked in a metallic-coated breath, opening my eyes. A teardrop fell from my cheek and splattered off my hand.

Red.

It was red.

Another fell. Then another. The blood tears were no longer coming from me but from above.

I lurched to my feet, mouth and throat dry. I stumbled over a prone guard’s legs—a Royal Guard. And there were more. They’d died quickly, their necks broken, as had those I’d seen in the city.

Eather throbbed and pressed against my flesh. I searched faces through the crimson-tinted rain, feeling pieces of me break away with each sight of mouths stretched wide in silent screams. Beige and brown faces. Pale and pink ones. Olive-toned and—

My throat constricted. My steps faltered, and I fell to my knees once more. My vision went black and then came back as I stared up at a jaw that was no longer stubborn. An awareness pressed upon me, but more pieces of me broke away when I saw none of the compassion and cleverness in her beautiful, once-warm brown eyes. I shook when I saw the pinstriped waistcoat, now black-and-red instead of black-and-white.

Beside my sister was her wife, her head turned slightly to Ezra as if Marisol had turned to see her love in the very last moments of her life.

They’d died side by side. Together. And I hadn’t been here this time for Marisol. I hadn’t been here for any of them.

Everyone at Wayfair was dead.

All of them.

And more than half the city now rotted in the rapidly forming red puddles. I couldn’t comprehend the senselessness. Never in my darkest nightmares could I have imagined this kind of horror. This kind of—

Movement from the castle caught my attention. Too-dark and thick shadows filled doorways and moved in the breezeways. They were no longer seeking to hide.

They were how so many had been killed so quickly. Because what I saw weren’t shadows. They were Cimmerian—senturion warriors that could pull from the darkest hours of night to cloak their actions. And they would’ve done just that, sweeping through the city like a plague of nightmares, leaving indiscriminate ruin and despair in their wake. Most had served Hanan but defected once Bele Ascended.

I knew exactly where they had gone.

The air around me charged, reacting to the energy sparking from my pores. A bolt of lightning struck the coast of Carsodonia. The night deepened, and my attention shifted to my kind, smart sister. At the Queen and Consort Lasania had needed. And then I thought about what Callum had said. How he’d wanted to visit with my mother one last time.

He’d known.

I’d told them all they had to do was call my name. Why didn’t Ezra do that?

Electricity rolled down my splayed fingers as I stared at the loss of hope. Of a future. Eather seeped from my fingertips. I couldn’t breathe, but that was okay. Grief gave way to fury.

The distant howls of the living faded, and awareness thudded in a hollow echo through me. The storm inside me spilled into the realm. Wisps of eather crackled around my arms.

“Kolis has come to a decision regarding the deal you offered. You now have his answer.”

Muscles locked all along my spine. My heart stopped. My mind clicked off. Wind heavy with salt and blood whipped through the courtyard, stirring the stained silk gowns and mauve banners. Thick, dark clouds rolled in, blotting out the moonlight. I forced my stare from the faces of the dead and looked over my shoulder at Kyn.

Our eyes locked across the field of dented armor, bent shields, and still-sheathed swords. He’d finally gotten what he’d wanted, even though this wasn’t the Shadowlands.

Vengeance had been unleashed.

And it would continue.

“He apologizes for not waiting until the eirini ended but he has grown rather impatient.” Kyn’s bronze helmet dulled underneath the clouds the starlight couldn’t penetrate. A long spear was embedded in the ground beside him, its blade a milky white. “What did you think would happen? That he would accept your deal? That you would somehow rule? Win? You cannot win against Death. He is inevitable.” Through the drenching blood rain, Kyn’s lips formed a cruel smirk as he chuckled. “Life is not.”

That laugh ended me.

I was no longer who I once was or was now. I was made of the anger and sorrow of my sister’s tortured expression and my mother’s forever-silenced voice. I was nothing but the fury and wasted hope of those small bodies left in gutters like trash and the souls lost at sea. I was nothing but a vessel of rage and the anguish of the great, unforgivable loss of all those who’d perished.