Page 1

PROLOGUE

This wasn’t supposed to be how it went down. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Not for her.

For me? Sure, I’d always seen this coming. Had always known my story would finish with me bloody, ruined, undeserving of mercy. I’d be the blackhearted monster who was finally forced to pay his debt. Let’s not pretend we hadn’t seen it coming. The sins of the father are laid upon the son. And those sins stack up—they always do. But it was all right. Because I was ready for it. Ready to meet it head on and pay with my blood. No matter how much it took.

There were endless euphemisms for it. Paying the price. Making the ultimate sacrifice. Laying it all on the line. Answering the call.

Well, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it, I was ready. It was time for me to do what had to be done.

Me. Not her. She was never supposed to be the price we paid.

But then, I’d noticed something about this fucked-up world: you never really got what you wanted out of it, now did you? When had this world ever cared about fairness? About justice? When had it ever spared anything just because it was good?

So, yeah. I really should have known that from the start. We were always fucked.

Because Medra Pendragon? She was goodness personified, even when she didn’t want to believe she was.

The only good thing, the only real thing, the only pure thing in my life . . . was always her.

Ironic that she’d been a gift I hadn’t asked for and tried to reject.

She was the beating heart—not just for me, not just for this school, but for this entire, no-good, blooddamned world. She carried us all. She was strong for so long. She shouldn’t have had to be.

We weren’t enough for her. I wasn’t enough. I was a coward who believed that loving her—letting her love me—would some-how be enough to make things better. Now I was staring down the road ahead with nothing left to bargain with. And where she was supposed to be, there was just empty space.

If she was really gone, then there was nothing left in this world worth saving.

Chapter 1

LUNAYA

Even though it was the second month of Springrise, it was snowing again. Dark gray clouds blotted out the sun. It always seemed to be cloudy here—either it was snowing or it was raining, sometimes a combination of the two.

The manor house was unnaturally quiet as Lunaya crept down the hall. A long row of closed doors was on her right. Tall windows hung with heavy velvet curtains on her left. The air was damp with a hint of mildew. No one cared for this place now. No one would dust the ledges of the windows or see to the curtains when they needed washing. Perhaps once it had been a home, but now it was just a house, haunted and forlorn, a dead thing. Even if no one realized it yet.

Lunaya was one of the few who was permitted to be here—or, at least, someone no one would notice or care about. But she was not free, not in the slightest. Many were not. Most who had once lived here no longer lived at all. So, she was luckier than some. Unlucky compared to others.

She paused when she saw him—a boy, no more than ten or eleven, his pale blond highblood hair long at the neck and in need of a comb. He stood at the very end of the corridor, where he should not be, with his face pressed up against a crack in a door. His hair fell across his eyes as he leaned forward, too focused on spying to notice her approach.

Lunaya came closer, studying the set of his shoulders, the tension of his back. He was listening so hard it seemed to physically hurt him. He must know what the cost would be if he was caught. When she reached him, she closed her fingers gently around one of the boy’s slender shoulders. He started violently, a gasp tearing from his throat, and Lunaya flinched. She ought to have covered his mouth, but such rough ways did not come easily to her.

She put a finger to her lips instead, and the boy’s eyes widened. They were a pale shade of purple. The color was unique to a few of the highblood houses. All could trace their lineages back to the Drakharrows.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Lunaya whispered.

The boy stubbornly lifted his chin. With a sigh, she moved to stand behind him. Not too close: She knew he was afraid of her. After a moment’s hesitation, the boy turned his head back to the crack.

The room within had once been a drawing room, meant for comfort and decorated in excess. The trappings were burgundy and gold. A low table was still littered with overturned crystal goblets and spills of bloodwine that had never been wiped up. A fire smoldered low in the huge stone hearth, flanked by columns decorated with carvings of the Bloodmaiden and her priestesses carrying vases of flowers. Near the fireplace, a man sat bound to a chair—he was the lord of this manor. His fine clothes were torn and marred with blood. Lacerations crisscrossed his arms and blood flowed freely from a cut on his forehead. Across from him stood a young woman with pale white hair woven meticulously into a crown braid. She was beautiful in an unyielding way, her posture perfect, her expression aloof. She wore red leather gloves on hands that rested against the back of a nearby armchair as she watched the man.

Lunaya was too far away to tell if the gloves were coated with blood. She thought they probably were.

A few steps away, a hulking young highblood man rolled his shoulders back and glanced at the woman with an eager, bestial grin. Lunaya felt the boy tense beneath her hand.

In the chair, the lord of the manor gave a wet, hacking cough and lifted his head. He looked back and forth between the high-blood man and woman. “You won’t get away with this.”

The hulking young man’s grin widened. “Isn’t that what they all say, Catherine?” He shook his head. “Fuck, but it gets dull. Nothing else you’d like to add?”

“You know who I am. You know my family.”