“Guards,” Dominik calls.
The two stumble to their feet.
“No!” I shout, slipping in blood. Beside me, Briar lurches forward.
“I want you to remember this,” Dominik says.
“Kassie,” Briar cries, and it is almost the sound of my mother.
Not this again. Not this.
Anything but this.
“Any House member you buy from me, I will just buy back,” Dominik says.
A glint of silver in his hand, a flash of his arm. Before I can reach outward, Briar is tackling me to the ground. I scream, thrashing—until I hear the thudding.
The guards collapse, two daggers across their throats. As they fall away, blood splatters and leaches into the oak floor. From the mass of bodies, Dominik stands tall.
“There were too many eyes in this room anyway.”
Beside me, Briar yelps, sputtering. A force wraps around my neck, dragging me to my feet. My fingers spark with little heat, my genius spent.
Dominik wraps a hand in Kassandra’s hair and jerks her head up so she’s looking at us, her face cut. I scratch harder at the hands that hold me, hiss, flashing my teeth.
“Spare them,” she begs, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Even if it means you will be harmed instead?”
Her eyes flick to him, and my heart grows heavy.
What is he saying?My sluggish brain cannot put it together.
“Whose arms shall I break tonight?” he asks. “Theirs or yours?”
“Mine.”
“No,” I cough. I snap my fingers over and over but there is no air. I cannot find my fire.
Dominik glances between the two of us. “A lovers’ quarrel? Interesting.”
The only sounds in the room are our choking.
“Since you two can’t decide…” he starts, flicking his wrist.
Briar’s left arm snaps, the white bone jutting out from her tunic. She screams, then goes limp, head rolling. Kassandra cries out and I kick outward, ripping at the force around me.
He drops his grip.
I crash into the floor, gasping for air. Briar falls facedown in the blood. I drag myself on hands and knees, but Kassandra is already kneeling, flipping over the faerie, wiping blood from her pale face. She cradles Briar with a care I have never seen in her before, have only ever known from my mother, from Lila and Briar. It is the tenderness with which a female holds a life in her hands.
“Consider it a mercy I only broke one,” Dominik says, stepping over us. “Every night you go without being in the king’s bed will be another night I shall break limbs. And when I am done with Briar, I will move on to Avery, then you, Kass. Remember, faeries do not heal as quickly as you. You have three days.”
He navigates the ring of dead bodies, the finished family by the table. As he reaches the door, he glances back at us.
“Remember your options, Kassandra. Either Maxian will sire the future Illusion king, or I will.”
With the slam of the doors, Dominik is gone, leaving Kassandra and me in the carnage of blood and bodies and our broken friend.
