“You have eternity ahead of you. She will die, Wroth. You will be free of her one day.” I put a hand on his shoulder, feeling the hunched tension in him. “Give her the poppy syrup, and send her to sleep—”

“No, no, Bane.” He laughed aloud. “Don’t you see? We have an eternity as the Lords. It never ends. There will be another Kajarin after her, and another, and another. Forever. An eternity of being hated and despised. If I must take a new hateful bride every time the last one dies, I don’t… I think I’d rather give it up and be free.”

I felt for him, torn between awful choices. If Cirri had loathed me, had made it her life’s work to see me miserable and downtrodden… I could see how I would find this a thankless task, a pointless, empty title.

But it was not only about us. Not us fiends, and not the women who had been chosen by a twist of fate in their bloodlines.

“Then you would return Owlhorn to the humans.” I squeezed his shoulder. “How long would our kind be welcome in the Rivers? How long until they would feel secure enough in their grip on power to begin burning the bloodwitches? Would you have all your people there return Below?”

Wroth shuddered at the name of the hell far below our feet.

“Our people have made lives for themselves under the sun.” I felt truly awful for what I was telling him, but we were only eight sacrifices, against thousands upon thousands of other lives. The balance was clear. “We can’t force them back under again, Wroth. I will do what I can for your… situation. I will speak to Wyn and Auré. Believe me, not all of them are like Kajarin. There are other chances, other choices.”

Wroth rippled his shoulder, knocking my hand away. “Did you hear nothing, brother?” He turned on me, teeth bared. “You and your pretty little wife, all cozy in bed… did you think that was not me as well? Truly believing the best? That she could love me?”

He unfolded himself from his crouch and dropped to the wall’s floor, standing upright to look me in the eye. “I was exactly like you, Bane. I thought Kajarin was not like Voryan’s weeping wretch, or Andrus’s dead-eyed, poppy-swilling slob. I thought we were happy. That I was lucky. And instead I came to find that she loathed me with every fiber of her being, that two years of growing to know each other was all part of her plan to make me feel the true weight of her contempt when she showed her hand.”

His tail was thrashing wildly; he paced back and forth on the small stretch of wall. “You waited until the last possible second to marry, brother. You waited, and you’ve known this girl for—how long? A week? Two? And you think she’s not like the others? No. She will turn on you. None of us are lucky. We’re all trapped in a cage of our own making, and so long as we choose to remain inside it, we will live an eternity of misery.” He jabbed a claw towards me. “I want you to remember this—I offered to end it. I gave you a chance to escape before she could crush your hopes and spit on the remnants.”

I waited until he’d settled, his torrent of words morphing into a stream of snarls.

His hatred for Kajarin was like a seed that wanted to take root—but I would allow it no fertile ground. I would not, could not, believe it of my Cirri.

Perhaps I was naïve as well as selfish. So be it; I loved her.

“I will take my chances with her,” I said, keeping my own voice hushed. “If she crushes me—then she crushes me. At least I will have had the pleasure of loving her for a little while. At least I will still live under the sun, and my kind here in the Rift will live free. But even if it means agony forever, I agreed to this. I agreed to become a fiend, and to marry a stranger for the sake of our kind, not myself alone. And so did you, Wroth. We both signed our lives away for them.”

He stopped moving, standing statue-still as he gazed at me. “So we did,” he muttered. “But this… might be more than I stand.”

“Then we find another way. We will remove her.” I clenched my fists, feeling claws dig into my palms. “Perhaps I cannot kill her with my own hands… I can’t break the Accords in that way. The risk is too great. But Wyn will give her the poppy syrup, and Kajarin will be too deep in dreams to spend every second tormenting you. Or… take another lover, someone to bolster you against her hatred. The vows meant nothing to her. She is a political requirement, not a true wife.”

Wroth’s ears twitched, and then he shook his head. “No. No, I will not do that; I will be nothing like her,” he snarled.

He descended into pacing and growls, striding back and forth on the wall; I had nothing else I could tell him. Nothing I could do.

I remembered thinking of the Accords as a paper prison, and my wife the warden; that was before I’d thought I was inexpressibly fortunate. The luckiest vampire in the world.

A shiver of foreboding went down my spine at the parallels to Wroth’s story.

No. I wouldn’t poison what I had with Cirri. She’d been too patient, too kind. She spoke her mind. I didn’t believe she would hide it if she despised me.

She wouldn’t come up with games, or be worried about a vampire who was like my own sister.

No, I truly believed Cirri was my friend, and now my lover. She was everything I could have wanted, more than I deserved.

But Wroth… I looked back at him, leaving him alone to his fury and baffled misery.

If I killed Kajarin and my crime came to light, I would lose the Rift. I couldn’t do that to my people.

Once, when we were young and stupid, everything had seemed so amusing. Why not become beasts, if we could steal thrones and claim glory? We were already killers, one and all; it had only been one step further.

Now I felt the chains of obligation, the weight of responsibility, and I knew my brothers were now suffering under that same weight.

I climbed the tower, slipping back through the window to my sleeping bride, curled up in my bed. I looked down at her, smoothing hair back from her face, watching her dark lashes flutter against her cheek.

I would not allow Wroth’s fears to grow inside me. Not my Cirri. Not her.

She frowned in her sleep as I took her into my arms, cradling her tightly against my chest, then settled again. One hand flopped back onto the pillow, her fingers moving in her dreams, spelling letters in nonsensical fashion.

I smiled at the sight, tickling her palm carefully with my claws until she made a fist.

Very well, then. I would refuse to believe she harbored hatred towards me. Our time together was too short as it was, a mere human lifetime not nearly enough.

But I could no longer ignore my brothers, and their struggles. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to help them, how to fix it—but if things continued as they were, the other fiends might give up over time, crushed under the wheel of a constant stream of abhorrence.

And then the humans would take the seats of the Lords again, and everything we had worked for, everything we had sacrificed, would be for nothing. The vampires would be hunted down and staked with silver. The bloodwitches would be burnt in the Arks, the vast iron ovens meant for bodies. The families that had sprung up in the last decade would be driven Below, into a nightmare realm.

All of it for nothing.

“You will be my proof, lover,” I whispered into Cirri’s ear as she dreamed. “You will be the one to turn the tides.”

She shifted closer, her hand closing around one of my fingers and holding me tightly.

Ancestors, please… let her be the one to break the mold.

I needed my brothers to have hope to live for.

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Chapter 27 Cirri

Iwasn’t upset when I woke to an empty bed; I knew Bane was with a Silent Brother, making strides every day to understand me. I could forgive opening my eyes and stretching out a hand to cold sheets for that.