“Promise me,” she whispered.
“Promise what?” My voice broke. I was crying now, tears mixing with rain and smoke. “Maman, please. Get up. We have to go. Please.”
“That you'll be more than this.” She touched my face, her palm leaving a smear of blood on my cheek. “More than crowns and cages. Promise me, Sebastian.”
I didn't understand. Didn't understand what she meant or why shewas crying or why her grip was loosening, fingers sliding away from mine no matter how hard I held on.
“I promise,” I choked out. “I promise. Just don't—please don't?—”
Her fingers went still.
She slumped forward, and I caught her, or tried to, but she was too heavy and I was too small and the world kept spinning without asking permission. Her head rested against my shoulder, and I held her there in the rain, rocking slightly, waiting for her to wake up.
She didn't wake up.
A final explosion lit the street, turning everything white and sharp. Debris scattered like shrapnel, raining down in a shower of metal and stone. Something skittered across the pavement, spinning, coming to rest inches from my hand.
A crossbow bolt. Broken. The shaft snapped in half, but the tip was intact.
Obsidian.
It gleamed under the flickering streetlights, dark and perfect and wrong. Beautiful in a way that made my stomach turn. I stared at it, then at my mother's body, then at the blood pooling around us, rain washing it into thin red rivers that ran toward the gutters.
Silence crept in. Not real silence. The hiss of dying fires. The groan of twisted metal cooling. The distant wail of sirens that would arrive too late to matter. But silence where it counted.
Where her heartbeat used to be.
I heard footsteps. Measured. Calm. Too calm for what had just happened.
Marcel appeared through the smoke like a ghost, immaculate despite the carnage. His suit was perfect, not a thread out of place. His silver hair was slicked back, unruffled by wind or rain. He moved like he'd been expecting this. Like he'd rehearsed his entrance.
He knelt beside my father, who was slumped against a guardrail ten feet away, bleeding from half a dozen wounds and staring at the woman he couldn't save. His hands were shaking. I'd never seen my father's hands shake before.
“Your Majesty,” Marcel murmured. He placed a hand on my father's shoulder, gentle and paternal. “I'm so sorry. So very sorry.”
My father didn't answer. Just gripped Marcel's sleeve with one bloody hand, white-knuckled, trembling. “Find who did this.” His voice was hollow. Broken. “Find them, Marcel. Make them pay.”
Marcel nodded solemnly, his expression perfectly arranged into sorrow. “Of course, Your Majesty. We'll hunt them to the ends of the earth. I swear it.”
His gloved hand moved while he spoke. Subtle. Practiced. So smooth I almost missed it. He picked something up from the pavement beside my father's knee. A shell casing, small and gleaming. Or maybe evidence of something worse. Something that would lead back to whoever planned this.
He slipped it into his pocket in one fluid motion, erasing it from existence.
I stayed on my knees, my mother's charm cutting into my palm where I'd clenched my fist around it. The broken bolt gleamed beside me like a promise I didn't know how to keep yet.
Rain drummed against my skull, cold and relentless. Lightning split the sky, turning everything sharp and white and merciless. Thunder followed, shaking the ground.
I stood.
Slowly. Carefully. Like something inside me had broken and been reassembled wrong, all the pieces in different places.
Too small. Too still. Like the storm bent around me, like the city held its breath and waited to see what I'd become.
The vow formed in my chest, silent and sharp as the bolt in my hand.
Never again.
Never helpless. Never small. Never watching while people I loved bled out on rain-slick streets because I wasn't strong enough or fast enough or brave enough to stop it.
