He laid me on a saddle blanket, lowering the rear hatch of a supply wagon. I could no longer feel my own limbs. I was floating, the shadows deepening, my mind numb.

The bloodroses flowered into an endless night.

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Chapter 38 Bane

Gods. I had screamed at her.

I had bared my claws, my fangs, showing the truth of what lived under my skin to the one I loved the most in this world.

My Cirri, my lover. She had run from me.

I curled in on myself, covering my face with my bloody hands.

Now she knew the truth, that there was nothing good inside me. Everything I had been, everything I once was… was now subsumed by the beast in my heart and mind. The creature that drove me to violence, that begged and fought for blood, that had no remorse and no care for life itself.

I was evil, and now she had seen it, in its most raw and open form.

The body was cooling. I smelled its thick, meaty stench in the air, the iron tang of blood, now congealing.

I could have offered a trial. Judgment by those who might have heard her out, rather than a death sentence at my hands. From the moment she had walked in through that door, that damning letter in Visca’s hand, she had been doomed.

But I didn’t regret what I’d done.

That was the worst part. Knowing that Cirri was right to fear me, because I had torn apart a woman she knew without an ounce of remorse. What was one woman after the hundreds that had come before?

Perhaps I had been a fool to think this would work in the end. To promise that I’d give her my blood, keep her by my side forever.

What kind of life would that be? To be trapped in the cage of a vicious fiend, afraid enough to run, yet too terrified to leave?

And still, even with that knowledge, I wouldn’t release her. I would give her my blood and keep her, evil or not. Brutal or not. As terrible as I was, I belonged to her, and she to me.

And of course I believed that, because I was evil.

I drew my hands away and looked at them, really looked at them.

The blood had dried to a glaze on my fingers, sunk into the lines on my palm, pooled around my claws.

These were the hands that touched Cirri every night. They were the hands that could reach into a chest, break through ribs like twigs, and tear a still-beating heart out.

Those two things did not belong together, but I would keep her nonetheless.

She couldn’t really believe that I was no better than a warg, though she knew the truth now. Her love for me, her demand to stay with me, denied that.

I exhaled, wishing the blood didn’t smell so delicious, wishing I hadn’t done it in the tower where I’d recently found such happiness.

Moving slowly, I picked up the slashed portraits. I touched Cirri’s face, torn through and gouged open, wishing I hadn’t ruined hers. This one was the only one that mattered.

I would have Miro paint a new one. The shredded one I would keep as a reminder to myself, that I was evil and I must never, ever turn that wicked gaze upon Cirri.

She could be so easily torn apart. Like the portrait, like the once-living girl cooling on the floor.

I propped it up among the other paintings, and looked at Ellena.

She looked so young in death, her eyes still shocked and open. And as much as I didn’t regret it, I wished I had done it away from Cirri’s eyes.

I picked her up, lip curling at the heavy ragdoll feeling of her body in my hands. Humans weighed so much more in death, like sacks of sand, nothing but dead weight to carry around.

I brought her down. Down beneath the keep, through the secret door that even Cirri hadn’t tried to open. There was no glory down here in the dungeon, no swooping buttresses, no marble floors. It was all stone, cold and unforgiving, the cells lined with iron bars. The air stank of moss and fungus, the eye-watering reek of piss, the curdled taste of old blood.

I brought Ellena to a long, wide room, where drifts of ash fetched up against the walls.

There was one Ark in here. One remaining out of ten, the others long since rusted shut or fallen apart. An old remnant from the days when humans rose up and killed their vampire overlords.

They had staked them with silver, shoved rowan down their throats, and that had killed many of them. But in their frenzy for revenge, the human rebels had created the Arks: oversized ovens, where the vampires stunned with silver and poison had been piled in heaps, and locked inside with the flames.

All of these Arks had once been maintained, their fires kept burning day and night, but eventually only one had been tended. It had been decades since a bloodwitch had been locked inside; now only corpses were burned there.

I laid Ellena aside, and began to shovel coal into the Ark’s grated bottom. When that was full, I laid wood atop it, building a pyre in silence.

No, I didn’t regret this, but for Cirri’s sake I would give Ellena a proper funeral. No rotting in a pit for this traitor, no.

I laid her atop the pyre, and shoved a bit of kindling under the grates piled with coal and wood, striking sparks off a flint and steel until it caught.

And when the flames began to climb hungrily, crackling through the wood and licking at Ellena’s cold flesh, I shut the iron door and barred it.

There. It was done; the traitor had paid in full. For every life taken, she received a hungry flame—but if I didn’t regret it, why did I have to keep telling myself I didn’t?

I crouched on all fours, the air around the Ark shimmering with the growing heat, watching through the bars as Ellena’s body was slowly consumed. It took several long hours before the blackened char consumed her outer shell, and I spent those hours with my thoughts running in circles of shame and guilt.

Cirri had witnessed it. She deserved an apology for my brutal behavior. I would tell her I should have given Ellena a trial… but that I didn’t regret it.

I left the Ark burning, the wood inside popping and crackling, the thick scent of ash and charred flesh coating my nostrils and throat.

Cirri would not be in the Tower of Winter. Not after she’d run. I went to the library, but the air carried no fresh scent I could pick up through the ash; it was silent, feeling strangely lonely. The golems were the only living things in there, standing at a window with their backs to me.

In the Tower of Spring, the air was even staler, no signs of life to be found.

Wyn was working alone; Brother Glyn was in the Tower of Summer, and he told me with pleasure that he had our next lesson worked out.

But by the time I was done searching the four towers, there was an odd sensation in my chest.

I went to the ballroom, retracing the steps of Bloodrain to the balcony, which was empty; I prowled the servants quarters, tearing through the kitchens and upsetting Cook. I breathed deeply, searching for her scent, but all I could smell was ash and burning blood.

By the time I had circled around to the keep’s entrance, that odd sensation had blossomed into a feeling I was almost entirely unfamiliar with, a cold spill down my spine, emanating into my guts and limbs and gnawing at my heart: fear.

She was nowhere.

She had run away from me and vanished.

I paused in the doorway of the keep’s entrance, and Koryek gave me an odd look as he passed.

“My Lord,” he said politely, keeping a wary distance.

I nodded, amazed at how suffocating such a thing as true terror felt; gods, was there anything else like it?

This was because of what I’d done. I was merely… not myself. She was here, she simply didn’t wish to see me.

Well, that was it. I could give her breathing room, let her come to terms with the facts of the matter: that she was trapped here, married to a murderous brute.