My fist cracks across his face, but he moves fast.
Too fast.
And too late, I have another realization: I amhisprey.
There’s asnap. A split second later, pain tears through my chest.
Hadrian steps back from me, his fist clutched around the iron blade he wrenched from my chest, its corroded surface dripping with my blood.
My leather strap falls to the ground, snapped apart. My body goes into shock, and I drop to my knees, blood gushing from the open wound in my chest. A gaping hole that the corroded dagger filled only seconds ago.
“Hadrian…” I try to breathe past the paralyzing trauma to my heart, the removal of the blade making it seize and sputter. “What have you done?”
He looks down at me from his full height, his expression clean and blank. “You made your choice.”
His grip loosens around the rusty dagger he pulled from my chest, dangling it in his fingertips, as if he wants me to see every detail of it.
This blade has kept me alive for years.
Its once-smooth surface is tarnished and pockmarked from all its years resting within my poisoned heart.
This dagger, whose protruding end was concealed behind my leather strap and which I would thump…thumpto drive it back into place, making sure it never worked its way free of my body, because the pain of iron rammed into my chest was far less than the agony of losing my mind to the dark poison that was inflicted on me.
This dagger…that my mother tried to kill me with. Because it was my life or hers.
Somehow, the iron saved me. As it burned and scorched, it saved me.
She saved me…
I slump forward onto the grass, my hands landing in a pool of blood, the puddle into which the corroded blade now drips.
Even if I thought I could prevail over Hadrian to seize the blade and drive it back into my heart, its surface is toodegraded, a harsh revelation that I was living on borrowed time already.
As for other sources of iron, I left my other iron daggers behind. The blade of my axe is too wide to do the same work. Every grain of iron that was gathered across my chest now flies back to its master, too small for me to control. Even if I could, Hadrian would rip them out again.
With each drip of blood to the ground, my life as I know it…shatters.
Everything I’ve clung to rips apart, tearing into pieces. Hope, faith, even lies. All of it, fading.
My breathing is increasingly shallow.
My heart begins to beat again, and now it’s slower. Insidiously slow.
A darkness fills my mind that I’ve fought since I was a child.
An innocent child. Destroyed by the cruel ambitions of others.
Not innocent anymore.
Hadrian crouches opposite me, pulling my axe away from me where it rested beneath my hand, sliding it toward himself across the grass. “You won’t need this anymore.”
As he leans forward, I catch sight of a dark object, partially hidden by his lapel, attached to a chain around his neck.
I force my body to obey my will, my hand snapping out, yanking the amulet forward, pulling hard on the chain it’s attached to. “What is this?”
“Oh, this.” Appearing unperturbed, Hadrian peels my fingers away from the object, holding it up for me to see.
A small, rectangular piece of wood. Smooth. Ashen-brown. Distinctive whorls circling around and around on its surface.
