like a beast now, breathing heavily, her hands glazed with blood.
“Milady!” one of the guards said, his claws out. “Are you all right?”
“So to speak,” Valaine answered. She looked at me, concern twinkling in her eyes as she rushed across the room and knelt by my side. “Are you okay, Tristan?”
I nodded slowly. “I’ll live. Maritza packed quite the punch. She took me by surprise.”
“I’m sorry. I had to kill her. She wouldn’t have stopped until one of us was dead,” she whispered. “I saw you get hurt, and… I lost it.”
Despite the savagery we’d both survived throughout the day, culminating in this equally startling incident, I was stunned by Valaine’s quick reaction and apparent affection toward me. At least I wasn’t the only one feeling it all as it shifted around us—our realities, our emotions changing, adjusting, then readjusting until we were brought closer to one another, often without even realizing it.
“Thank you,” I said to her. “You took her down. That’s all that matters.”
“She would’ve been useful to interrogate.” Valaine sighed while I got up and dusted some of the wood splinters off me. The guards checked Maritza’s pockets, her blood spreading and seeping into the handwoven carpet. “Anything?” she asked them.
They produced a black-and-white braid—hers, as Egan’s was on the floor, soaked in Maritza’s blood. “She was a Darkling, too,” the second guard observed. “Are all the Makios Darklings?!”
Valaine shook her head. “I doubt it. Maritza and Egan shared a common goal, clearly… pretending to be upstanding citizens while plotting with the Darklings. I know the Makios dynasty well. They’re good people.”
“Maritza struck me as someone else, entirely,” I said, genuinely baffled. “I… I didn’t see this coming.”
“None of us did,” Valaine replied, her brow furrowed. “But it happened. It’s done. And we’re nowhere closer to the truth. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know the Makios dynasty all that well, either. I mean, I thought I knew Egan. Obviously, that’s not true.”
The first guard straightened his back. “What do you want us to do, Lady Crimson?”
She exhaled sharply, glancing around the room. She picked up another handkerchief from the floor, where the blood hadn’t reached. It had fallen along with the coffee table and several other rolled-up handkerchiefs. Wiping the blood from her hands, Valaine looked at the gold guards again.
“Their children are upstairs, sleeping. Have one of their next of kin come over and take them away. Then, when the house is clear, turn it upside down,” she said firmly. “There must be something in here linking Egan and Maritza to the Darklings. If it had been just Egan, I would’ve been inclined to assume he had a secret hideaway somewhere else…”
“But with the two of them, chances are said hideaway is in here,” I finished her sentence, nodding in agreement. Sadness engulfed me like the coldest, most peculiar fire. “The children… they’re orphans now.”
Valaine was trying hard to keep a straight face, but I knew this was affecting her on a deeper level. Her body language frequently betrayed her. “It’s not something I’m proud of. But I had no other choice.” She looked at the guard again. “Also notify my father that all the members of the Makios dynasty must be brought in for questioning. Just so we’re on the safe side.”
The soldier nodded briefly, backing away.
“No one is blaming you, Valaine,” I said. Suddenly, Maritza’s words came back to me. “What cycle was she trying to end, exactly?”
Valaine shrugged, equally confused. “I have no idea. She wanted me dead to… end the cycle? Did I hear her right?”
“Yes. She mentioned the cycle,” I replied, then glanced at the gold guards. “Do any of you know anything about a cycle? Any kind of cycle?”
The two stared at each other and back at me. “The solar cycle. The moon cycle. The season cycle,” one of them said. “None have anything to do with… well, with this,” he added, motioning around.
“This is not making much sense,” Valaine groaned, sinking into an armchair.
Why had Maritza been so adamant about killing Valaine? Why were all the Darklings so hell-bent on taking her out? What was it about Valaine that drew their ire and bloodthirst?
Once more, we had more questions than answers. This time, however, we also got confirmation regarding the black-and-white braid as an identifier for the Darklings, and the undeniable certainty that Valaine was their target. They weren’t going to stop until she was dead.
The Darklings had a problem now, too. Because I wasn’t going to let