He gentles, power easing until it’s barely there. “I know it hurts. But I need contact with your body to set you to rights. As it stands, this will take multiple sessions. It won’t be pleasant, so hold your breath and think of something else. Can you manage that for me?”

I squeeze my eyes shut as I fight for composure. Then I nod curtly.

“Brave girl,” he says, so softly I almost don’t catch it.

His power unfurls again. It laps at the ragged edges of the deepest wound, building and building until my nerve endings sing, and then it plunges in, in, in, coaxing torn flesh to knit, stitching perforated organs and severed vessels. Heat suffuses my veins as the pain ebbs. I sigh as the burn of agony eases, and the warmth of his power turns strangely comforting.

His hands continue their explorations, touch sure and firm. Certain.

“You have the hands of an artist,” I murmur. “All that power in those clever fingers, and you use them to unmake instead of create.”

He hums. “Butchers and artists aren’t so different. We both understand the beauty in rearranging pieces.”

“But you’re an executioner with a healer’s power. Funny, that.”

“Life has a sense of humor. Trust me, I’ve ripped apart more bodies than I’ve put back together.” His fingers press against my ribs, checking something. “The internal bleeding’s stopped. Any more tonight, and your body will shut down. I haven’t used this power in a long time.”

“How long?”

The silence stretches between us. Then: “Since the war.”

Three simple words, and in the negative space between them, the truth he doesn’t voice—centuries of disuse. Of letting this magic wither until he had to excavate it from some dark, disused corner of himself, dredged up and dusted off for the likes of me.

Realizing he’s revealed too much, the Wolf blinks, and his jaw clenches. “You look like something I might have found broken and bleeding on a battlefield,” he continues with deliberate cruelty. “You would have fit right in with all the hopeless humans I tore into.”

My equilibrium is unraveling. Everything I’ve survived suddenly crashes over me, and it’s too much. All at once, I’m viscerally aware of my nakedness, his hands, my vulnerability, all this blood everywhere. Everything is too much and too close and too raw. The room is shrinking, black eating at the edges of my vision as my lungs constrict.

I need to not have blood on my skin. I need—

“I need to be clean,” I gasp. “I need—”

“Breathe.” His voice is crisp and commanding. “We’re going to breathe first, yeah? Nice and slow, in and out. Focus on me.”

I struggle to obey, to suck air past the pressure crushing my ribs. Gradually, the roaring static recedes to a low hum. The bands constricting my chest loosen.

“Good.” The Wolf pulls back to study my face. “I’m going to dress what’s still unhealed. Then we’ll get you in a bath.” He retrieves a box from a nearby table and draws out a length of soft fabric. “This will hold up in water,” he says as he winds it around my midsection. “I’ll remove it tomorrow when I heal the rest. Think you can manage if I help you to the tub?”

“Yes.”

He scoops me into his arms. I brace for the swell of revulsion, the animal panic. But it doesn’t come. There’s only the solid heat of him as he carries me into the bathing chamber.

Extravagant is my first impression—all cool marble and gilt fixtures. A large sunken tub dominates the space, able to accommodate his wings. Plush towels and an array of colored glass bottles line the counter.

He sets me down in a chair at the tub’s edge and spins a few taps. To my astonishment, a panel opens, and a small waterfall fills the basin. Not like the pipes back in Hellevig—a real, natural waterfall. The room quickly saturates with a lovely, citrusy scent. After a few minutes, he twists the knob to close the panel, and the flow cuts off.

I hold my breath as he helps me into the bath, and a moan catches behind my teeth as I sink in.

He moves away, collecting bottles and unfolding towels. And then, to my shock, he kneels beside the tub. Subservient, almost. He flicks a sponge into the water and reaches for me slowly enough that I could stop him if I wanted. I don’t.

“What are you doing?” I ask as he draws it across the knobs of my spine.

“You can barely sit upright. I’m helping.” His ministrations don’t falter, each swipe of the sponge hypnotic. “I’ve never met anyone who inspired this stupid impulse before. The verdict’s still out on whether I like it.”

I rest my temple against the cool lip of the tub. “Do you have a lot of impulses?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever been accused of being rational.”

Exhaustion is settling into my limbs, dragging me into the warm dark. I fight it, clinging to consciousness. There’s one thing I need to know.

“Tell me your name. Your real one,” I say, barely loud enough to be heard over the drip and plink of the water.

He goes still. Then, as if the admission is being dragged out of him: “Evander.”

“Evander,” I whisper, letting my eyes drift closed. I turn the shape of it over. Tasting the sounds. “Pretty name for a monster.”

Pretty name. For such an ugly thing.

“Monsters aren’t born.” He smooths the sponge over my neck. “We’re made. Some of us in pointless, brutal wars. Now go to sleep. I’ll dry you off and put you in bed.”

I’m weightless, drifting, surrendering to the dark. “You won’t hurt me, will you?”

“Not tonight.”

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14

BRYONY

I WAS FIVE the first time they killed me.

The Eternal has rules about these things. Alexios says our souls can’t take the trauma of dying when we’re babies, so Devaliant children prick their fingers, the same as every other Claimed human. Just a tiny drop of blood in the temple collection channels.

Until your fifth nameday.

No one prepares you for the altar. No one is allowed to hold your hand and whisper reassurances. And every moment before and after the knife isn’t some hazy, half-formed nightmare you shake off: you’re old enough to remember. When most children are figuring out how to tie their boots, I was finding out what it feels like to die.

“It’s okay,” Theo whispered to me that day. Two years of deaths had hardened her into someone who could lie convincingly. “It’ll be okay.”

The Head Oracle didn’t even look at her when she spoke to my father. “Take her outside. She’s distracting the child.”

I can still hear Theo shouting as Father dragged her away.

Three Oracles surrounded me. One grabbed my arms and lifted me onto the altar, another locked my legs down.

And one held the blade.

I screamed when I died that first time. The Oracle with the blade slapped her palm over my mouth until I stopped making noise. When I came back from the Void, I didn’t scream again—not until Idris sliced me open on the Duehavn.

That’s the thing with trauma: it doesn’t heal like skin. It doesn’t stay buried. It nests inside you, patient as a snare, waiting to wake up. And when you’re trapped between sleep and waking, between nightmares and reality, where the world is black ice—that’s when ugly memories come slithering out of the dark. I thought that five-year-old girl died for good when the Void swallowed her. That it spat out some unrecognizable creature wearing her face.

Then I dreamed about her, and the dream went like this:

Soft morning sun on my cheeks. The aroma of freshly baked bread and sausage. I’m a little girl again, stretching awake to breakfast in bed on temple day. Before the blood. Before the blades. Before the hand over my mouth—