Standing over him was the Guildmaster.
I stepped forward, the strange golden shadows falling on the walls, and Thorn’s eyes met mine. He was beyond battered. He was bleeding from his ears and his nose, and even his eyes shed vaguely pink tears. I choked off a sob. I knew those symptoms. And I knew the man who had done this to him was the only one who was allowed to carry the poison that caused it: rictal powder.
Thorn might be alive now, but he had minutes left, if that. His eyes gleamed with love and regret when they met mine across the room. “Roya,” he rasped, and I heard his voice as if he were leaning against my shoulder, his chest to my back, breathing the words into my ear gently. He was always so gentle with me, my assassin. My Thorn. Always trying to keep me from the harsher truths of this world. From losing the innocence that I hated, and that he prized.
“My love,” I mouthed.
“I love you, little queen,” he answered. And then the Guildmaster thrust his sword directly into Thorn’s heart.
His eyes went glassy, his head lolling back.
“No!” I screamed, and the sound stopped every motion in the room. Around me, the world exploded into fire.
I heard shouts—“Larkial!” and “The Goddess!” I ignored them all. I ran to Thorn, but the Guildmaster intercepted me.
“My dear girl, what lovely eyes you have,” he taunted, holding two daggers up. “I see you fucked someone already. I’m not about to let you near this one.” I blinked, unsure what he meant by that. “Give it a minute, he’ll be so dead not even the Goddess could bring him back. Then I’ll let you cry over his corpse.”
Before he could finish the last word, my daggers were in my hands, and I ran at him, wheeling and thrusting. He parried expertly, of course. I was only a student, and he was a master. I felt and saw the blade he held in his right hand slip past my guard again and again, felt it sliding into my flesh. He kept his left hand blade away, so I knew which was the poisoned one. Blood ran from my wounds, but the blood was golden.
The Guildmaster’s eyes widened as we both watched a stream of gold flow down my arms. “It’s true,” he whispered, then lifted his knives for another attack. I spun away, the gold light that shone from my eyes as I went disorienting me.
What was true? What did he mean?
I dared a look at my bleeding arm. My skin glimmered with small, golden, glittering scales—but no cuts. They bled gold, and healed almost instantly.
Had Icarus’s wyvern mating bond saved me? Something inside me said no. This was me, my own power, ignited with the spark of his wyvern, perhaps.
Fighting had resumed all around us, with Kavin and Wulfram now side-by-side, facing down the Haviran guards who kept rushing through the door like the swell of an evil tide.
Blonde braid swinging as she ducked and twirled, Valerie was in the middle of it all, killing quietly and efficiently. Bodies began to litter the floor, the air thick with the iron tang of blood and underneath it, the citrus honey of my heat resurfacing.
The Guildmaster was wearing me down. “Stop fighting, girl. You can’t win. I don’t want to kill you.”
He didn’t understand that he already had. That the largest part of my heart was dying with Thorn right now.
I grunted as our knives met and sparks flew. Gold light reflected in the Guildmaster’s eyes, and madness, and something I’d never imagined seeing there: fear.
His arms were longer than mine, his technique too controlled. I couldn’t get close enough for a killing strike—which would be any strike at all, knowing what was on my blade—unless I was willing to give something up.
I took a deep breath, and stepped inside the Guildmaster’s guard, forcing the poisoned blade to pierce my arm. Proximity was more important than my safety. As long as I didn’t let him slice an artery or decapitate me, with Icarus’s bond, I would survive.
I had to.
A white-hot knife of pain shot through my limb as his blade met mine, but I ran my own poisoned edge over his neck.
He hissed, recognizing what I had done. “Fool,” he growled, and surprised me by pulling me into an embrace, pushing my blade even deeper into his shoulder as he did so. Then I felt something beyond unsettling: his tongue, lapping one of the wounds that flowed with golden blood.
“Tastes like honey,” he growled, spinning me suddenly, so that his dagger rested against my neck, my back pressed to his chest.
“An Omega’s blood is a cure for any poison.” His breath was rancid and hot on my neck, and he licked me again. “I was never going to leave you in Starlak, girl. You’re the most valuable creature in the world right now. You will make me invulnerable.” He chuckled. “And rich.”
While he spoke, my eyes had landed on Thorn. Remarkably, he was still breathing, though each breath was shallower than the last. If my blood was some sort of miracle cure, I had to get to him, reach him before he took the final breath. But the Guildmaster’s arms were as tight as a vice, crushing my ribs and arms, and the razor-sharp knife he held to my throat was already cutting through the skin.
“Let me go,” I begged. “Please let me save him.”
“Foolish girl. You have no power here. You never had any. I let Thorn train you to keep you both under my thumb. He’s outlived his usefulness, and you? Your time under my control is just beginning.” His tongue swiped down my neck again, and I could tell he was making a promise as to what the years he had planned for me entailed. He would use more than my blood.
Inside, the fire that had raged my whole life, the one that had been stoked into flame by my heat, then quenched and re-ignited by my mating bond, sparked.
