Her hands shook, her eyes blinking rapidly. “No, Majesty.”
“No. That’s right.”
She stood up.
“Do continue with your rhetoric now that we are in a more intimate position?” I asked.
She licked her lips, clasping her hands together as if in prayer. Pitiful, her convictions dead without any buffer between us.
“Go on,” I pressed.
“I just think that?—”
“I know what you think, I know how you want me to be.”
Deadly fissures crawled across my reason for the second time tonight. A more judicious voice begged me to stop, but I’d already seen the course of action I would take. To give her and the rebels exactly what they wanted from me. Show them all in this room and across the world how my tolerance was beginning to waver.
I plunged my hand into Tilly’s chest, closing my hand around her heart. Fear chimed around me like deathly bells, the Heart of All recoiling in shock.
A wicked veil of darkness fell over my soul. Tilly’s mouth fell open, blood oozing from her lips, her frightened eyes locked onto mine. She couldn’t speak, only wait to meet her fate.
“You want me to kill you, don’t you?” I asked. “That’s what you told me once more.”
“Majesty,” Vaughn whispered, pleading in his tone.
How delicate a vampire’s heart felt in my hand. If I tore it free or closed my hand tightly enough to crush it, Tilly would be bone dust.
Tilly. Tilly. Tilly. A vampire of many critical opinions. Yes, I was responsible for this mess, but there was something in seeking redemption, in striving to make things better.
I deserved that chance, didn’t I?
Only, doubt lurked within me. A real sense of failure hanging around my neck.
Vampires like Tilly didn’t help.
Vampires like Tilly could not be trusted.
Vampires like Tilly were correct. I did need to grow more of a backbone.
“Thank you,” I told her. “I think I see the light.”
I tore out her heart, her body falling to the floor. A mewling sound escaped her lips before she collapsed into a pile of crimson bone dust.
Seconds tick by, the silence as thick as molasses. Her heart continued to beat languidly in my hand, blood streaming down my arm, seeping through my fingers.
“This is what she wanted,” I said, swaddled in darkness.
Her heart popped, now just bone dust joining the rest of the pile by my feet.
Her death drove a spike into the Heart of All, drilling another unfillable hole, an empty void whispering Tilly’s name.
I looked to my people, brimming with fury and enjoying their terror.
Reason had fled, stripping away my layers, revealing a raw, alien version of myself I didn’t like.
I’m going too far…
“The old ways are done,” I spoke, my tone pure ice. “There will be no rebellion, only unity.” I paused to meet each of them in the eye, to let them see how serious I was. “One by one, you will come before me on this stage and bend the knee. Thrall and vampire alike. If not, you will die by my hand, right here. No dungeons, no exceptions.”
