Silence stretches, tight as a drum.
“Take them both,” the Centurion snaps.
Nyatrix and the tall, muscular guard exchange a look I can’t decipher. Tension and fear batter me from all angles. And then the soldier steps behind Lucretia, blocking the door with his formidable frame.
Nyatrix laughs, the low, husky sound of it slinking beneath my skin. The entire chamber is rife with brewing violence, palpable as a stormfront.
“Tiberius,” the Centurion says, pivoting uneasily, addressing the soldier at the door even though her gaze stays on Nyatrix. “Do not be stupid.”
“Yes, Centurion,” the soldier agrees in a deep, rich voice. “I completely agree.”
“The problem, Lucretia,” Nyatrix murmurs, so soft I barely catch the words, “is that you always pick the best of the Celeres for your personal guard. Though you may have lured many of our people into your disgusting scheme, the Celeres remain quite loyal.”
“And not,” Tiberius adds, the white of his teeth bright against his dark skin as he grins in a wild way I’ve seen on Nyatrix’s face so many times, “toyou, Centurion.”
Understanding sweeps through me, honey-sweet with relief. I watch Lucretia’s eyes go wide, her hand moving along her belt for a dagger. “You are both foolish,” she snaps. “I am preparing a future that I won’t live to see. Butyouwill. You will be the blade that topples the Host, Nyatrix. Don’t you see?”
The knight slows, her head cocked to one side. Something about her movements is positively inhuman as she takes the last few steps to draw even with Lucretia, who finally manages to grasp the handle of her dagger.
“No,” Nyatrix says, calm as anything.
The Centurion raises her weapon, but Nyatrix knocks it away and has her by the collar of her blood-red cape before I can blink. Tiberius reaches for the heavy iron latch at the door and locks it.
“I’ll scream,” Lucretia warns, struggling against the knight’s hold, only the tips of her boots brushing the ground.
The Lupa Nox shrugs. “You could. I prefer it, actually.”
The windowless room’s candlelight gilds the whites of Lucretia’s eyes as her gaze widens. She fights harder against Nyatrix’s hold on her collar, trying to scratch at the back of the knight’s hands with her nails.
“If you name everyone in the Centuria who is involved in this conspiracy,” Nyatrix purrs, her face a mere breath from Lucretia’s in a way that makes me burn with strange jealousy, “I’ll let you live.”
Lucretia sputters nonsense—half-words and incoherent sentence fragments—for a few seconds. Nyatrix waits. With my own body trembling, the hand on my cane shaking, it’s especially startling how still the knight is. Lucretia rocks about violently, like a man dangling from a noose, and yet the Lupa Nox is utterly still. Unswayed. Unmoved.
“You wouldn’t k-kill y-your own Centurion Primus,” Lucretia finally manages in a breathless gasp, sounding like she hasn’t entirely convinced herself.
Nyatrix moves then, an explosion of muscle and predatory grace, as she strides toward me, slamming Lucretia into the wall just a few steps away from where I’m standing. My sharp inhale fills the space like the opening note of a hymn.
“I am older than your Centuria,” Nyatrix murmurs, her head still cocked to the side, a wolf about to disembowel a hare. For the first time, here in the candlelit gloom of these ancient halls, gowned in shadow, she truly looks as though she is Death Herself, returned and capable of absolutely anything.
For the first time, I think, I am truly and properly afraid of her. And yet...andyet...my blood pounds with something else, something slick and open-mouthed and damp with want.
“You promise I-I’ll live?” Lucretia sputters, her boots scuffing against the tiled floor as she struggles for purchase. “D-don’t forget you...” She trails off, fighting for breath. Nyatrix’s grip relaxes just slightly, and the Centurion snatches in a rattling gasp. “Y-you’re bound. You bound yourself to this Centuria. You cannot lie to me.”
“I cannot,” Nyatrix agrees. “I promise to let you live, bound by my unbreakable vow to the Centuria. Names, Lucretia.Now.”
The Centurion rattles off a list, and I try my best to memorize each one, even though I fear they’ll slip through my hands like grains of sand. I brace myself for what will happen when Nyatrix lets Lucretia go—for the hell that will surely break loose.
“Is that everyone?” the Lupa Nox wants to know.
Lucretia nods furiously. “I swear it. Now let me go,” she pleads.
Nyatrix smiles, all wolf, her upper lip curled, and lifts the Centurion higher on the wall as her hand constricts around the woman’s throat. “I have served your state,” she snarls. “I have killed at your command. I have given myself up to the reign of mortals, believing that I must be marred by the choices of my foremothers, the death I wrought within our walls. It was my own people, after all, who gave Sempiternus the power to rise again after the Creatrixes struck Him from His first divine body.”
My chest heaves as I watch her, a blinding, throbbing heat uncoiling low in my belly. She is terrible and magnificent and more worthy of worship than anything I have seen in all my days.
“Thatis why I bound myself to the Centuria—to alter the legacy of my people,” Nyatrix whispers as Lucretia begins tochoke, her eyes bulging. When the Centurion claws at her hands, Nyatrix violently shakes her, slamming the woman’s skull into the earthen wall. “But I am the last of my kind, and the Centuria to which I bound myself is gone, burned away in Centurion Decima’s funeral pyre. I no longer yield.”
I look away instinctively, squeezing my eyes shut, though the sound of Lucretia’s neck snapping stirs nausea in my stomach. I’m still turned into the wall, one hand hovering above my head as if to protect myself from something, when I hear the Centurion’s corpse collapse onto the floor.
