Caesar drew himself up to his full, imposing height. “What the hell do you want?”

He wasn’t quite slurring. Not quite. Aldo wished he would cover himself; it was unnerving to be standing so close to a naked man. Especially a drunken, naked king. He could reach out and tap him on the breastbone if he wanted.

“Your sister, my lord. She’s told the colony Silas is a traitor and a liar. She’s rounding them up and preparing to leave for—somewhere. I don’t know where. I thought you’d want to know.”

Aldo had never seen anyone sober so quickly. Caesar’s eyes, slightly glazed only seconds before, sharpened and took on a sinister, predatory edge. He stiffened, hissed in a breath.

“Where’s Silas?”

“I don’t know, my lord. I didn’t see him, but your sister…it appears your sister has cut off one of his hands.”

Caesar recoiled with a gasped exhalation. He recovered, muttered, “That bitch,” then snapped, “Wait for me,” and slammed the door in Aldo’s face.

It wasn’t two minutes before he reemerged, dressed and radiating anger, his eyes a deadly, flat black Aldo had seen on many, many occasions, right before something terrible happened.

Caesar said, “Let’s go.”

They found Silas in one of the old outlying buildings on the abbey property, a crumbling, mossy stone structure that had once been used as an infirmary. Seated on an upended milk crate next to a small fire he’d built in the middle of the bare floor, he was shirtless, sweating profusely, and pale as a sheet. On the arm missing a hand, he’d tightly tied a strip of fabric—torn from the discarded shirt that lay at his feet—just above the elbow as a tourniquet. How the hell he’d managed to tie a tourniquet with one hand was a mystery Caesar had no intention of unraveling.

Below the tourniquet the flesh had turned a waxen, lifeless gray. There was a trail of blood from the door to where he was sitting, and a crazy splattered pattern of crimson drops zigzagged back and forth across the bare room, a visual map of where he’d been since he arrived. Smoke from the little fire gathered against the vaulted wood ceiling was funneled off toward rotted gaps in the boards in long white fangs.

In Silas’s one remaining hand, he gripped a dagger.

“My lord,” he greeted him, stronger than Caesar would have thought for someone missing an important body part. But Caesar couldn’t look at Silas’s face, because the bloody stump of his missing hand held a hypnotic, almost sensual appeal. He couldn’t wait to get a better look at it. He and Aldo moved closer.

“Your sister,” Silas began, but Caesar interrupted him.

“Yes, I know.” He finally met Silas’s eyes. “She’s always been unreasonable.”

Silas exhaled, strangely relieved. “She’s seen Demetrius—”

“Demetrius!”

“She slept with him, my lord. I overheard her talking with Melliane—”

“Slept with him!” Caesar screeched, eyes bulging. The world ground to a halt.

“He’s somehow convinced her I’ve been lying to her, to all of you—”

“SLEPT WITH HIM!”

Caesar felt as if a bomb had detonated inside his body. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He was frozen with horror and a fury so gargantuan it felt nuclear. She’d slept with the vermin who’d murdered their father. Slept with him. Slept with him. It kept slapping against the inside of his skull like a trapped bird.

“Kill her,” he choked out. Silas and Aldo stared at him. The fire crackled merrily, sending up feathers of glowing ash and whorls of smoke. “We have to kill her! She’s a traitor! She’s—she’s a whore!”

Slowly, Silas smiled. It was more of a grimace the way his lips peeled back over his teeth, but the blood was pounding through Caesar’s veins and there was a booming in his head and he couldn’t see much of anything anymore because the room had started to spin.

Slept with him. Slept with him.

He imagined it in stunning, Technicolor detail, their naked bodies pressed together, the warrior’s big hands all over her bare flesh, her wanton moans and their sweat and the squeaking of a mattress beneath them—

Aldo caught him as he staggered sideways. Caesar shoved him away and began pacing to and fro with his hands clenched in his hair to manage his sudden dizziness, the acid burning his lungs. Hatred glittered through him, consuming, and Caesar had never wanted to kill something—hurt something—so much in his entire life.

He swung around and spied the dagger in Silas’s hand. “What are you doing with that dagger, Silas?” he hissed, prowling forward.

Silas’s face hardened. Sweat dripped from his chin. “I have to stop the bleeding, my lord.”

Caesar looked at the dagger, at the fire, and understood in a flash that was like a thunderbolt. He yanked the dagger from Silas’s hand, held it over the fire until the tip glowed white hot and his own fingers were blistering, and then spat at Aldo, “Hold him.” He looked back at Silas, and his smile was like an animal’s, rabid and wild. “This is going to hurt.”

A man walking his dog down a quiet residential street six blocks away heard the screams. He stopped and crossed himself, peering up. A mother walking her two children to school heard it, too, and so did the fruit vendor and his wife setting up their stall on the Rue de Marquet. Many more heard it as well, the long, eerie shriek that seemed to descend from the sky itself, echoing off walls and trees and buildings before being cut off abruptly, leaving all to wonder just what had caused such a terrible noise.

Or who.

Eliana had no idea how much time had passed. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours. It might have even been centuries for all her dead heart could tell.

She was slumped against the wall in the long corridor on the level of the bedrooms, her arms resting on her bent knees, staring down at the fibers of the black carpet, seeing nothing. Demetrius had been inside the room with Mel since they arrived. She’d brought him hot water in pans and all the towels she could find, then left him alone as he’d asked. Her last sight of Mel had been of her still, pale body lying on the bed, Demetrius leaning over her with a scalpel in one hand.

She would die. Eliana was sure of it. She’d lost too much blood. She would die.

Her fault. Her fault. So much blood and chaos and the unending, nearly unendurable agony of living with half-truths and twisted lies that passed for their sad reality. And what was the point of it all, really? More and more and more years of living on the run and hiding from still more people she once thought were her friends and family. More dragging days and endless nights, hoping for a future that would probably never come, more betrayal, more assassins, a future of living in the open with another species that seemed to prefer her dead, or—worse—caged?

The answer was: there was no point. It had all been a pipe dream, a castle built in the sand. Emptied of the dreams that had sustained her for so long, she felt gutted. She felt hollowed out.

The door cracked open. Eliana’s head snapped around. She staggered to her feet.

“Well?”

Demetrius looked as if he’d gone down to hell to do battle with demons, and lost. His face was strained, his shoulders were hunched forward in an attitude of defeat, and there were dark smudges of blue under his eyes which, to her great horror, reflected the defeat in his posture. The utter lack of hope.

“You should sit with her,” was his cryptic response, and then he brushed past her and walked slowly up the twisting stairs to the level above.

No. Her heart began to pound it out like a drumbeat in her chest. No. No. No. No.

She went into the room and had to bite her lip to keep from sobbing.