“I’m handling it, brother,” Kassandra said to the man who would be king of kings.
Xavlin laughed, a rasping, guttural mockery, and she clawed the air to dismantle their shape.
“Patience,” they said.
“You show me nothing but blood,” she hissed at them. “I want to see my crown.”
A hand cracked across Alexandra’s cheek. The shock, white-hot, scattered the voices and gave way to…
She’s home. She knows this room. Two boys, sleepy, heads full of dark blond curls, sit up in their beds and smile. “Auntie Alexandra, are we going to play in the tunnels again?” But those boys are gone, ashes, and another sleeps in their place.
A handsome man smiles over the sleeping child, a happy king, a delusional king.
He bleeds like all the rest.
She speaks to him…so faint, a thread of silk between worlds. But she’s delighted. She’s won. She’s tricked them all.
His blood runs gold, and she laughs and laughs and laughs. “You’re nothing but a man now,” she says, and she’s holding a knife and she’s ready, so ready, the time is now nownow.“Your crown is mine.”
A hand fisted Alexandra’s throat and shook. Titos’s eyes burned with rage as he pulled her to her tiptoes. “Get yourself together.”
Together? She was the only one who knew, who saw, who was finally beginning to understand.Hewas the one whoremained blind.
“He smiled at you from his horse,” she told her uncle, a smile spreading her dry, cracked lips. “He called you Little Fox, and you turned your back on him with dreams of his blood spilling on that mountain.”
The room went silent. Even the mist held its breath.
Nearby, Kassandra’s hand flew up to cover a gasp.
Titos’s gaze flicked across Alexandra’s face, his skin turning pale. “Only one person ever called me that.”
“And now you wear his crown.” Her voice turned sing-song. “And he’s dead, dead,dead.”
The king’s eyes narrowed, his brown eyes, her mother’s eyes. “What else do you know?”
“It’s time for kings to fall. Weak kings, usurper kings, bastard kings.”
Titos’s lips widened into a smile, and he flashed his teeth. “A crownless king, perhaps?”
“His crown is within reach,” she said, and it was… She could almost feel it in her grasp.
“Tell me everything.”
She leaned close, lips cracked open like a wound. “I already did.”
Alexandra laughed and laughed andlaughed.
Stupid, stupid,stupidkings.
The scent of burned flesh clung to the air.
Augustus gagged on it as he woke again—he’d lost count of the times he’d lost consciousness. His cheek scraped against the stone bench beneath him. Even that slight shift lit his spine on fire. His back was a swath of never-ending pain.
“Dad,” he groaned, squinting into the too-bright jail cell.
“Still here.” Mettius’s voice was frightfully weak. “How do you feel, son?”
“Like my back was flayed open. You?”
