A pale, broken,beautifuldoll on a pedestal, her voice a monotone drone as she parrots Aria’s poison. My heart shatters all over again. She’s giving up. She’s sacrificing herself for us, and it’s a fate worse than death. I close my eyes, unable to watch the final act.
If she dies, I’ll follow.
After I kill as many people here as my failing body physically can.
Then something changes. Her voice. It’s no longer flat, no longer defeated. It rings with a chilling, divine authority that cuts through the ballroom’s oppressive silence like a shard of ice.
“As your goddess,” she proclaims, “as your one true leader, I command you to prove your devotion. I command you toshed your mortal coils, remove your masks, and join me in the eternal. Kill yourselves.”
My eyes snap open. What?
A man in the front row, one of the masked fanatics, pulls a wicked-looking dagger from his belt and removes his mask. He looks at Ellie with tears of pure ecstasy streaming down his face. He doesn’t hesitate. He draws the blade across his own throat in a smooth, practiced arc. A fountain of crimson sprays into the air, and he drops like a stone.
Shock, cold and sharp, lances through me, momentarily overriding the pain. It’s a distraction. The only one I’m going to get.
The guard holding me, his grip like a vise on my arm, is mesmerized. His head is turned, his gaze through the mask fixed on the spectacle unfolding before him. He’s so captivated by the holy carnage that he forgets the heathen in his hands.
I don’t think. I just move. Every ounce of strength I have left, every bit of rage and grief and love for the woman on that stage, I channel into one motion. I drive my elbow back into his solar plexus.
He grunts, his grip loosening for a fraction of a second. It’s all I need.
My hand reaches for the bedazzled dagger tucked in my sock. Aria’s goons took my favorite, but ha ha. Joke’s on her. I always keep two.
Stabby One and Stabby Two.
Stabby Two is gaudy, the hilt encrusted with fake gems—the real ones were too expensive, dammit—but the blade is sharp.
I rip it free and, with a guttural roar, I slam it backward into his side. I feel the tip punch through leather and flesh. He gasps, a wet, bubbling sound, and stumbles away from me, his hands flying to the wound.
That’s the spark that lights the inferno.
The spell is broken. The reverence shatters, replaced by raw, primal terror. The music cuts off. A woman screams as the man beside her falls, his face a mask of surprise as he clutches the knife buried in his stomach.
Chaos erupts.
The faithful are no longer killing themselves; they’re panicking, trampling each other to get to the exits. The ballroom becomes a maelstrom of screaming bodies and spraying blood.
I scan the pandemonium, my heart hammering against my bruised ribs. Ellie. Where is she?
The dais is empty. I’ve lost her.
“Zane!” Dominic’s voice, a raw rasp from my left. He’s on his feet, having used the same momentary distraction to overpower his own guard. He’s a mess, but he’s moving.
I spot Beckett, still on one knee, swaying but conscious, his guard frozen in horror at the sight of his comrades dying. I lurch toward him, grabbing the guard’s head and smashing it into my knee. He goes down with a sickening crunch. I pull Beckett to his feet. “We have to find her!”
My eyes dart through the chaos, searching for a flash of her dress, a glimpse of her hair.
And then I see them. A small knot of POP fucks, their masks firmly in place, is dragging a struggling figure toward a side exit. Aria is leading the pack, and the figure they’re hauling away is Ellie.
“There!” I yell, pointing.
Rage, white-hot and blinding, eclipses everything else.
I’ve always had two types of anger.
The first, and most common, arrives wearing bells.
It startles me into motion, bright and busy, a fever that makes my hands flutter and my mouth smile too wide. I laugh at the wrong moments. Words spill out sharp but playful, barbed with wit. This particular brand of anger is incandescent—too hotto be contained—so it escapes as humor, as theatrics, as a kind of manic grace. Anyone watching might mistake me for amused, but beneath the grin is a frantic energy, a need todo somethingbefore the feeling burns a hole straight through me.
