CHAPTER ONE
706 Words
"The Day I Died Believing Him"
The cold came first.
Not the cold of the throne room's stone floor pressing against my cheek, though I felt that
Too, the chill seeping through silk that was never mine, a Luna's gown I never wanted. It
was a deeper kind cold the type that starts somewhere from behind your ribs and moves
outwardly slow like a tide that has finally decided to stop pretending it will turn.
I was dying, and I knew it the way you know a thing you've been dreading for so long.
almost feels like relief.
Almost?
Above me, Darius stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching me bleed out
on the floor of the court I had helped him build. He did not crouch or even take to his
knees. There was no drama in his face, no grief, guilt, not even the dignity of real cruelty
but just a faint loosening around his jaw. The expression of a man who has finally crossed
an item off a long list.
"You were useful, Mara,
" he said.
"More than I expected, honestly.
"
I tried to speak but what came out were not words.
In the corner of the room, Seraphine leaned against the pillar she had claimed as hers
long before I ever arrived. She was beautiful in the way predators often are effortless,
untouchable, and watching my end with the patient satisfaction of someone who had simply been waiting for a season to change. Her silver eyes met mine and she didn’t for
once look away or felt sorry.
Why would she? She had won.
I thought about Rena. My second-in-command, who had wept the day I told her I was
going to marry the Alpha, who had said Mara, this feels wrong, and whom I had silenced
with the confidence of a woman who believed she was making history. I thought about
the human settlement at Ashford's Creek, the one Darius had promised autonomy, the one
that was now a labor camp processing moon-iron ore for his expansion army. I thought
about the twenty-three names I had memorized of the human leaders who had come to
the peace summit on my word and my assurance that Darius was different, and who had
never come home.
I had handed them to him, gift-wrapped in my own blind faith.
The rage came up through the cold like something living. It did not roar or even shake. It
was quieter than a furnace sealed behind glass, burning so clean it left no smoke. I had
loved a lie so thoroughly that real people had died for it. I had worn his crown and called
it peace. I had seen the signs, the locked doors, the whispered conversations Seraphine
and Darius ceased whenever I entered, the look in his eyes when he thought I wasn't
watching it was the look of a man maintaining a performance but I had seen all of it and
told myself a story.
That was the part I could not forgive myself for.
Not his betrayal but the one I showed myself.
The darkness began pressing in at the edges of my vision. I could feel my fingers going
numb, the cold climbing my arms like something methodical and patient. Darius turned
away, he was already speaking to an advisor, and was already moving on. I was not even
worth the length of a death watch.
Fine.
I burned every detail of his face into what was left of my mind. The line of his jaw, the
particular tilt of his head when he gave an order and the way his left shoulder droppedslightly when he was satisfied. I memorized him the way you memorize a threat not with
love or hate, but with the cold precision of a soldier who intends to use the knowledge.
You do not get to win.
The thought was the last thing I held onto as the dark took me not a prayer or a goodbye
but a promise that was directed at no one and at everything. A vow made in the last
breath of a woman who had already decided she was not finished.
And then I woke up.
- Writer
