“You might need stitches.”
She yanked away, out of reach. “I said I’m fine, Toran.”
He sank back on his haunches, fingers curling inward. He blinked. A flash of silver. Dark blood. He couldn’t see it anymore—not on her neck—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The smell of it singed the air, like the spark of a flame on a matchstick.
“I need to see the wound.”
“I’m fine.”
“For magic’s end, Nes! I just killed a man. A captain. My equal! And I will not have two dead bodies on this floor, so show me your damned neck!”
In her gaze, he saw a sort of pleading. It made a piece of his heart pool and puddle, but on this, he would not give in. He would not have her bleed out and die.
Slowly, Nes let her hands fall away from her throat.
He sucked in a tight breath.
The moon, the sliver that it was, chose that moment to emerge frombehind a cloud and shine through the gambling den’s front windows. In its light, the skin on Nes’s throat shone like a pearl. It was smooth and specked with her usual freckles, and but for some smudges under her chin, free of any blood. The wound on her neck was barely deeper than a scratch.
“Fell c-cut you. It was deep.” He hated how his voice shook, but his mind couldn’t make sense of the memories in his head and the evidence in front of him. His fingers hovered in the space between them, reaching for the gaping wound—so clear in his mind—and trying to reconcile it with the thin cut that was before him. “Sliced your neck open.”
Nes leaned away from him. She shook her head, a slow, pendulum-like rhythm. “It’s just a surface wound. I managed to hold the blade back.”
“There was blood everywhere.”
Except, even as he glanced down to prove his words, he saw the floorboards, bathed in the blood leaking from Fell’s body. He couldn’t distinguish her blood from his.
She had bled. He was sure of it. And yet, miraculously, it hadn’t been enough to kill.
But he knew, perhaps better than most, their world was not one of miracles.
He turned his back to her and tried to keep his fingers from curling around the hilt of his sword. At his feet, Fell’s corpse was a shadow, as if even the moon couldn’t bear to see the monstrosity of his actions. It wasn’t his first kill. But it was the first time he’d killed a fellow guard. And now he saw exactly how wrong he’d been.
Aeos wasn’t his fault. Never had been.
He hadn’t plunged a blade into Kai’s back. He hadn’t killed Malia or Bastian or Safie, either. Their deaths weren’t on him. But Fell’s was.
He could still feel the hilt of the knife in his palm, feel the resistanceas the blade struck bone first before sliding under and through to Fell’s heart. He’d felt Fell’s very pulse leave him, travel up the metal, and shake Toran’s veins. As if the other captain had been so desperate to hold on to life, any life, he’d tried to take Toran’s.
He shuddered. Blood swirled the air with his every inhale.
“Toran?”
Slowly, he turned. “We have to get rid of the body,” he said, eyes everywhere but her throat. She’d covered it again, pulling her cloak tight so she looked like a head floating over a whisper of blue cloth.
He moved first, pulling the knife from Fell’s back. Wiping it on his cloak, he stowed it at his hip beside Cavallis. Then he wrapped his arms under Fell’s shoulders. He didn’t bother to turn the body over. He didn’t think he could handle seeing the shock frozen on Fell’s face. Already, he knew the feel of Fell’s heart beating against the knife would haunt his dreams.
“Grab the legs,” he told Nes.
She moved quickly, almost easily, and it unsettled him. He wasn’t sure how he’d expected her to react, but it wasn’t like this—like she was used to moving corpses.
He’d been either a guard or training to be one for as long as he could remember. He’d killed a total of eight people, including Fell, and had watched at least a dozen others die. But he would never get used to the sight of death. That Nes somehow had…It both scared him and made him pity her.
Together they lifted the body and hefted it into the kitchen. Fell was surprisingly light. As if the heaviest thing about the man had been his ego, and now that he was dead, it had deflated, leaving him beyond recognition.
Throwing open the back door, they shoved their way into the dumpstreet behind the Siren’s Hair and let go. The body dropped between a broken crate and several large trash bags.
Nes began throwing random scraps of trash on top in an effortto hide the body. He watched as Embley Fell was lost to the mass of filth and decay. So many years of torment, so many scathing looks and prickling jabs, all over in an instant.
