on her lips on her throat on her breasts, hot and thick as he gargled and spat and flailed, clawing at her neck, muscles taut and fingers curled, but the blood, O, the blood,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
already fleeing him in spurts and floods, down his bare chest and over the throne beneath them as he surged upward, fighting to the last, and yet she clung on, legs wrapped around him like a lover as he bucked, as she stabbed and stabbed and stabbed until he stopped fighting, until he stopped punching and kicking and breathing, his final exhalation a bubbling whisper, his final touch a caress as his hand fell away and his eyes rolled back and still, still she didn’t stop,
chunk
chunk
chunk,
and she dragged her forearm across her eyes now, wet with sweat and blood, mouth set into a thin line as she shifted from stabbing to sawing, hand trembling with the effort, parting muscle and cartilage and bone as Sigursson roared, scrambling up the rope ladder to the aid of his captain, his lord, his king, but by the time he made the balcony Mia was done, tendons standing taut in her neck as she leaned back, damp popping, wet crunching, pulling her bloody prize from its shoulders.
Einar Valdyr’s head went tumbling across the floorboards, through the balcony railing, and down to the floor below, spraying a slick of blood. It bounced once before rolling into the tidal pool and disappearing in a swirl of red. Mia grabbed Valdyr’s headless corpse by the collar of his macabre greatcoat, hauled it out of the Scoundrel’s Throne, and sent it to the deck with a swift kick to its arse. Valdyr’s slaveboy was on his knees, utterly aghast, slipping in the thick pool of blood as he scrambled away through the mess. The onlookers in the tiers below were in equal parts horrified and awed, watching slack-jawed as Mia turned and flopped onto the throne, half-naked and covered in gore, long dark hair soaked with blood barely protecting her modesty.
She propped her bare feet up on Valdyr’s headless, twitching corpse. Fished about in the arse pocket of her britches, wincing, and finally pulled out her thin, battered cigarillo box. Eclipse coalesced at her feet, black fangs bared, hackles raised.
Standing on the balcony’s edge, Sigursson looked at her in utter disbelief.
“Just who. The fuck. Are you?” he demanded.
Mia leaned back on her throne, put a cigarillo to her lips.
“Well,” she said, wiping at the blood on her face. “If I understand this Heritance thing correctly … I think you can call me Your Majesty?”
CHAPTER 26
PROMISES
Mia had put Valdyr’s greatcoat on, but refused to wash his blood off.
She sat in a tall chair at one end of a long table, red gore crusting on porcelain skin. To her right sat Cloud Corleone and BigJon, looking like they’d each aged twenty years in the last ten minutes. Tric loomed at her right side, bare-chested, glowering. Without his robe, Mia saw fresh rends on his body: stab wounds in his belly, across the muscles in his arms, three in the flesh around his heart. She could see the flush of life plainly in his skin now, blood glittering in the new wounds, she was sure of it. But his arms were still spattered to the elbows with a black as dark as night, eyes gleaming like that pool of godsblood beneath the ’Grave.
Sid, Bladesinger, and Butcher stood around Mia’s chair, and Ash sat to her left with Jonnen on her lap. When he’d first set eyes on her after she’d butchered Valdyr, her little brother had simply looked at her and smiled.
“Well played, de’lai.”
At the other end of the table sat Ulfr Sigursson, a little paler beneath the handsome. Other members of the wulfguard were gathered around him, black-clad and tense as bowstrings, looking somewhere between shocked and murderous.
Mia could hear the chaos in the chamber outside. Captains howling at each other across the Hall of Scoundrels, scuffles and faint curses and breaking glass.
Mia’s eyes were locked on Sigursson’s, her stare cool and even. Blood was coagulating on her skin, in her hair and eyelashes and under her fingernails. All her lessons from Shahiid Aalea were ringing in her head. She knew the next sixty seconds would utterly define her relationship with this man. That, at its heart, this was a game of blink. The first person to speak was showing their weakness. Their fear. And watching the wheels turning behind this man’s eyes—former right hand of the