The Knights would know.
Emersyn Spade.
The name rattled against my brain like a curse. Alaric had spat it at me like venom before he lunged, before instinct—or desperation—took over and ended him. The truth was out now, at least in his mouth. If Kaius found this scene…I’d be finished.
No more pretending. No more Acelynn Thorton. No more revenge plot that was spiraling horribly out of control. Unless I made sure the story told itself before anyone else could tell it for me.
My eyes darted wildly around the room. The wreckage of the fight wasn’t enough. There wasn’t adequate evidence to suggest astruggle. I needed more. I needed a scene. A script. Something to bury my crime under layers of chaos and hysteria. Something that painted me as the victim who had no choice but to kill the deranged man in my home.
I staggered to the kitchen table, shoving hard until the legs screeched across the floor and tipped onto its side with a crash that made me flinch. The sound reverberated through my bones, loud enough to feel like a warning. I went further, yanking the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen open, like he had been rummaging through them, searching for something before I made it back home. Silverware spilled across the floor in a clattering rain. I ripped a picture frame from the wall, glass shattering as it hit the ground. My fingers dug into the couch cushions, shredding them apart until feathers and fluff rained down onto the living room floor.
My body carried me from room to room, destroying everything in my path until there was nothing pristine left. But it still wasn’t enough.
The reflection in the darkened window of me didn’t match the stage around her. Face pale, smooth, and unmarked. I didn’t look like a victim.
I pressed my lips together until they hurt and seized the broken lamp lying among the mess. My arm shook as I pressedthe jagged brass edge against my forearm and pulled. Pain flared instantly, a searing line of fire, hot and wet. My breath hissed through my teeth, but the sting anchored me. It had tolookreal.
I raised the heavy lamp base and slammed it against my cheek. The burst of pain nearly dropped me to my knees. My ears rang. My vision blurred with tears, but when I blinked them away, the redness and swelling across my cheek was exactly what I needed. I struck again, lighter this time, enough to bruise, but not break. Then I slapped myself once, sharply, the crack echoing in the silent house.
When I looked in the window again, the woman staring back almost scared me. Dark hair wild, face blotched and bruising, blood on her arms and cheek. A trickle of crimson trailed down from the corner of my lip. My hand traveled up to the collar of my shirt, pulling until the fabric gave way and ripped down the middle. A long tear now made the shirt hang awkwardly off my body. Now she looked like she’d fought for her life.
My stomach twisted at what I was doing, but I pushed it down, shoved it into the same locked place where I kept every other horrible truth.
And then remembered the one thing Kaius couldn’t find in my possession.The hemlock. My eyes snapped to the Ziplock bag Alaric had found still lying on the countertop. He’d confronted me with it, the evidence of who I really was. That was the thread I needed to spin this whole lie into something believable.
I lunged for the bag, heart hammering, and flung it against the ground near Alaric’s body. The vials shattered, spraying shards of glass and sticky liquid across the floor. The smell hit immediately—sharp, bitter, poisonous, curling in the air like smoke. I coughed, covering my mouth with my arm, then crouched near Alaric’s body.
With careful, shaking hands, I dragged the glass into his palm, cutting deep into his skin, and smeared his blood across the broken vials. I pressed one jagged piece against his wrist until the crimson ran and dripped, mixing with the poison, the story writing itself in every drop.
The elder Knight turned traitor. Twisted by hemlock. He attacked me, and I had no choice.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. Tears streamed down freely now—not all of them forced. Because part of me knew how far this had gone, how deep I was burying myself.
I was making it impossible to turn back.
I staggered to the corner of the room, sliding down against the wall, and let my head fall into my blood-smeared hands. I needed Kaius now. Needed him to come running, to see the chaos and the blood and the girl who looked shattered.
Not the girl who’d done the shattering.
With hands that tremored too violently to be faked, I dug my phone from my pocket. Blood smeared across the screen as I tapped his number, nearly dropping it twice before the call connected.
It rang once before he answered. His voice was clipped, low, already suspicious. “Acelynn?”
I sucked in a jagged breath and let it out in a sob that cracked like lightning. “Kaius…oh god! Kaius, I need you! Please, please, you have to come. He broke in, and I didn’t know what to do. I think I killed him…”
My voice tumbled over itself, frantic, unraveling in panicked gasps. I dragged my fingernails down my cheek to make the sobs more ragged, let them claw out of my throat until they didn’t sound staged at all.
“I’m bleeding. I can’t…I can’t do this. I don’t know what to do.”
“Where are you?” His tone sharpened, steel beneath the demand.
“My house,” I choked, letting the sobs convulse through me, raw and broken. “Kaius, please hurry. I’m so scared?—”
I let the phone slip from my hand, let it clatter against the floor beside me, so he’d hear the muffled sobs through the speaker. My cries cracked and fractured, the sound of someone spiraling.
A woman at the end of her rope. A victim.
I pressed my hand against my burning cheek, against the stinging cut on my arm, and let myself sink into the role I’d built out of blood and lies.
