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I know how much horrorIcan bring about even when I want to do the right thing.
That thought—the thought that’s held me back a thousand times before—crosses my mind, and my gaze snags on the trickle of liquid seeping from an alleyway over the dirt road. The fading sun lights it crimson.
Blood.
My feet move without consulting the rest of me. I sprint toward the alley even as both my head and my heart tangle up with indecision.
I don’t intervene. Not like this—not when my control might slip—
There has to besomethingI can do with just my hands and the skills I’ve learned. I know how to stop bleeding, how to bind a wound. I—
I throw myself into the alley and skid to a halt just before I smack right into the body slumped there.
It’s a woman, glossy chestnut hair scattered around her pale, blood-flecked face, her dark cloak fallen away from a lavender silk dress that manages to shimmer even amid the grime of the alley. Gold glints at her wrist.
Someone like her doesn’t belonghere. She—
She’s bleeding out from a gash where a knife’s stabbed into the side of her neck.
Snapping out of my shock, I drop to my knees and press my fingers to the wound around the blade. Yanking the knife out will only make the blood flow faster. Not that it’s flowing at all slowly as it is.
The woman’s eyelids flutter. She’s still alive, however many fleeting seconds she has left. Her life is gushing away in a pulsing torrent beneath my useless hands.
My magic resonates through my limbs, prickling into my bones. My posture stiffens against it.
No. The power inside me can’t save a life.
I knowthatbetter than I know anything in my whole damned existence.
The noblewoman’s lips part, but nothing comes out except another sputter of blood. Gods, she doesn’t look any older than my twenty years.
My gaze locks with hers beneath her twitching eyelids. She stares back at me with desperate intensity and yet already fading away.
I open my mouth to stammer some kind of apology, as if anything I can say would make up for the dire end she’s about to meet… and the whole world spins.
My vision grays, and my sense of my body disintegrates. A whirl of images floods my consciousness.
Stone towers. Crumpled papers. Piles of books on a table.
Spinning dresses in a rainbow of colors. A reflection preening in a mirror.
Four men. Four men standing around a desk, each of them so striking I don’t know where to look first.
One impossibly tall and brawny, with hair the same dark red as the blood I’ve been trying to stanch.
Another warm and grinning wide as his tawny curls tumble over deep green eyes.
The third with a sharply bright gaze behind the polished mask that covers most of his bronze-brown face.
The last with his hands on his hips and a smirk curling his full lips beneath the fall of his sun-kissed waves.
All of them are gazing back at me, so avidly my nerves shiver as if a bolt of lightning has crackled through me.
The bolt blazes right through my skull, hazing my mind white and then black and then—
I drag in a hitch of breath as I come back to myself, gaping down at the woman in the silk dress. Her eyes have totally hazed. Her body lies motionless, her skin waxen. Even her eyelids have frozen in place.
What under the gods’ gaze just happened?
A shout travels from somewhere down the street. Footsteps pound toward me.
My pulse stutters. I glance over the noblewoman, but death emanates from every inch of her body.
She’s gone. There’s nothing I can do for her.
I can only make sure I don’t follow the same path.
I shove to my feet and run.
