in her hands. A golden mask covered her face, black paint on her lips, parting now as she spoke with a voice that shook the world.
“Father,” she said.
“Yes?” Mercurio answered.
She looked at him then. All the years between them became nothing at all. He was back in his little store, before it all began. Just the two of them, alone together. She was eleven years old, sitting at his feet as he showed her how to sweet-talk a padlock. She was thirteen, flint-black eyes glittering as she demanded to know why boys didn’t bleed. She was fifteen, borrowing his cigarillos and telling him some bawdy joke, a skinny, scrappy thing with a crooked fringe, not yet grown into her own skin. And it struck him in that moment just how much a part of him she was, just how much she meant, just how deeply she’d changed him, forever and always. This girl who’d dared where others had failed, who had never ever seen the world the way others did.
Nor had he, really.
Goddess, how he loved her …
She smiled at him. Just for a heartbeat. Black eyes gleaming with tears she’d never allow to fall in a place like this. And it struck him then, just how much she loved him back.
“I didn’t mean you,” she whispered sadly.
And she turned her dark, shaded eyes to the man behind him.
“I meant you,” she breathed.
Julius Scaeva looked at Mia with a stare as black as the blood inside him. He hovered perhaps twenty feet above the ground, dark, translucent wings rippling in the air about him, liquid black dripping from his fingertips. It was easy to see the thing inside him, the godling howling and smashing itself against the cage of his flesh. But the imperator of all Itreya seemed to have remembered himself for this last dance—some small part of what he’d been dragging itself back up to a thin and cracking surface. Enough at least to bare his teeth in a ghastly parody of a smile.
“It’s good to see you again, daughter,” he said.
“Mia!”
Mercurio and Mia both looked to the ruins of Scaeva’s throne, where young Jonnen was still crouched among the wreckage. His eyes were wide with fear, little hand outstretched toward his sister. But the shadows rose up from the floor like razored teeth, barring the way between the girl and her brother.
“Let him go, Father,” Mia said. “This is yours and mine now.”
“He is my son.” Scaeva’s face was twisted, black on his teeth. “My legacy.”
“He’s a nine-year-old boy! Let him go, you fucking cunt!”
“Your mother called me that once.” Scaeva smiled faintly, frowned at the ceiling as if lost in memory. “I believe I took it as a compliment.”
Mia shook her head, looking around at the wreckage of the room. The shattered throne. The spreading flames. The bloodstains of brave senators and loyal soldiers and beloved brothers smeared upon the floor. The remains of Scaeva’s own bride crushed under glittering glass. Everything he’d wrought, everything he’d lied and stolen and killed for, and it had all come to this. Black blood boiling in his belly. Spilling from his eyes and bubbling on his lips. She looked on the man with a sort of awful pity.
“You thought you were building. And all this time, you were only digging.” She shook her head. “Now look what you’ve made of yourself. All for fear of me.”
“What I made of myself?”
Scaeva laughed, strings of black drool between his teeth. He opened his hand. And there in his palm sat a pawn, carved of polished ebony. Spattered with tar black and blood-red. The imperator’s hand was shaking, veins stretched like rusted chains under his skin. The black began spilling from his mouth again as he spoke, too much of the broken god inside him now to hold it all in.
“I warned you about joining a game you cannot hope to win. Do you see this, daughter? This is what you’ve made of us both. Mere pieces in a game of gods.”
“Take heart then, bastard. Because the game ends tonight.”
The shadowviper coiled around Scaeva’s neck bared its fangs.
“… Do you still not see what your precious Goddess has made you…?”
Mia didn’t even meet the snake’s stare.
“Whisper, if you speak one more word to me,” she warned it softly, “I promise things will go very badly for you.”
The serpent narrowed his not-eyes, hissing softly.
“… I do not fear you, little girl. You should never have come here. Least of all alone…”