air. He’d killed May. She wanted, more than anything, to rip him apart, to bleed him dry drop by drop and watch him suffer—
“Ana!” She heard her name as though from a distance. Someone knocked into her from behind.
They crashed to the floor, and she found herself pinned beneath Ramson. He was panting, blood seeping from his reopened wound through the bandages on his abdomen. He slammed her hands to the floor, his full weight on her. “Control yourself,” he snarled. “Think.”
“Get off me!” she screamed.
“We need answers. Who sent him? How did he find us? Can we ally with him—”
“Get. Off. Me.” She spat the words at him.
Ramson’s eyes bore into hers; his grip tightened around her wrists. “No.”
It was the trigger she’d been waiting for. Keeping her hold on the broker, she flung her Affinity at Ramson. He went still, his eyes widening and veins straining in his neck, at his temples, as she took control of his blood.
Ana threw him across the room.
She heard the thud of his body as he slammed against the far wall and crumpled to the floor. A part of her was aware of Yuri and the Affinites watching her, frozen from their hiding places behind Shamaïra’s divans.
Ana ignored them and turned back to the broker. He’d crumpled to the ground, but she easily lifted him again. A strange sense of calm descended upon her as she approached him. “Do you recognize me?” It was as though someone else spoke through her, pulling words through her lips.
The man hung suspended in the air, his body arched, his eyes bulging from his head. He opened his mouth to speak. Instead, blood trickled down his chin.
“No?” Ana continued her advance. A delicious feeling gripped her. “Perhaps 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