I didn’t belong here.

“He didn’t tell me any of this.” It hurt, like a twisted knife.

Amalthea increased our pace. “Perhaps he would have if you were not avoiding him.” There was the barest note of something in her voice. Censure?

“I’m not avoiding him,” I lied, even as I admitted to myself she might have had a point. Ever since he found me in the donor den that night, I’d taken care to avoid encountering Raphael. I took meals in my room, and insisted on having Amalthea walk me back to my rooms.

My cheeks heated at the memory of the night, part blush and part fury. I refused to meet the sidelong glance she cast my way. I wasn’t fooling either of us, but unless her oracle vision had shown her what happened between the vampire king and me, I wasn’t saying a word.

Amalthea seemed inclined to say more, but something caught her attention. She startled and tried to usher me down an alleyway.

“This is a better path,” she said urgently.

I frowned. “But we’re nearly back—”

My words broke off as I saw what Amalthea had tried to spare me. A small cluster of Damerel’s denizens lingered around a corner, a few pinching noses. Two legs were splayed out on the ground, visible.

I was already moving, Amalthea’s urging to not look barely registered as I walked closer.

There, on the sidewalk, half in an alley, half out, was the mangled body of a girl. Her throat had been torn wide open, her head barely hanging on by the slightest tendon. Her entire front was painted red with blood, the scraps of fabric that had once been a sheer dress ripped to shreds.

I’d seen this girl. The one who’d been weak in bed at the donor den.

She was dead. A vampire had done this.

I’d seen this before.

Blood and blood and blood. A woman’s flesh, torn apart. An arm flung to one edge of the arena, the arterial blood cascading through the air. The cries for mercy cut off as her corpse is shredded by the vampire’s ruthless fangs. He’s not biting her, he’s mauling her. The once fine brocade of her gown is soaked through. When he drains her neck, he moves to other arteries, trying to pull more from her body. He rips apart her limbs like he’s trying to crack open her body for any spare drop of blood. When he’s done, my world has ended. There is no more of the woman who birthed me, who raised me. Just pieces of skin scattered in all corners of the arena. The others are cheering. All I can do is stare.

I keep staring. The two scenes overlapped in my mind. She’s dead because of me. The accusation echoed through me. I wasn’t even sure which woman I mean. Both? If I had told Raphael what I had seen more precisely, would he have been able to make sure she was safe?

Or was this every human’s fate at the hands of vampires?

Dead. Not just dead, but destroyed. Devoured.

For what? For some animal’s snack?

Her sightless eyes met mine, accusing.

I have to get the necromancer the grimoire.

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Chapter Forty-Four

“You’re avoiding me.”

I shrieked and nearly dropped my towel. When I’d entered the bathing chamber, my room had been empty. Now, Raphael was lounging on my bed, his hands tucked behind his head, flexing his biceps in the confines of his white shirt. His ankles were crossed, boots resting on the coverlet in a way that would have earned me an ear-ringing lecture from my mother.

In contrast, I was naked, save for the towel clutched perilously in one hand.

“Expecting privacy in my own room hardly counts as avoiding you,” I snapped.

Anger was good. Anger that let me cover the flush I felt encroaching on every inch of my body as Raphael arched a single eyebrow at me. The anger wasn’t about Raphael in the room—it was about the mutilated corpse I’d seen yesterday. But having him here in my space made it impossible to wall away those emotions, so I chose to focus on the immediate ones that made my blood roar, not the memory.

Part of me wondered, Did he like what he saw? Now that I’d put on some fat and muscle, turning into a woman more substantial than the skin-and-bones waif he’d met in Greymere…

I tightened my mental shields and kicked the thought aside. That was the trouble with kissing vampire kings who looked like Raphael. You started to wonder if your body was pleasing rather than when you’d outlive your usefulness and would be abandoned once more.

“You walked in on me wearing a towel,” he replied when he’d completed his appraisal. “I’d argue returning the favor should be expected.”

Unfortunately, he finished his a second before I finished mine, and the curve of his lips let me know he was aware I’d been looking too.

I skirted the room to get to the changing screen, where my dress was perched.

“I’d rather you leave now.”

“Eventually,” he repeated.

No one made the vampire king do a single thing he didn’t want to.

I blew out a breath of frustration. Either I grabbed my dress and marched across the room again to change in the bathing room with my tail between my legs, or I got out of my now-soaked towel and dressed in the same room as Raphael.

Even he can’t see through solid objects, I chided myself. Still, it felt utterly intimate to be changing clothes with Raphael in the room. I threw the dress on and walked out from the screen so I could cross my arms over my chest and tell Raphael what I thought of him camping on my bed.

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

“Amalthea mentioned you saw something unpleasant yesterday.”

My fingers pressed harder into the flesh of my upper arms. The girl, massacred by a careless vampire. I didn’t even know her name. Her killer probably didn’t either. The scene where we’d found her body replayed over and over in my mind, but it was like I was a distant viewer. I saw it in my waking hours, and during what little sleep I’d had last night, I replayed a scenario where I’d done something different in the den and saved her.

I failed in each one.

“I didn’t feel it, you know,” Raphael continued. “I would have come if I’d felt it, but there wasn’t even a ripple. It’s impressive your shield didn’t slip even when dealing with such a shock. You’ve been a quick study in learning to secure your emotions.”

He called it impressive, yet neither of us was impressed. For me, it made sense. I’d spent my entire life suppressing my feelings in front of others, and in turn, to myself. And I’d had extra motivation to block out Raphael. Now that I planned to take the grimoire once I finished using his resources to translate it, it was all the more important I hid my true feelings. As exposed as I’d felt with only my towel for modesty, I felt completely exposed at the thought of Raphael feeling my emotions.

“And that’s what bothers you. The fact you couldn’t feel my emotions. Not that an innocent girl was mutilated by one of your citizens.”

Raphael made no denial. “These things happen. You are my priority, not some random human who signed up as a donor.”

Because in whatever moral compass he followed, the humans didn’t matter. I did. Knowing whether I was upset was of paramount importance. But the fact I was upset one of my kind was killed by one of his meant nothing.

Titus was right.

“Fine,” I snarled, my fingers curling into fists. “You want to know my emotions? Here.”

They unfurled inside me. I hadn’t simply locked them away from Raphael, but myself. Now, I let it all pour out of me. The anger. The disgust. The hatred for the one who had maimed that girl was overwhelming. I despised them all for being complicit. The ones who walked by. The ones who would let whatever vampire feed again. The ones who stole children, the ones who hurled them into ravines for their own gain. The hatred I’d known since childhood, the memories that had tormented me for years—I unleashed them too. Raphael recoiled, just slightly, as each one slammed into him.