When I reach the courtyard where the secret tunnel is hidden, I find Wren and Naja locked in combat.
The white fox lets out a high-pitched laugh when she sees me. Her fur, previously spotless, is now splattered with red. In the daylight, it looks lurid, almost unreal—but the cuts and bruises on Wren’s face say otherwise.
“Look who it is, Paper whore,” Naja sneers, dancing out of reach of Wren’s sword. “Your little lover has come to die with you. How romantic.”
Wren swipes out again. Naja defends with a slash of her claws.
“Gods,” I growl at the white fox, readjusting the grip on my knife, “I am not going to miss you one bit.”
And I join Wren’s side. There’s nothing elegant about the way we fight. Wren’s movements are sloppy from exhaustion. Her right eye is so swollen I doubt she can barely see out of it. It throws off her balance—but I’m there to deflect Naja’s claws. I’m there to double down on an attack she started but is too slow to finish. We fight together, and even if it is messy, we don’t give up, wearing Naja down.
All it takes is one mistake.
Wren and I have pushed Naja against the wall. Wren aims a low, sweeping cut at her legs. Naja can’t move back, so she veers sideways instead—
Right into the path of my blade.
I only nick her skin; it’s hardly more than a papercut. Yet whether due to surprise or complacency, it makes Naja hesitate—giving Wren time to use the momentum of her previous thrust to swing her sword.
It digs deep into Naja’s side.
With a howl, the white fox topples to her knees. Her hand grasps uselessly at her opened flesh as blood spills out, a flood of shining red.
I drive my knife into her chest.
Naja’s silver eyes flicker. Then they glaze over. I move back, sliding my knife from between her ribs, and she falls facedown onto the tiles, finally limp.
My heart is racing. “She’s dead,” I say. “She’s really dead.”
“Lei.” Wren seizes my hand. She’s wheezing, almost doubled over. “The King.”
I help her to the passage entrance. Its cover has been shoved aside. A trail of blood leads down the steps.
“He’s injured,” I say.
“I got him,” Wren explains between rasping breaths, swaying in place. “As we were leaving the hall. But I don’t know…”
She pitches forward.
I grab her, easing her down. I stroke back the sticky hair from her bruised face, seeing her properly for the first time since the Ancestral Hall. She looks terrible. Her skin is mottled and bloodied, its usually tan color gray. Her right eye is a bulbous mess, and beneath it, marking her lovely cheek as clearly as a tattoo, are the imprints of the King’s knuckles.
She tries to sit but I push her gently back. Her cracked lips part. “The King…”
I press a kiss to her brow. “I’ll get him,” I say. “If he’s hurt, he can’t have gotten far. You’ve done your part, Wren. It’s time for me to do mine.”
“Lei,” she croaks as I move to the tunnel.
I’m poised to rebuff her protests. Instead, she fixes me with a dark, fervent look.
“Finish it,” she whispers.
I find him at the bottom of the staircase amid the corpses of his guards.
In the darkness, the King is nothing more than a sunken form slumped against the wall. But I’d recognize that silhouette anywhere. Symmetrical horns, their gold patterning glinting dully in the dust motes filtering down from above. Rounded shoulders, unusually slim for a bull demon. A long nose and jutting jaw, with its mouth that once claimed my body when it was never his to take. Even in pitch-black I would know it’s him, because it is more than physical. I sense his presence with every part of me. Just as how Wren is a song I can’t help but answer, the Demon King is a pained, off-chord shriek that repels me from him with each note.
Blood drips from the blade, coating my fist red.
How fitting I am to kill the King dressed in his own colors.
His breathing is labored. A strange whistling accompanies each exhale. As usual, Wren didn’t give herself enough credit. She didn’t just hurt him; she injured him so badly he barely made it down the stairs before collapsing.
The King’s war-mask has fallen off, or maybe he discarded it in his need for air. It lies at his feet, sneering up at us. He’d looked so commanding when I first saw him in his layers of armor. Now, the mask is powerless—along with the demon it failed to protect.
He doesn’t move until I’m standing right above him, my shadow falling over him the way his fell over me so many times.
Slowly, with effort, the King lifts his chin.
A single arctic-blue eye meets my stare.
I’ve never felt calm in the King’s presence, but I feel calm now. My gaze tracks down to where his hands are pressed to his side. I kneel down, and, unafraid, ungently, prize them away.
Wren’s sword has run deep. Blood pulses out, drenching his clothes and turning his chestnut fur black.
The King’s rasping grows more erratic as I lift my knife to his chest, touching the tip to the space between his ribs where Kenzo once showed me.
This is where you aim tomorrow.
Push the blade deep, and do not stop.
Shaky and weak, the King tries to grasp my arm, but I push him away, not breaking eye contact. I want to see it: the fear. The unique kind that only exists when you understand something irreplaceable is about to be taken from you.
I see it, and smile.
I could leave the King to die. It wouldn’t take long, and no shamans are coming to save him this time. No magic will knit close his wounds. But as we look at each other, my heart beats with a calm clarity that this is the way it’s supposed to be. It is the way I want it to be. A power the King always had—to force his desires on others—is now my turn to wield.
Things I could say run through my mind. There is so much. All the words born from my pain and his cruelty, and the lives he wrecked, the bodies and hearts and hopes he broke, the scars he carved. Yet sharing them, giving them to him, feels wrong.
He doesn’t deserve them. He deserves nothing more from me—except this.
“We beat you,” I tell him simply. Then I slide my knife into the King’s chest.
I press it deep.
I do not stop.
FORTY
WREN
THEY EMERGED INTO A CHANGED WORLD.
Or perhaps it wasn’t so changed, at least not quite yet. But it felt so to Wren, and she knew Lei felt it, too. A weight had been lifted. Gravity altered. And unlike magic, this was a burdening weight, an unwelcome one that had crushed her for a year without her realizing quite how much until it was gone.
They’d thought the King dead once before. This time, there was no doubt.