“You’re beautiful,” she whispered to the newborn, her voice thick with tears. “Balthazar’s girls are always beautiful.” She looked down at me, her lips curling. “Don’t worry—I’ll protect her from her monster of a mother.”
I gasped, my body limp from exertion. My tears weren’t from joy—they were from rage, from defeat.
Zara bit through the umbilical cord with her teeth like some ancient predator and pressed on my abdomen to help expel the afterbirth. Her movements were clinical. Efficient. Inhuman.
Then, with a chilling tenderness, she placed the baby in my arms.
The child’s weight, so small, so warm, was heavier than any burden I’d ever known.
“Care for her,” Zara said, her voice coated in poison. A malicious glint shimmered in her eyes like a serpent catching light. “Don’t do anything stupid—don’t eventhinkof harming her.”
She stooped and picked up the placenta with one bare, blood-slicked hand, lifting it like a grotesque trophy.
“And now,” she purred, turning, “I’ll be on my way.”
She paused at the threshold, her eyes locking onto mine. I felt the weight of her stare burrow into my chest and curl around my ribs.
“I’ll be watching you.”
Then she was gone, leaving behind a thick, suffocating silence that bloated the room. I could still smell her—the coppery tang of blood, the scent of ancient loathing, the ghost of power.
I looked down at the infant in my arms.
I felt… nothing.
She was lovely, yes. Tiny, soft, and impossibly delicate, her damp blond curls clung to her scalp, and her wide blue eyes stared up at me—not with love but with ancient knowing. There was something too aware in her gaze, something unnerving.
She was Balthazar’s child.
And I had refused him what he wanted most.
I should have hated her.
But as the memory of Balthazar’s voice played in my mind—“Let’s have a child… build a family…”—I felt something foreign rise in my chest. Not love. Not guilt. Something deeper. Tenderness, tinged with regret.
And yet… I was still me.
Wickedness was my sacred currency. I bathed in it. I craved it.Every sin I committed lit my veins with delicious fire. Ithrivedin the dark.
Philip entered the room with wide, wonderstruck eyes. He gasped softly as he saw the child cradled against me.
“She’s beautiful,” he murmured. “Truly… perfect.”
He stepped closer and gently took her from my arms. I watched his face shift as he rocked her, his brow furrowing.
“What’s this?” he asked, reaching toward the baby’s tiny neck.
Dangling against her chest was a small charm—a silver pendant shaped like a dagger, impossibly detailed for its size.
My breath caught.
I had never seen it before.
Where had it come from?
Oh my god…
I gave birth to Balthazar’s child.
