I looked down at the creature at my feet. The Valerius I had known—the proud, the untouchable, the celestial prince—was gone, replaced by this ruin clinging to the hem of my gown. Two hundred years of devotion, of whispered secrets in the dark, of being his steady heart against the shadow fits, had culminated in this: a parasite begging its host for one last drop of life.
The entire court watched, a gallery of stone-faced predators holding a collective breath. They were not waiting for a display of mercy. They were waiting to see where the power would settle.
I felt nothing. Not pity, not triumph, not even the ghost of a dead love. The place in my soul he had occupied was a crater, cold and silent.
"Please," he wept, the sound wet and broken. "Anything. I'll undo it all."
Slowly, I kne
