Arthie liked to think that she had a heart made of ice, but ice was like glass—one fall and it shattered. She didn’t want to leave Jin, not now, but she had to move. She paused to look at Penn one last time. The other vampires stayed away. How could they not, when they’d seen the abomination of a weapon that had rendered Penn dead within moments? She took his Athereum marker and the revolver from his pocket. It was gold, as dignified as he was.
And then she ran, the doors of the Athereum’s meeting hall thudding closed behind her.
She knew what she looked like to anyone who saw her on the street: A girl racing through the dark, a sari slipping from her shoulder, blood-soaked hands gripping a gun, eyes wild as the night had been.
But Nimble Street wasn’t far from here.
When she tried the door to Laith’s apartment, she wasn’t surprised to find it unlocked. He was waiting for her in his armchair, the one she’d been seated in on the night they traded secrets.
They had always been destined for this moment.
“I told you to leave,” she said. “I warned you.”
“I didn’t know what it was capable of,” he said, still holding Calibore. She saw the shock in his eyes. She believed him, but that wouldn’t bring Penn back. That wouldn’t undo what had happened.
Laith was bleeding from his neck in the same place she had kissed him. If she closed her eyes, they were both on their knees, the truth of what she was bared before him.
He laughed and looked down at the pistol.
“You understand, don’t you?” he asked. “We’re the same, you and I.”
He sounded exactly as he always did, the silken thrum of his voice low and lovely.
“We will never be the same,” she bit out. “You’re so deluded by your own pride and righteousness that you never stopped to wonder if you truly were right.”
“Are you saying the king didn’t send my sister to her death?”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might be the reason she died?” Arthie asked.
Murder darkened his gaze. She recognized that limitlessness brought on by vengeance. She knew it because it lived in her bones. It was why she was drawn to him, why she’d let him so close to the cage of her heart.
But she was like him, and in that, she saw her flaw. She saw herself mired in a past that wasn’t driving her forward but holding her back.
She had thought herself feral, when he was the animal.
“You joined that voyage when you were ill, when you knew she would be in close contact with you, when you knew that medical care would be lacking on a ship that was likely one of the first to leave Arawiya in a long time,” Arthie said. “You made her sick. She would have been fine if you had seen her potential, rather than lying to yourself that she needed saving.”
Get behind me. Those words had troubled her since he’d spoken them in the Athereum. She had thought it was because he had shown care for her when she was moments from betraying him, but that wasn’t it.
He had always doubted her.
He had tried to teach her how to leap across the sky. He had tried to put her behind him. He had all but forced her to drink from him when she had made her reluctance known.
“Even that kitten of yours. You saw her toying with a snake, not cowering from one, but thought she needed saving too.”
“Do not try to make assumptions about my existence,” Laith said coldly. He cocked Calibore.
She drew Penn’s gold revolver. “Oh, these aren’t assumptions, saint. Now put that down.”
He raised his arm. “I truly did grow fond of you, Arthie.”
“Says the pistol aimed at my heart,” she replied, brushing her thumb along the hammer of the revolver. She hadn’t checked to see how many bullets were in its cylinder. She’d never fired one before, but she’d seen Jin use his enough times to know how it worked. “You’re ludicrous.”
He smiled that smile full of secrets. “You would know.”
A shot rang out.
Laith fell back into the armchair, surprise gasping out of him. Blood bloomed in the shimmering white of his robes, petals unfurling in crimson. It called to her, but Arthie didn’t feel right. She was numb and cold. Empty. He had killed, and she had done the same.
No, she felt worse than that.
The front of her sari was wet.
Arthie looked down. Blood dripped onto the floorboards by her feet. The gold revolver fell. Pain started pulsing through her. There was a hole in her heart. The blood she had taken from him spilled from her chest, and she wanted, impossibly, to laugh at the irony of it all.
And then Arthie Casimir collapsed.