Warm liquid slicked my palms, dripping down my arms as I poured every ounce of myself into its choke.
He had called me a monster. Perhaps I was.
Or maybe I was only what the world demanded of me.
Either way, I would not disappoint.
Before his last breath sang free, I lunged, fangs splitting through the shadow, sinking deep into flesh, venom surging into his veins.
He stiffened, jerking, body convulsing under the curse’s cleansing. Black lines slivered down his throat, etching across his skin.
I ripped free, spitting rot, my face painted in his spoiled gore.
He crumpled at my feet, rigid.
I bent low, voice reminding him still, “I am death.”
CHAPTER THREE
Verena
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL, IN A DANGEROUS AND DEADLY WAY, how the venom unfurled, slow and inevitable, its stain seeping into bone.
The black lines spread under his pale skin. Thin at first, until they looked as if shadow itself had been stitched through his blood.
The prophecy from his lips still hung in the air.
And the darkness marks them blind.
I had heard the verse before, in nightmares and half-haunted stories.
The words were not an accusation so much as a naming. I knew the divination’s edges the way one knows a scar, by the memory of the moment it was made.
And those syllables were a measure of the prisoner I would become.
One day, the Viper would unravel me entirely, would step out of my skull and wear my face like a mask. And I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
For a single beat I considered walking away, letting the foundation of the world swallow him, letting the forest take the rest.
It would have been easy. Mercy, in this world, often wore the face of indifference. But the black that bled from his throat was not the curse’s doing alone.
There was a foreign cruelty in the way his blood had already been corrupted. Someone else had touched this man before I did. Someone who left a signature I recognized in the way the darkness crawled: not simply a death, but a precise, carved-out undoing.
Perhaps it was whoevershewas.
I crouched, letting my finger drag the skin taut above one of the darkened streaks. Csolenia did not need to be aware that the ancient rot lurked within its own domain.
I opened my mouth, the word coming from somewhere deeper, older. “Kyartas.” The syllable was a stone dropped into still water, simple, precise.Burn.
The mark pulsed once, answering, searing the blood from within until the black lines smoked and blistered beneath the pale.
Magic wasn’t required, not for this. Just my intent, just my command.
A cold breath kissed the back of my neck, shivers sliding down my spine as the serpent curled possessively, wrapping itself tight back around my wrist.
My Fae eyes strayed upward, where an owl perched above, a silent sentinel, white as bone save for a silver mark like a crown etched onto its head.
Same damned owl as before. Enjoying the spectacle perhaps.
