“Noctis. The cops. She’s not looking too hot—maybe she’ll kick it herself. There are options here, Katherine. You don’t have to make yourself a murderer.”
“I’m already a murderer.”
Fiona huffed. “Please don’t make me give the not-everything-is-your-fault speech again. My vocal cords are exhausted.”
Fiona knelt down beside Katherine, clasping their hands together. “Just do a spell to knock her out and wait for the authorities to come. You don’t have to keep cutting out pieces of yourself to solve every problem.”
Katherine paused a moment. Her mind was going in a million directions, memories of all the years she and Sylvia had spent together running side by side with the betrayal of the last few weeks. Sylvia had broken the law. Broken Katherine’s trust. Broken the fundamental thing in her that believed people could still be good. Part of Katherine wanted to kill her. Wanted that further bit of proof that every soul was a black, rotted thing.
Part of her wanted to cry.
That part could wait.
She cut into her palm and raised her hand. She wouldn’t kill Sylvia. She would knock her out and wait for the authorities to come and punish her through the proper channels.
Sylvia had decided that she always knew what was best, that she could make her own rules. Katherine wouldn’t follow in her footsteps.
She closed her eyes, bringing her magic to the surface—
Too late.
It was instantaneous—one moment, Sylvia was unconscious, the next she was on her feet, magic swirling in red sparks around her. Sylvia reached a hand out, and Katherine braced for the hit, but it didn’t come.
It went to Fiona instead.
Katherine screamed as her friend was hurled across the room, flying over the roof of her car and out into the parking lot before landing with a sickening thud. Instinctually, Katherine started to run to her, but she was yanked back by a rope of burning fire around her ankle.
She fell to the ground with the force of it, her knees cracking against the hard floor. She scrambled for purchase, but there was nothing that could stop her from being pulled to Sylvia.
Sylvia flipped Katherine onto her back, pressing her knee into Katherine’s stomach as she knelt over her. “That was some fucking stunt, dear.”
The whites of Sylvia’s eyes had gone fully red. Blood leaked from her mouth, dropping onto Katherine’s face. She was keeping all of her weight on the left side of her body.
But none of that was what gave it away. What gave it away was the tremble in Sylvia’s hands—the same tremble she always got when she was running low on magic.
Unsettled magic was strong, but it wasn’t limitless. What Sylvia had done was unprecedented. What if she was nearing her bottom?
Before Katherine could consider what to do with that information, Sylvia dug her knee in harder. Katherine heaved. “All up on your high horse about me being a murderer,” Sylvia continued. “And look what you tried.”
Ropes of sparking magic wrapped tight around Katherine’s chest, pulling her up from the ground and slamming her against the metal of Fiona’s car. She struggled against the bindings, scratching at them uselessly with her fingernails as they cut off her breath.
“I should’ve taken your magic the second I found you on thatbench,” Sylvia snarled. “I should’ve ripped it out of you and left you there to die.”
She veered wildly as she stalked toward Katherine, sweat pouring off her forehead. Katherine tried to make a plan, but then the ropes tightened and all of the air rushed out of her body, her ability to think disappearing with it. Her vision popped with flecks of color as Sylvia clenched her hand, tightening the ropes again. Katherine screamed as she felt something inside her crack. It had to be one of her ribs.
“You know, Katherine, I always wondered where you’d draw your line.” Sylvia’s face twisted into a terrifying rictus, a mockery of her normal smile. “I mean, all those years you watched me take from ordinaries… I knew it ate at you. Every time you walked in, I kept waiting for you to say ‘That’s it. No more.’ But you never did.
“I’ve been hurting people for a long, long time, Katherine, and you let me. You had the chance to stop this, and you didn’t.”
The cut of her words was even worse than the ropes, more painful than the magic burning into Katherine’s skin. The agony cleared something in her, letting her think straight for what felt like the first time in her life.
She had compromised her morals for Sylvia, but she wasn’t the one who had committed murder. She had let Sylvia take magic from ordinaries, but she wasn’t the one who ripped Lily’s life from her body.
She couldn’t blame herself for someone else’s actions. For someone else’s decisions. For someone else’s mistakes.
Sylvia’s power had to run out eventually. If Katherine could find a way to wear her out, she’d have a chance to make that choice again. To take the killing blow, or at least incapacitate Sylvia long enough for Noctis to arrive and drag her in—for Silas to arrive, to take the revenge he deserved to be able to take—likely quite literally over Katherine’s dead body.
But Katherine wasn’t afraid to die. Not if that was what it’d take to make the world safe for the people she loved.
