Elias gives me a once-over. “You look like shit warmed over.”

“Fuck you very much,” I snap, shooting him a withering glare.

“Did you find anything?” Arcadia asks.

I pull out the charred book and hold it out to Zephyr. “Most of it’s torched.”

She takes it from me, fingers gentle as she flips open the cover and scans the blackened page. “Looks like a ledger. Full set of primaries. Previous asking price doubled.”

An image crashes through my mind of wings cut off and plumage matted with blood.

She turns the page, continuing grimly, “Marrow and viscera potency tested. Delivery arranged via blind drop. Rhosyn delivered. Twice confirmed with BC contact, ready for processing—”

Ice crystallizes in my veins. “BC. The Bloody Court?”

Elias swears under his breath. “Someone’s resurrecting the pits.”

Where demigods were made to hack each other apart for the amusement of humans. Where my brother spent weeks being tortured and violated while I searched for him. Amara, even longer.

“Does Rhosyn mean anything to you?” I ask Zephyr, forcing the words past the lump in my throat. “Some kind of code?”

She stares at the page as she thinks. “Maybe. Or a name? Whatever it means, they’re getting the shipment of dust.”

I think of broken wings. Desecrated flesh. Survivors on killing room floors, waiting for death or worse. A familiar hatred shudders through me—the need to slaughter, to make every fucker who did this pay for it.

Clenching my jaw, I carefully pull the feathers out of my armor. “For identification and funerals.”

Zephyr handles them reverently. “I’ll give Alexios my report. I’m still following leads on more missing demis. If I have any new information, we may need to act fast. They’ll be more careful after this. Elias? With me.” She glances at me and Arcadia, her expression softening a fraction. “Get some rest.”

Arcadia and I watch them launch into the sky. Their silhouettes shine against the stars for a moment before they disappear into the night.

“Are you okay?” she asks, silver wings rustling.

“I’ll heal.”

“Not what I meant.”

There’s worry in those mercury eyes. Understanding. Arcadia lost her brothers in the Devouring; she knows how it feels to lose part of yourself. We all do.

“No,” I say quietly. “I’m really fucking not.”

Her hand finds my forearm. “What do you need?”

You, I want to say. Make me feel something.

Arcadia would let me lose myself in her if I asked. I could stay at the palace and fuck her until my thoughts go quiet—I’ve done it a hundred times before. I know how to shatter her and put her back together, how to make her scream in pleasure. It would be easy to let her numb the hurt for a little while.

But when I picture the female beneath me in my bed, it’s not Arcadia I see.

It’s the Devaliant, staring up at me with those defiant violet eyes. Her silvery hair spread across my sheets. Her body moving against mine.

And she’s a reminder of every damn thing that happened to my realm.

I’m so disgusted with myself that I can’t even look at Arcadia. “Go home. I’ll deal with it.”

*   *   *

Memories batter against the inside of my mind as I stride down the hall of my tower.

Butchered bodies. Feathers removed and stacked. Rhosyn delivered. Twice confirmed with BC contact.

Turning the corner, I jerk to a halt. No. Fuck, no.

The Devaliant lingers outside the one door I warned her never to approach. Her fingertips ghost over the obsidian seal in the center, tracing the edges gone soft with age.

I move in a blink, slamming my hands against the wood on either side of her, my lips at her ear. “Devaliant. I believe I made myself crystal fucking clear about this door. It. Stays. Shut.”

She inhales sharply, a subtle tremor rolling through her. “I wasn’t going to open it. I was just… curious.”

“Well, fuck me, she speaks,” I say with a bitter laugh. “A whole damn month of the silent treatment, and now she’s found her voice.”

A muscle tics in her jaw. Oh, I’ve pissed her off now. Good. She can give me exactly what I need to numb myself tonight.

Burn hotter, vicious girl. Let me taste your fury.

“I want to negotiate—”

“No.” She’s always pushing, testing boundaries. Trying to negotiate. “No throwing knives. No bartering. No deals, Devaliant. Not tonight.”

Not when I’m one wrong breath away from coming out of my skin entirely. Not when she belongs to the family responsible for every festering hurt, every memory. All the ways I’m cracked and broken until I became this.

Slowly, the Devaliant twists to face me. Those violet eyes flick over my gore-splattered and dusty clothes. Quick. Assessing. As if she’s trying to get a read on me. Trying to find the broken bits she can press on until something fractures for her.

“This is how you come home every night, isn’t it?” she asks softly. “After killing oathbreakers?”

That’s where she thinks I’ve been. Stacking bodies. Slitting the throats of more precious Vartenans. And why wouldn’t she? That’s all I am to her—the killer, the monster, the nightmare they tell stories about. She has no clue what I saw tonight. Because why would it even occur to her that her people have been butchering and consuming us for centuries? That while she considers the war a distant past, some of us are still sifting through the wreckage and finding corpses to bury?

And why correct her? Why tell her the truth when the lie is so much more useful?

“That’s right, Princess. Every damn night.” I flash a vicious grin. “Sometimes I don’t even wash the blood off before dinner. Sometimes I let it dry on my skin because I like how it feels.”

I track the shallow rise and fall of her chest, the pulse in her throat. I could sink my teeth into that spot and taste her terror. Could press my fingers there until she begged me to let her breathe.

What an easy target she is tonight. Such a perfect distraction.

Tough luck, Devaliant. You’re the only thing in reach, and I’m all out of mercy.

“You want to know how killing them feels?” I ask, voice low. “Righteous. Like I was made for it. Shaped for it. It makes me feel alive when everything else is static. And when it’s over, I’m just hungry. For the next. And the next. And the next and the next. No fucking bottom. I could slaughter every last one of you and still wake up starving.”

“Stop it,” she whispers.

That plea only feeds the hunger. The dark, twisted part of me that wants to push until she snaps.

A cruel, mocking laugh shivers out of me. “Aw, listen to you beg just like they do. I honestly expected more from you, Princess. You’re boring me. All that promise, all that potential, and you’re just another disappointment, aren’t you?”

Boring. The word I promised would be her death sentence. Never let it be said that I don’t know exactly which of her wounds to press on. I want her to claw at me, wreck me, crack me open. Dig her nails into my skin. I’ll still be here demanding more, harder, now. Better for her to see the butcher than someone falling apart.

The effect is instantaneous. I notice the moment it registers, the way her eyes snap up, bright with rage.

Yeah, that’s it. There’s the fire. Good girl. Give it to me.

“Boring,” I say again when she doesn’t rise to the bait. When all she does is pant in these shallow little gasps. “Maybe Amara’s lessons didn’t teach you shit after all. Did her goodwill finally bleed the fight out of you, huh? Or is this what you were like on the altar?” I ask to twist the knife that much deeper. “Lying there so fucking obediently every time they sank that dagger in? I bet you begged then, too. I bet you cried. I bet you were pathetic.”