“No, please!” Rose clutched the baby to her chest, letting it startle and flex its chubby arms from the woolen blanket with another warning cry. “Please, I… ask of me whatever you wish but… please, my baby needs me.”
Enosh smacked his lips. “Yet another conundrum, for my baby, too, needs its mother. I shall not place yours above mine.”
When Enosh extended his arms to take the child and shifted forward, I stepped in front of him. “No, I need to be the one.”
I had to do this.
On my own.
“Very well.” Enosh let the same blade I had used to kill Henry shape there in his open palm, my husband’s forehead wrinkling with a dozen justified doubts. “The wind picked up when we arrived.”
“I know,” I said when I took the knife, the handle somehow going slick and damp in my grip as I looked at Rose. “Give your baby to your husband.”
“No…” Rose whimpered, holding it tighter as she sniffled and cried until snot drooled onto her upper lip. “Oh my god, Helfa, I just wanted a better life for me and my baby instead of fish stew every damn day.”
My stupid stomach clenched as though recognizing the hunger pains any fisherman’s wife or daughter experienced whenever the damn beasts wouldn’t bite. But only until I looked around the house.
Fragrant, golden straw poked from the linen on the mattress, a fire that burned away throwing barely any smoke into the room, and a fat cured ham hanging from a rafter. Oh, she’d made herself a nice little home, indeed.
With the coin from the priests.
I took a strong step toward her, gripping the handle of the blade tighter. “You sold out my father. Where is he? What happened to him?”
At my questioning, Rose’s feet slowly slipped out from underneath her, and she sunk along the wall until she pooled into a puddle of cries on the floor. “They t-took him. Said he’d be useful to the high priest, paid me a handful of c-coins, then put him on a mule. Elisa… Adelaide, please… look at my baby.” Before I managed to focus my gaze elsewhere, she turned the little thing, showing me its stubby nose and flakes of white on its chin from when it must have spit some milk. “Look at my… my baby.”
I did look.
God help me, I stared down at the baby, its eyes hazel-brown. A handsome thing, with chubby cheeks, full lips that rooted for a nipple, and a thatch of brown hair poking out from the blanket draped over its head.
A heavy weight came over my chest, so overwhelming I squatted before them. If I killed Rose now, this child would never know its mother—just like I had never known mine.
That ached me.
For a moment, I might have contemplated to spare her. There were plenty of other wicked souls out there I could kill to show Eilam that I had meant what I’d said. Maybe.
Until the god took shape right beside Rose, ripping a startled yelp from her but leaving her no direction to flee. Trapped between walls on two sides, the bare god to her left, and me in front of her, she simply folded her arms over her baby.
‘Ada. His voice filtered not into my head like his brothers, but rather, into my very core. Will you truly rob a babe of its mother? Condemn it to grow up without ever knowing her embrace when it scraped a knee, or the sound of her voice when she sings it to sleep?’
“Shut up,” I mumbled, probably sounding like a madwoman, rambling to myself like this, and perhaps I was because the weight of the knife tripled as though I truly wanted to spare that bitch. “You think this will hold me back?”
It couldn’t.
Not with how Eilam sat there with that smug smile all the brothers seemed to have inherited from whatever hellhole birthed them. All this killing would continue if I succumbed to doubt now. All those corpses out there…? They would have died for nothing.
Was this not better?
To kill one, yes, but spare the rest?
Did that not make me a hero?
Besides, what if I failed now, and Eilam would go back on his offer? What if he didn’t? I couldn’t bring myself to kill someone less deserving of punishment than this woman. What if Enosh would wipe these lands like he’d done before? What if—
‘Ada.’ Eilam’s voice had my nostrils flare and my molars grind together. ‘Think of the baby. The innocent boy—’
“Quiet!”
Rose startled so hard at my shout that the baby shook in her arms. One warning wail, and another, then the boy started to cry with vigor. Tiny red veins popped up all over his wrinkled face, chunky fingers clenching and unclenching.
“Shh…” On instinct, I reached my hand forward, hushing him, wanting to pick up this boy and hold him against me.
Rose pulled him away from me.
Did what I had wanted to do instead.
She lifted the boy’s head to rest in the crook of her neck, rocking him, swaying him, comforting him, hushing him. All the things I wanted to do with my baby, she did right before my eyes… The woman who had cost me the opportunity to do so.
For eternity.
Hot and biting, anger carved itself into my beating but dead heart, letting my fingers tighten around the blade. Why did she deserve to hold her baby and I did not? What had I ever done to anybody to be denied hushing my child? Why would I deny myself, when all this could end with a single stab?
I’d done it before.
I could do it again.
Just one more time.
For my baby.
For the world.
Eilam cocked his head, brows furrowing. ‘Have you no heart, murdering—’
“I told you to shut up.” With a swipe of my hand, I lashed out at him. The blade cut across his collarbone before tearing open his neck, letting rivulets of blood run down his bare chest no matter how he pressed a hand to the wound, staring at me in shock. “Take the baby!”
I’d only shouted it into the room, but Enosh immediately stepped up beside me. He leaned over with hushing sounds, plucking the screaming boy from Rose’s arms.
Perhaps she would have gone after Enosh, if it wasn’t for the ropes of skin wrapping around her, disabling all fight. Still, she tossed on her arse and screeched frantically, her face a mess of tears and auburn strands clinging to damp cheeks.
I leaned closer to Eilam while readjusting my grip on the blade. “I might rob the boy of its mother, but I’ll also make sure that many other boys will get to keep their fathers.”
Or at least, that was what I told myself when I brought the blade to Rose’s throat with one hand and let the palm of the other touch down on the butt of the handle.
Fast. Simple.
My eyes flicked to her belly.
Throat. Belly.
Throat again.
The next time my gaze dropped to her upper belly, a bone knife protruded from it, close to her lungs, its handle resting in the fist of my hand. How it had slipped so low, I couldn’t say. Maybe the weight, maybe not.
I watched my hand turn, driving it in deeper until a wet cough called my attention back to Rose. Red-cheeked Rose, whose lips parted like that of a fish out of water, unable to take a breath under the flow of blood that gargled from her mouth.
“I am the Queen of Rot and Pain, beautiful and kind, terrible and cruel,” I murmured to myself and Rose, then stared down at Eilam, who still held his hand pressed to a wound already closed. “Now give me my baby.”
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Chapter 23
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Enosh
I was ruined.
For eternity.
There she stood—my woman, my wife, my queen—with a wicked mortal bleeding out by her left foot and a stunned god sitting by her right. Yes, my little one had ruined me, for there could never be a woman beside me ever again but my Ada.
