Page 153 of The Dark Lord’s Guide to Honeymooning (and Other Acts of Tyranny)

Is sweeter than the blood we’ll take.”

My voice was controlled, commanding, turning what could have been a simple soldier’s song into something genuinely menacing. The temperature in the room seemed to drop as I continued, describing the certainty of blood, the emptying of the soul, the moment when violence became inevitable.

“We know the cost, we pay it still,

The battlefield demands its fill,

But in this breath before we fight,

We’re gods of war in mortal night.”

When I finished, the silence was absolute. I returned to my seat, and the building’s magic settled around me like a satisfied cat. The warmth returned. My ale tasted right again.

Elowen launched into another song, something cheerful and bawdy that pulled the room back from whatever edge I’d pushed it toward. Gradually, the normal tavern atmosphere returned.

I should have felt satisfaction at a reputation maintained.

Instead, I felt… strange.

The hearth-spirit had looked at my darkness—really looked at it—and simply accepted it. Not tried to change it. Not recoiled. Just incorporated it into the evening like it was as valid as Thorne’s soldier’s ballad.

This is what it feels like to be seen and not destroyed.

The thought came unbidden, and immediately, something else stirred.

That ancient presence that lived in the spaces between my thoughts. It noticed the crack—the moment of genuine feeling, of lowered defenses—and pressed against it like testing a weak point in armor.

I slammed the walls back up. My runes burned cold as I forced everything back into its box.

Fuck.

I’d been vulnerable before. Stripped down, broken apart, someone else’s hands on every piece of me—body, mind, will. I’d survived by holding on to one truth: No matter what was done to my body, to my mind, I was still in here somewhere.

The voice that plagued me was different.

Malphas had wanted to own me, but the fragment wanted to consume me.

And the warmth in my chest wouldn’t fully dissipate, no matter how hard I tried to smother it. Something about the offering to the hearth-spirit had cracked me open, and the fragment was already slithering through the gap.

I watched the room, forcing my breathing to steady. Villains and criminals, all of them. Content. Present. Participating in something that wasn’t about power or survival, just about being human together for a few hours.

When did I stop knowing how to do that?

I knew exactly when. The first time I’d shown genuine emotion during one of my mother’s carvings and she’d had to start over because her hand had slipped.

“Emotion makes you sloppy, Kazimir. Sloppy gets you killed.”

She’d been right. Just not in the way she’d meant.

Emotion didn’t make me sloppy. It made me accessible. Every genuine feeling was a doorway the fragment could exploit. Every moment of vulnerability gave it more room to work.

“You all right, boss?” Thorne’s voice cut through my thoughts.

“Fine,” I said automatically.

Thorne jerked his chin toward Istvan at the bar. “If we’re going to grab him, now’s the time.”

Right. The mission.