In a flash, Scythe shoved his hostage at the servicemen, and the hostage knocked into one and stumbled over a nearby chair. While he fell, Scythe swung his blade in a deadly, graceful arc, slicing through both of the officers’ sides. Blood spurted from their abdomens, splashing onto the sterile white floor, and they collapsed, dead within seconds.
While Fenice screamed, Sophia looked out the door in horror to see other bodies of the other whiteboots littering the hallway, the faces of petrified nurses and doctors around them. Narinder and Harvey were nowhere to be found.
As Scythe straightened, his dark eyes circling the room, Sophia attempted to reach for her own gun in her bag. She wasn’t a great shot—certainly no match for a Dove—but she couldn’t just crouch there helplessly. But when she tried to reach for it, she found her arm wouldn’t move. Something tight squeezed around her throat. The omerta.
She glanced wildly at Harrison, who gave an imperceptible shake of his head.
Fury coursed through her. There was no point in trying to protect her. If Scythe killed Harrison, then they’dbothbe dead.
Roy pointed his gun at Scythe’s chest. “Stand down,” he ordered, his hands shaking. “Stand down or I’ll shoot.”
Scythe opened his mouth and let out a long rasp for breath, as though trying and failing to speak. He raised his weapon.
“Officers!” Fenice called wildly, but no one in the hallway moved. There was no oneleftto move. Sophia’s blood chilled. “Someone help!”
“I said stand down!” Roy shouted.
But Scythe didn’t. His eyes watered, and his skin reddened from what appeared to be exertion, but he didn’t listen. He wheezed as he took a step closer to Harrison.
Finally, Harrison sat up, his eye wide. “You have an omerta,” Harrison said.
Scythe didn’t nod or speak, but that was answer enough. That meant he wasn’t killing of his own volition, not in this moment. He was someone else’s puppet.
“An omerta?” Roy asked sharply. “Yours?”
“The Bargainer’s,” Sophia breathed, understanding washing over her. A single omerta—an Augustine split talent. What the Bargainer had taken from her two years ago.
Which meant shewasan Augustine. ShewasHarrison’s daughter.
“Mine,” Sophia finished.
And she was so shocked by her own realization that she had forgotten something important: that Scythe, puppet or not, was still a player. And that meant he had a target.
It happened so fast, Sophia’s senses seemed to take it in out of order. She heard it first—the whistle of the air, the wet slicing sound, the crack of bone, and the thump of a head hitting the floor. Then she saw the glint of steel and the blood—so much blood—pour from the neck where it had been severed, same as the shade-maker from the House of Shadows. She smelled it last: iron. Then the vomit, as she bent over and threw up while the body tumbled to Scythe’s feet, splashing crimson over the room.
Roy Pritchard was dead.
Sophia sat up, and her mind tilted, dizzy. Between the two servicemen and now Roy, she’d never seen so much blood—not since Charles died. For a moment, she stood where she once had, on the top of the stairwell at Luckluster Casino, staring down with Jac at Charles’s body. So much death. She felt drenched in it.
Scythe reached down toward Roy’s body. Sophia realized instantly he was reaching for Roy’s Shadow Card. He’d already killed the shade-maker. Then he’d killed Owain. Now that he’d killed Roy, he’d have Roy’s card. And Hector’s.
Five cards to end the game, leaving everyone without their target’s card—Grace, Harvey, Tock, Narinder, Poppy, Delaney, and herself—dead.
Harrison must’ve realized this, too, because he let go of the omerta on Sophia. And her luck must’ve been high, because when she grabbed her gun and shot—she hit. Scythe fell backward, his arm still outstretched over Roy’s body. He slammed into the wall with a low grunt.
Sophia stood, her boots soaked in the blood coating the floor. She was vividly awake. She was delirious. She reached out, about to fall over, and Harrison grabbed her hand to steady her.
“No!” someone shouted from the hallway. Grace appeared at the door. She stood there, frozen. An anguish crossed her face that Sophia couldn’t even imagine. After all, she’d lost Jac—but she’d never seen the body. She’d never seenthis.
Grace put a hand over her mouth. “That’s not... He told me he wouldn’t...” she sputtered, almost too quiet to be heard. She took a step back, as though she—someone who’d seen so much death herself—couldn’t be close to this.
Scythe groaned as he leaned forward, breathing in gasping bursts and—once again—reaching for Roy. So distracted in her horror, Sophia almost didn’t notice the Chancellor doing the same thing. But it wasn’t Roy’s Shadow Cards that Fenice grabbed—it was his gun.
She aimed it at Harrison, her hands and the metal dripping blood. “Now I can—”
Sophia only had a moment to make a decision. She couldn’t roll the dice. Weigh the odds of killing the Chancellor versus killing Scythe. And so she squeezed her eyes shut, and she made her choice.
Bang!
