“Why didn’t you leave?” Nadi asked, genuinely curious. “You’re powerful in your own right. You could have gone anywhere. Gone to rule one of the outposts.”
A bitter laugh escaped him. “Where would I go? The Nostroms are one of the oldest, most powerful vampire clans in Runne. There’s nowhere they couldn’t find me. And betrayal…” He shook his head. “What do you think the punishment forbetrayal would be? Besides, they’re still my family. Twisted as it is, there’s love between us too.”
Shutting her eyes, she let out a breath. She understood. She didn’t want to. But she did.
“So you see, little murderer,” he said, his voice taking on that familiar sardonic edge, “I’m using them exactly as they’ve used me all these years. The student has simply surpassed his teachers.”
In that moment, Nadi understood him with terrible clarity. Every cruelty, every manipulation, every twisted game—they were the tools of a child who had never been shown any other way to interact with the world. He had been crafted into a weapon and never given the chance to be anything else.
They had turned him into a killer.
And he had turned her into one.
It didn’t excuse what he’d done to her family. Nothing ever could. But for the first time, she saw the full tapestry of causes and effects that had led to that night, to the moment when her world had ended and her path of vengeance had begun.
“What about your father?” she asked. “Was he like her?”
Something dark flashed across Raziel’s face. “My father was weak. He stood by and watched it all happen. His silence was as bad as her actions.” He paused. “She had him killed when I was little more than a toddler. She staged a whole public trial for a false crime and had him executed—drawn and quartered. His organs were carved from his body like he was nothing but an animal, jarred, and scattered to the far ends of Runne to keep him from returning. But to us? Hischildren?She proudly professed that he had grown weak. He had outlived his usefulness.”
The brutality of it struck Nadi anew.
“Now you know,” Raziel said, straightening from the railing. “The sad, pathetic history of the Serpent. Boohoo. You must be so disappointed.”
“No,” Nadi answered honestly. “I just understand some things better now.”
He studied her face in the moonlight, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. Pity, perhaps? Disgust? Whatever it was, he seemed satisfied with what he found—or didn’t find.
“We should get some sleep,” he said finally. “Tomorrow will be…complicated.”
As they turned to go back inside, Nadi found herself speaking without planning to. “My mother used to sing to me when I couldn’t sleep.”
Raziel paused, looking back at her with an unreadable expression.
“She’d stroke my hair and hum this old fae melody,” Nadi continued, not sure why she was sharing this, only knowing that she needed to offer something in return for what he had given her. “I still remember how it felt. Safe. Like nothing bad could touch me while she was there.”
“Until I took her away.”
Nadi met his gaze steadily. “Until you took her away.”
The weight of eighty years of grief and rage and hatred hung between them, acknowledged but unchanged. Yet something else was there too now—a strange, tenuous thread of understanding.
“I can’t undo what I did,” Raziel said finally. “Even if I wanted to.”
“I know.” Nadi stepped past him into the bedroom. “I don’t expect you to try.”
She climbed back into bed, aware of him watching her from the doorway. When he finally joined her, keeping to his side ofthe bed, she felt the mattress dip beneath his weight. Neither spoke again.
But as Nadi drifted back toward sleep, she found herself facing an uncomfortable truth—the man beside her was no longer just the monster of her nightmares.
He was becoming something far more dangerous—someone real, someone complex, someone she might come to understand.
And understanding was only a breath away from forgiveness.
That thought terrified her more than anything else.
The Blue Terrace was aptly and uncreatively named—a sprawling teahouse with azure glass walls that caught the midday sun casting cool sapphire light across its patrons. It was the kind of establishment that existed solely for the vampire elite to conduct their business away from prying eyes, where the staff moved like ghosts and the private rooms offered complete discretion.
Nadi had done a few hits here in the past.
