I gripped it, hearing Safiyya’s voice in my head over and over.
Use it first. Use it first.
IWith the last piece of consciousness I had, I lifted the blade and slammed it into his bulging neck.
His hands dropped from my throat, and his blood splattered across my face.
I gasped as air filled my lungs and the blackness in my vision receded. The cool burning from the bangles at my wrist was still there, a reminder that I was still alive.
The General collapsed on top of me, but he was still moving, gurgling blood in my ear.
Blindly, I lifted the knife and struck again, stabbing himin the fleshy part of his neck.
Then I tore the blade out and struck him again.
And again.
Blood sprayed over me, coating my face, and Mishah’s screams had become an ever-present noise until I couldn’t tell if they were even hers or if they were mine.
Was she still in the room?
Was I?
Was I passed out on the floor and imagining this whole thing?
But the hot, sticky blood on my skin felt real. And the weight of the general’s body slumped on top of me was not a figment of my imagination.
I pushed him off me in a daze and rolled away, scrambling to my knees and coming to all fours. My throat was raw and I still felt like I was drowning, but I was alive.
I was alive.
Awareness slowly trickled back in, the thrumming in my brain fading. I blinked, realizing that the leg of the chair I had been staring at in front of mewasn’t a chair at all.
It was boots.
Which led to legs. And as I raised my eyes, an entire fae male was standing before me, looking down at me, taking in my blood-soaked smock, the letter opener in my hand and the body of the Viceroy’s general, which had been stabbed repeatedly by said letter opener.
It was the young man I’d seen earlier in the library, and a slight fluttering of relief went through me. He wasn’t a soldier come to arrest me, he was a scholar.
I could reason with a scholar.
Iknewscholars.
I was playing with my father’s parchments before I could walk, and spending time at his philosophical meetings almost every evening. This was the type of person Iknew—someonewho used logic and thought and reasoned with facts. He didn’t have to turn me in, not yet anyway. I could make him see reason, escape with the book and be long gone before the soldiers came looking for me.
I swept my gaze around the room to check if Ramishah was okay. She stood beside a bookshelf and clasped her hands in front of her. They were shaking. Her head was bowed, and she was covered in blood.
“Mishah, are you okay?” My voice was a weak croak.
She didn’t answer me, and I cast my gaze over her, seeing the red marks on her throat from the General’s hands. I probably had similar fingerprints on my own neck.
Anger spiked in my blood once more, thinking of the attack and how vulnerable we both were.
I looked back to the young man in front of me. “Thanks for the help by the way,” I said sardonically, nodding over to the General dead on the floor.
If I thought the scholar would be surprised at my censure, I would have been wrong.
The shadow of a smile quirked his lips, which looked foreign on his face—as if they were unused to making such a gesture.
