A lump rose in my throat.
I had made this not long after I’d come into Vincent’s care. It was the first time I’d felt comfortable enough to ask for a project to work on and safe enough to actually do it. I’d liked chipping away at stone—I didn’t even remember why, now. But I did remember making this little dagger, and the pit of nervousness in my stomach when I’d presented it to him. I had held my breath when he surveyed it, face stoic.
“Good,” he had said, after a long moment, and he’d tucked it into his pocket, and that had been that. The first of countless times I’d found myself reaching for Vincent’s approval and wondering desperately whether I’d gotten it.
And now here it was, lying with the death warrants of thousands.
Two versions of him that I couldn’t reconcile in life, and now was even further from understanding in his death.
Vincent the king, who would kill my whole family in the name of power, who would slaughter an entire race, who would lie to me for nearly twenty years about my blood to protect his crown.
And Vincent the father, who kept this little makeshift trinket I’d made him, right there with all his most precious possessions. Who had told me he loved me with his final breaths.
How convenient it would be, if I found a letter tucked away in one of his drawers. My little serpent, it would read. If you’re reading this, then I am gone. It would be unfair for me to leave you with no answers…
But Vincent was not the kind of man who wrote down his secrets. Maybe I’d told myself I was coming here for supplies, but really, I was coming here for answers.
A fucking dream.
Because instead, this was a room that made as little sense as he did. I found nothing here but discarded pieces of him, just as disparate in death as they were in life.
My eyes burned. My chest ached. A sob bubbled up inside of me with such violence that I had to press my hand over my mouth to stifle it.
I never used to cry. Now, it seemed like the more I tried to stop myself, the more viciously it clawed its way out of me.
I choked it down with an ugly sound that I was grateful no one could hear.
No fucking time for this, Oraya, I told myself. This isn’t what you’re here for.
My gaze fell to the center of the desk—the pile of broken glass. That was peculiar. It was mirrored, the shards neatly stacked on top of each other, as if someone had assembled them into a perfectly aligned pile. The metal reminded me of the full moon, silver bright and gleaming with hammered indents that shivered beneath the cold light. Elegant swirls adorned its smooth edge, driving to the center before being interrupted by the jagged edge. I squinted and could make out a faint cast in those carved lines—red-black. Blood…?
Why would he keep this broken trinket here? Right in the middle of his work?
I touched the edge of the top shard—
A gasp ripped through me.
The edge was razor sharp. It sliced open my fingertip, leaving a streak of red rolling to the edge—but I barely noticed either the cut or the pain.
Because the shards began to move.
In the span of a blink, the shards of glass spread out, locking into place with each other—forming a shallow, mirrored bowl, the drops of my blood rolling down to be cradled in its center.
And yet, as shocking as this was, what left me staggering was the sudden, overwhelming, disorienting sense of Vincent—Vincent as he’d been in this room, standing where I stood, blood spilling into the same bowl. A sudden, intense anxiety rose in my throat, all in broken pieces—fragmented thoughts of cities, generals, Sivrinaj, Salinae, hundreds of feathered wings staked throughout the city walls. Anger and possession and determination, but beneath it all, a powerful fear.
I yanked my hand away, gasping. I felt nauseous, dizzy.
“Vincent?”
I thought I’d imagined the voice at first.
“Vincent? Highness? I—how can—”
The voice was faint and distorted, as if coming from somewhere very, very far away, and through heavy winds.
But even so, I recognized it.
“Jesmine?” I whispered.
I peered into the bowl again. My blood pooled there, spreading out more than such a small quantity of liquid should have, coating the silver.
I squinted and leaned closer. The flickering reflection of the Nightflame made it hard to see, but was something moving—?
“Oraya?”
The voice—confused—was definitely Jesmine’s. I could barely hear her.
I was now bent over the desk, my forearms braced, my awareness pulled in so many directions—to the faint presence of Jesmine, somewhere many miles away, to the presence of Vincent in the past.
This was a communication tool of some kind. A spell, a—
Voices.
Not Jesmine’s. No, these were here, in the hallway outside.
One was Raihn’s.
Fuck.
I yanked my hand away from the device, and the silver collapsed back into countless shards, falling again into a neat pile. I winced at the metallic sound they made crashing against the wood.
I swept them up and shoved them into my pocket, my eyes glued to the door.
The two voices grew closer. The other, I realized a few seconds later, was Cairis’s.
“—long to find it,” Cairis was saying.
Footsteps. Down the other staircase. My escape route.
“Has the guard gone through all this yet?” Raihn asked.
“Not yet.”
“He made a lot of changes to the place.”
There was a strange note to his voice at that—one that seemed obvious to me, but that Cairis breezed right by.
“They’ll start in on these rooms as soon as they’re done with the upstairs studies,” Cairis said.
“Anything useful?”
“Nothing new. We already know who we need to kill. The hard part is getting to them. But getting rid of Misrada will help with that. Septimus seems confident.”
“Well, as long as Septimus is confident.” Raihn’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “At least that will get some of them out of our way.”
The footsteps grew louder. I shrank back as I watched the sliver of light beneath the door—watched shadows flicker across it.
I stopped breathing. I shrank back against the wall, trying to put as much space between me and them as I could.
But they just kept walking. “This place was kept out of the way,” Cairis said. “Maybe he kept the good shit down—what?”
My short-lived breath of relief stilled.
One set of footsteps—Raihn’s—had stopped.
“What is it?” Cairis said, again.
“Nothing. Just curiosity.”
Raihn was a good actor. He always sold his lies well.
“You go ahead,” he said to Cairis. “I’d like to look around in here instead first.”
Fuck. Fuck.
“You want me to call someone to help you?”
“Honestly, I’m dying for a little privacy. Want to hear myself think for once.”