you’ll remember the young earth Affinite you took in Kyrov. The child you put on show tonight. The one you murdered.”
Recognition lit the broker’s face. He struggled against her hold, his mouth opening and closing like that of a fish out of water. Ana was a mere arm’s length away now; she could see the veins of his eyes erupting, red bleeding across the white. Blood gushed from his lips.
In that moment, she recalled the Salskoff Winter Market, the screams and the terror as her Affinity ripped the life from eight innocent people. She heard Luka’s voice—the voice of reason that had guided her hand and her Affinity.
Luka would counsel forgiveness.
Looking into the broker’s pleading face, Ana searched for a sliver of pity.
Instead, she found the memory of May’s bright eyes dimmed to emptiness.
And another voice whispered to her then:
Monster.
Ana smiled, lifting a thickly veined hand and gripping the broker’s neck. It glistened, slippery and red. The blood felt like exhilaration beneath her fingertips. “Are you afraid?” she whispered. “You should know that it sometimes takes one monster to destroy another.” She pressed her face close to his, forcing his terrified gaze to meet the crimson of hers. “Remember my face as you burn in hell, deimhov.”
With a twitch of her fingers, she pulled.
There was a wet ripping sound. Red poured from him like wine from an uncorked bottle, pooling on the floorboards and forming puddles beneath Ana’s boots.
As the blood drained from him, her control over the lifeless body slipped. The corpse dropped to the floor with a thunk.
Her Affinity receded like a tide, taking with it the red of her vision, the buzz in her ears, and her adrenaline. The broker’s corpse lay at her feet, limbs bent at odd angles like a broken doll.
Ana stumbled back. Nausea flooded her stomach, and bile rose, thick and bitter, to her tongue. The rest of the parlor swam into dizzying view. Overturned settees and divans. Shattered globefires and torn books. Broken shelves. And, at the far end of the room, Ramson’s body curled against the wall where she’d flung him.
A sob choked Ana’s throat. The room had emptied at some point; the heavy brocade curtains leading to the backroom and the rest of the dacha were drawn back, and Yuri’s gaze found her. Shamaïra stood behind him, clasping an Affinite child in her arms. The rest of the Affinites behind them.
Tears blurred Ana’s vision. “I’m sorry…I didn’t…I…” Words faltered on her lips. There was nothing she could say that would justify what she had done tonight, before the eyes of a dozen witnesses.
Because you are a monster.
She was spiraling, shrinking into memories of her eight-year-old self, the world a dizzying kaleidoscope of screams and terror. Her breaths came in shallow gasps.
Ana turned and staggered out the door.
The predawn air stung her cheeks, the cold rushing into her bones and sucking out every last bit of warmth. The shadow of the Syvern Taiga stretched before her, and she remembered the night she’d lost everything and run into its darkness.
Tonight, she stood to lose everything again. May, the light in her life, had kept her grounded, kept her good, and showed her the importance of love.
She was gone.
But there was one person left, Ana realized as Shamaïra’s dacha faded into a small blur of golden light.
Luka was still alive. And he needed her.
She was shaking as she continued to plunge forward. The town of Novo Mynsk dozed beneath a sky that shifted from black to a dark violet with the softest of blues fringing the edges.
Footsteps fell behind her. A familiar voice called her name.
Ana slowed. Turned.
Yuri’s fire-red hair was outlined in the faraway glow of Shamaïra’s dacha. “Don’t go,” he said.
She had a sudden memory of them as children back at the Palace. Her, after her worst rages or days of silence, screaming at him to go away. And Yuri, sitting against her door until the next morning, her tea long gone cold. It had been the little things that anchored her to the present—the sigh of his roughspun servant’s tunic as he stirred on the other side of the door, the gentle knock and soft whisper that he would be back with her breakfast, the slight clink of her teacup in the early-morning silence as he left with velvet steps. The smallest reminders that no matter what she became, no matter what her Affinity made her into, there was someone on the other side of that door, waiting for her.