We needed to do this my way.
“Why what?” I arched a brow.
He pushed closer and my flesh gave way beneath the sharp sting of his blade. I let out a hiss of pain as a thin trickle of warmth beaded toward my chest.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” His voice grew louder, and I could hear the desperation in his words. He was cornered now, a mongoose in a trap, and I the jackal.
“Why did you set me up?” he bit off. “It was too organized. Too specific. You weren’t trying to make money off this, you were out to get me specifically. Why?” His beady eyes were bloodshot and wild, and they were hyperfocused on me. He leaned closer.
“What did I do to you? Tell me before I spill your blood all over your pretty floor.”
His blade was already stained red, and my neck burned with the proof of it. My eyes flicked to the courtyard where the prone body of a slain guard lay. So, that had been the noise we heard earlier. I brought my eyes back to Darbaran.
I’d compensate the guard’s family, but a life was still taken.
A life that wouldn’t be gone if it weren’t for me.
I was sick of people like Darbaran who thought they could do whatever they wanted, kill and use and imprison whoever they wanted while they got rich in the process. That darkness rose up inside me again, the rage building until the edges of my vision blackened and a beast in my chest took hold.
Not a hawk, not a jackal, but a halmasti, the giant wolf hunting on the edge of the mountains. Rage made me confident, and I suddenly wanted Darbaran toknowit was me, not this lacquered, pretty mask. But the real me, the girl he had condemned to a life of prison, torture, even death, all for coins.
I felt for the thread of djinn magic that had transformed me. I felt for it, and I pulled itback.
My nose, my eyes, the bones in my cheeks—I took everything away that was Sanaya until it wasmyface.
Until I fit in my own skin again.
Dania, daughter of the slain weapons master.
Dania, forsaken by her best friend.
Dania, looking at one of her betrayers.
“You want to knowwhy?” I spat the question coming from my own voice this time, deep and certain.
Darbaran shrank away from me, his eyes wide, lips parted. Hestumbled back, lifting his sword from my neck and clutching the blade in shock.
“You.”
“Me.”
I kept walking forward, and he fumbled, falling over his feet until he was on his backside looking up at me.
“I’ll tell you why.” My voice was soft, the hiss of a blade cutting through the night air. “Because you had a choice. You chose to betray me, to sell a girl for money, to frame her for gain. And so, I chose this.” I lifted the glistening dagger in the torchlight of the garden, where the guards I had hired lay dead. Anger burst inside of me. But there was something else there too, savage, elemental.
The power of knowing this was righteous anger.
A history of women and girls being wronged by men who never had any consequences.
Now I would be the consequences.
“I choose vengeance. I choose death. And in the end, that’s what you chose too.”
Darbaran lurched up, swinging his sword in the air, but I dodged the strokes of his blade easily. He stumbled, the blood dripping steadily down his leg and across the parquet floor. He swirled around, running at me again.
“I knew they should have executed you when they had the chance, but that idiot boy wanted you alive.”
I inhaled sharply but didn’t have time to process his comment.
