Mask of Shadows (Untitled #1)(86)

“What?” My knife dropped to his shoulder.

Elise turned to her father slowly and said, “We failed Nacea and you, and I’m sorry, but he can pay with his life in court. Let everyone find out what he did and know it was wrong. You can have justice with that. Trust me. If you kill him like this, no one will know and nothing will change.”

Would it be justice if his death wasn’t by the last Nacean hand? They’d hang him. They’d have to. But she’d be sending her father to the gallows.

“It’s what he deserves,” she said softly to me. “Please, for me.”

She’d no part in this. This was justice, vengeance, everything I’d been breathing for laid out right in front of me, flesh beneath my blade and heart beating at my command. I could stop it. I could end this.

And it was only the beginning. His death would give me everything.

Except Elise. Except Maud. Except my new place at court. No matter what he’d done, they’d never forgive me for killing him. And Elise, Lady, she’d never forgive me for murdering her father. Not after she’d asked me to stop.

Nacea for Elise. A home for a home.

A home Winter didn’t deserve. A comfortable, wealthy lordship he hadn’t earned and should never have kept. He deserved a thousand deaths, the skin stripped from him and a decade of haunting nightmares filled with faceless friends all clamoring for attention. For revenge.

They’d bled me that morning while I watched my siblings die and heard my parents murdered, and there was nothing left in my veins but vengeance.

Till now. Till Elise had seeped under my skin like ink on paper and swept my loneliness away. I could have the home that was taken from me. I could have Winter paraded out for all of Igna to see and watch him hang. I could be Opal, he could be dead, and Elise wouldn’t hate me.

I’d have someone who cared about me—what Winter stole. I could have that back.

I opened my hand, knife clattering at my feet. “I trust you.”

She stepped away from me. Her father surged forward, arms outstretched and sword slashing through my stitched side. I stumbled back, crashing into the windowsill, and he grinned. He tipped me up and over.

And I fell and fell and fell, the image of Elise’s terrified face framed against the night sky scorched into my mind.





Forty-Nine


There was ash on my lips and blood on my hands, and no force in this world could cleanse me. The fire burned lower and lower, embers red as the rising sun, and the last support beam snapped. I shuffled forward, all fractured bones and stitched-up skin. Heat licked the hem of my funeral clothes.

The brimstone stench of burning hair and the bitter taste of bone dust crept under my new mask till each breath was thick with death. I’d never attended a proper pyre—no funerals for Nacea and no money for the felled members of Grell’s gang. I’d never known the taste of ash.

Not like Elise had.

“He hated tawny wine,” Emerald muttered.

Amethyst tossed her glass of it into the fire, mask streaked with soot. “He loved wine. He hated funerals.”

I poured my wine on the ruined shirt in my hands, Ruby’s dried blood dark as night against the white silk, and threw it into the fire. It caught in an instant.

Dead and gone and never coming back.

I peeled back my sleeve and took out my knife, scoring seven long marks down the inside of my arm. Seven dead by my hands, seven bodies left to burn, and seven ghosts howling in my head. It wasn’t justice.

It was necessity.

There was no peace without death, and there was no justice at all. Nothing true. Nothing real. I was what Erlend had made me—killer to Our Queen—and they were what history made them. The lords screaming for my head were what I’d made them with Five’s death.

Fernando.

His name was Fernando. He was like me, and he was dead.

I dropped my arm, blood dripping around my feet. I could bleed for years and never clear their names from my soul. I deserved nothing but the weight of their deaths. Elise deserved so much better.

“How do you live like this?” I asked. “How do you live and look at other people when they know what you’ve done?”

Elise was too caring for me. For the callous lands of Erlend.

They’d eat her alive. They’d break her down bit by bit, till she was jaded as they were, and she’d never recover. Winter might not kill her, but he could use her to further his needs, and they knew what she meant to me, and that might…

I shuddered. Elise couldn’t die—not yet. She’d so much to do, so much she deserved. She’d be a better noble than her father ever was, and she’d turn the old Erlend traditions on their heads. She’d do everything to stop a war.

Elise had fought. Claw marks lined the wall where her father dragged her away, nails tearing through paint till she bled. I’d so many better memories of her—ink and ice and orange blossoms—but all I dreamed of now was her face framed against the stars. Her screaming.

And unable to escape the never-ending echo of her crying my name, I broke as bones break.

“Carefully. Sadly.” Amethyst wrapped an arm around me, pulling me to my feet, and wiped away the tears dripping down my neck. “Because we must. Because those who care to know us understand.”

“Because if it wasn’t us, it would be someone else.” Emerald unclenched her hands, copper nails now tipped with red.