“If you bleed my daughter, I will kill you.”
The calm of my voice does nothing to betray the protective violence shredding my insides.
I drag my eyes away to meet Tyroth’s merciless stare. “It may not be this dae, or this lifetime, but Creators hear me, I will have vengeance on your body and your filthy, rotten soul.”
He arches a brow. “A female?”
Something about the way he says it makes me flinch, like he sharpened the words into pins he just punched through her flesh.
His impassive gaze slides down to Kyzari, up again. Deadly calm, he says, “How disappointing. She’ll no doubt grow to be just like you. A wretched cunt.”
I snarl.
He smiles—a rarity I want to rip off his face, though it’s gone in a blink. “Now, Zatia.”
I shred Tyroth with a stare, still snarling as a pin is pressed into Kyzari’s heel. Though she squirms, she doesn’t pull from my breast, settling back into her suckling.
Tyroth stands stoic and unmoving, features poised, holding all the power in his clenched fists while the bead of blood is mixed with a loose tincture, dribbled within the ring of runes that begin to glow in my peripheral.
The liquid branches out like the roots of a tree.
I don’t have to look to see that the thickest two point to myself andsomewhere else. North, to where Kaan no doubt resides. I don’t look, but I see the moment Tyroth slides his attention to the spreading tincture.
The moment his features harden, suspicions confirmed.
He lifts his chin, lids lowering until his stare is a slit glower. “You whore.”
I ignore him, choosing to spend my final heartbeats with the one who matters, dropping my gaze to Kyzari … wishing I could lean down and kiss her pale lashes. Instead, I sing to her—starting Mah’s song from the very beginning, moving softly through the tune.
I’m only two verses in when Tyroth mutters a spear-headed phrase.
Bulder doesn’t respond immediately, like he spent a moment fighting the order. Or at least that’s what I choose to believe, that he’s hoping I have the power to shift my body to the side.
I don’t.
I gag as a barb of stone punches into my back, busts through my ribs with a shatter of gouging pain. My chest fills with a flood of cold before it emerges through the front of me, spraying blood across Kyzari’s face.
She flinches. Opens her eyes, not quite enough for me to see their color before Tyroth rips her from my breast.
Blood boils up my throat with a serrated scream forged from a depth I didn’t know I possessed. Though to me, Kyzari’s shrill cry hits harder.
Sharper.
Tyroth bundles her within a cloth, then tucks her against his chest as life rushes from my veins, my body loosening much faster than my panicked mind still clinging to every detail it can frantically snatch.
The Bloodlace hobbles to my side and begins gathering her belongings. She glances up, looks at me through wide, sorrowful eyes—
Another sharp sentence spits from Tyroth’s lips.
A stone lance punches up through the underside of the Bloodlace’s jaw, out the top of her skull, blood weeping from her still-open eyes—now flat and lifeless.
Pushing past her, Tyroth reaches forward to jiggle the diadem bound against my brow, his upper lips pinching together, threatening to twitch into a snarl when the headpiece doesn’t budge.
He sighs, brings Kyzari close enough to tease me with her scent. To touch—to pull close to my chest where she belongs—if I could only lift my arms.
The runes on the diadem pulse with a warm throb before one of the many clawed tendrils loosen. Like a pin slowly sliding from my brain …
My skull …
