Blood Heir (Blood Heir Trilogy #1)(49)
The compass traveled with Ramson until Jonah died, almost exactly one year later. Ramson remembered hurling the thing at the wall, and then picking it up to see the arrow spinning like a broken helm amid the shattered glass, faster and faster until it seemed to careen into a wild blur. And Jonah’s death had left Ramson that way, broken and directionless and spinning out of control ever since.
* * *
—
Ramson blinked, and the traces of his memories vanished. He was back in the small dacha, the fire dying low, the Affinite girl—Ana—curled against the wall opposite him, watching him over the flickering embers. Phantoms danced around them in the shapes of light and shadows, and he suspected he wasn’t the only one haunted by ghosts of the past tonight. “I’d tell the Blood Witch that I understand,” Ramson said quietly. “I never meant to hurt anyone, either.”
It was a half-truth. After Jonah’s death, Ramson had set out ensuring that that truth never held again. He’d hurt anyone and everyone who got in his way. And even those who didn’t.
Yet as Ana gave him a wide-eyed look, the curiosity on her face open like a book toward him, a part of him faltered.
What do you want?
To right my wrongs. What do you want?
I told you. Revenge.
It had been his motto for the past seven years, even when the molten fire of his anger had cooled to cold steel. Revenge, for what his father had done, for all the broken flaws of this crooked world.
For Ramson’s own flaws, which had cost Jonah Fisher’s life.
Yet as he turned a palm up against the dying light of the fire, he could almost see the ghostly outline of a compass. Jonah’s words whispered in his ears. You can achieve everything in this world, but if it’s for someone else, it’s pointless. Live for yourself.
Ramson almost turned, as though expecting to see Jonah slouched against the wall next to him, watching him through those dark, half-lidded eyes.
Ramson snapped his fist shut. The ghosts vanished, and there was only the witch, sitting before him, her head tilted against the wall as she drifted to sleep.
Such easy prey. He would gain her sympathy, manipulate her into trusting him for his own gain.
That would make it easier for him to hand her—the infamous Blood Witch of Salskoff—over to Alaric Kerlan. A better Trade, the best Ramson had ever made, in exchange for a clean slate.
Yet as he settled on the hard floor, using his own arm as a pillow, he wondered why something that should have been made easy had, instead, seemingly become harder.
It took them five days to reach Novo Mynsk: a sprawling mass of a city in the north of the Empire. It was a city of extremes, where white marble houses and gilded roofs oozed opulence, towering over dark alleyways in which the wet smell of gutters lingered like death. The cobblestone streets were lined with glass-paned storefronts boasting lush silk kechyans, gold jewelry inlaid with precious stones of all colors and sizes, and trinkets that winked and glittered as they passed. Fur-cloaked nobles swarmed the streets, bellies and coin pouches bulging, just steps from the dark alleyways in which half-clothed beggars crouched.
Ana kept close to Ramson as they wound their way through the streets. It was late afternoon and the sun slanted over the marble mansions. Five days of travel had worn her out; she gratefully collapsed on the cold bed of the room they rented in one of the hundreds of pubs scattered throughout the city.
Ramson had purchased fresh clothes for them with a portion of the coins she had taken from the bounty hunters. After a quick meal of beef and onion pirozhky pies, Ana cleaned up and quickly slipped into the new outfit. The destination for the night: the Playpen.
The silks and chiffons slid smoothly over her skin, and Ana shivered as she turned to look at herself in the cracked glass mirror of her rented room. The clothes were extravagant—finer than anything she had worn in the past year. Ramson had mentioned that only the affluent could afford such lavish entertainment; to get in, they had to look and act the part.
Her dress, in her opinion, bordered on suggestive. The midnight-black evening gown draped over the curves of her body like the cool caress of water, pooling at her feet. The back plunged to her waist, and she was thankful for the fur drape that Ramson had bought her. Still, she felt almost naked without her hood.
Ana braided her hair and twisted it into a bun, in an attempt to reproduce some semblance of what her maids at the Palace used to style for her. She dabbed some rouge on her lips, brushed powders on her cheeks, and traced kohl over her eyes. It had been so long since she’d looked in a mirror, and dressing up felt like a strange game she was trying to play, an imitation of a past she could never again have. Her skin had grown rough over the past year, crisscrossed with tiny scars where she’d fallen or where branches or the elements had chipped at her, her lips dry and cracked.
She leaned back, and it felt as though she were staring at a ghost in the looking glass: an echo of the Crown Princess Anastacya Kateryanna Mikhailov she’d been.
A knot formed in her throat at all the possibilities of how her life might have turned out, the could-have-beens if the smallest thing had just gone differently.
Ana shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind. She pulled on a new set of black velvet gloves. Drew a deep breath. Lifted her chin.
Three sharp raps sounded on her door. And, just like that, their plan was in motion.