Page 27

“I failed you,” Nix says. “Do what you must, master.”

Darius extends his hand. His nails are unnaturally long. “I made you both. And what I made, I can unmake.”

I don’t know what Nix did to displease him but I know that, in this moment, Darius is willing to kill him for it.

Four centuries of service. All his great plans. And he will dispose of Nix, and me, and start all over again with better progeny if it pleases him to do so.

He exiled Zephyra decades ago because she refused to do as he asked.

We mean nothing to him.

We are not his sons. Not his kin. We are experiments.

But Nix doesn’t see it. He is so blinded by Darius, so infected by his mind games, that he will kneel there and willingly die for him.

I don’t decide to kill Darius.

It just happens. A sword comes off the wall. And unmaking our maker takes one stroke. Just one. Big and clean.

He bound Nix and me to one another and made it so we could never hurt each other but his pride and arrogance let him believe we would never dream of hurting him.

He was wrong.

His body falls beside my kneeling brother, and the hall is very quiet.

Then Nix screams.

Not at Darius. At me. I stand there with the sword hanging from my hand, waiting for him to understand.

“He was going to kill you, Nix. I stopped it, and I would do it again, a thousand times, without hesitating. We are free of him now.”

I wait for him to experience the relief I’m feeling. But when my brother finally looks up at me, fury is etched into the lines of his face.

“What did you do? Lucien. What did you do?”

“I saved you.”

“You killed him.”

He charges for me, grabbing the sword from my hand. But when he swings for me, the blade falls from his grasp and flies across the floor.

I stand stock still as he tries again, and again, and again to end my life.

Eventually, he stops. His back is to me. He is shaking. Then he leaves, carrying Darius’s body.

I let him go. I tell myself he needs a decade, perhaps two. But three nights later, I find out where he went.

A workhouse on the northern edge of the city. A grey building full of women and children.

Nix doesn’t leave a single one of them alive.

No one.

In all our days on this earth, we have never killed children. It was a line even Nix refused to cross. And in one night, he killed more than I could count.

He was thorough, and he was unhurried, and he wanted it found.

He wanted me to find it.