The cut was not quick. The metal bit, the world became the sound of blood thundering into the wooden floor. He gurgled and clawed at air that would not take him back. His eyes stayed open until they did not.
I dropped him. The body slumped, another corpse added to the tidy ruin of that morning.
I turned to Helena. My mouth curved.
“You’re next,” I said.
Her face changed—not to pleading so much as to a practiced softness, the voice she’d used to make men forget themselves. “Salvatore… this isn’t what you think,” she breathed, like a woman reciting the lines that had gotten her what she wanted before.
“Do enlighten me,” I said and stepped over the fresh dark that welled from the corpses. The dagger left a ragged line of red on the floor as it dripped.
“They meant nothing,” she said, hurrying in the words. “I thought you were dead. I feared?—”
“And now I stand before you.” I let the words hang. “Alive.”
She flinched, and then—as if the air itself had gone thin and cold—she sank back onto the bed. The traded linen, stained and wet, clung to her. Afternoon light slanted through the windows, dust motes drifting lazily and ignorantly in the gold; sunlight cut the room into warm bands that the blood answered with a colder shine. Her face was a map of ruin—shame, calculation, fear, each line deeper in that harsh light.
Her voice slid low, practiced, the whisper of a woman who had always known how to bend men. “We can still make this right…”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” I spoke without mercy.
I climbed onto the bed like something with nothing left to lose. The bronze dagger was slick in my hand; its weight felt true, unforgiving. My fingers found the fragile cords beneath her jaw and closed.
She clawed at my wrist, nails tearing at leather and skin, a useless, frantic sound. Her breath hitched; panic pulled color from her face, then dragged it back in ragged streaks. The pulse at her throat fluttered like a trapped bird.
“Salvatore—please—can’t—” she gasped.
Her face bled red, then purple. The same color as the blood on the floor. The same color as my temper.
I watched her gasp—one ragged, useless thing—then drew the blade across her throat.
Blood sprayed and struck my chest, warm and obscene. Her body shuddered with the last, grotesque echo of life and went slack. The bed drank the wet bloom, and the room filled with a new, heavy stillness.
I sat back and breathed deep. Linen clung in ruined folds. The house reeked of oil smoke and blood. I looked at what I had made—the ruin, the two men who would never rise, the woman whose bargains had been built on small betrayals.
She had thought me weak. She had thought I would forgive. She had been wrong.
I rose. The dagger in my hand was warm, sticky with other people’s lives. Without looking, I hurled it across the room. It struck the far wall and fell, dull and final, to rest in a shadow of plaster and dust.
The house went as quiet as a tomb. Perfume and the smoke of burned oil that had once hung like a promise were braided now with iron. I walked into the hallway, through the doorway, into the morning air. I did not look back. I felt no mourning. A chapter had closed, its pages soaked and stiff.
I had no use for what she had been. I had no use for my father. I had only one name left in my mouth with any warmth at all.
Lazarus.
Chapter7
Lazarus
The first light of dawn spilled over the fields, washing the barley in pale-gold. Dew shimmered on the stalks, shivering as if the earth itself were waking.
The cottage waited where the land met the horizon—small, familiar, heartbreakingly unchanged. Its clay walls bore the cracks of age, the roof mended by careful hands. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, curling soft and blue into the morning air, like a prayer still clinging to the sky after a year away.
They were alive.Gods, they were alive.
“Amara!” My voice broke the stillness. “Mother! I’m home!”
The words echoed over the fields, startling a flock of doves from the roof. Their wings caught the sunlight, flashing white before they vanished into the pale sky. I started forward, the ground hard beneath my sandals, the air tasting of salt and soil. Every step brought the ache sharper—the weight of my pack, the drag of the sword at my side, the rush of disbelief pounding in my chest.
