Chapter 6
Julian had sworn the Sovereign never touched them. He had sworn there were no concubines, no harem, no defiled corpses rotting in the crypts.
*Then what are you keeping them for?* I thought, snapping the sheath over the poisoned dirk and sliding it into the concealed forearm bracer of Vera’s leather armor. *What kind of monster hoards a century of warriors and never shows his face?*
I buckled my cuirass, checking every strap, every blade.
My twin short swords hung at my hips. The silver stiletto rode against my right thigh. The poisoned needle was locked against my forearm, spring-loaded and primed for a single, lethal thrust.
I was not going to wait for midnight. I was not going to let Julian lead me down a flower-strewn aisle like a heifer to the slaughterhouse while some phantom king waited to claim my soul.
If this fortress was a trap, I would spring it from the inside out.
I left my quarters silently, the supple boots making no sound against the damp basalt.
The fortress was changed. The violet runes that usually pulsed with a quiet, bioluminescent hum were blazing now, their light shifting to a deep, arterial crimson that matched the bleeding sky outside. The air tasted thicker—charged with ozone, old copper, and the sharp, prickling sensation of hair standing on end before a lightning strike.
No guards barred the corridors. There were still no servants, no heralds, no priests bearing incense. Only the silence, and that deafening, resonant pulse beneath the stone.
I turned toward the central spiral, aiming for the upper reaches. If the Sovereign had an inner sanctum, it would sit at the highest vantage of the keep, above the smoke of the forges, where tyrants always nested.
A cool draft swept down from a side gallery, carrying a scent so foreign to this tomb of iron and ash that my boots halted on instinct.
Roses.
Not dried lavender or cloying perfume, but the raw, peppery scent of living, freezing petals.
I drew my left dagger, easing my back against the wall, and stepped through a tall archway into the open air.
It was a sanctuary garden, suspended hundreds of feet above the jagged mountain cliffs. Colossal buttresses of volcanic stone arched overhead like the ribs of an overturned galleon, opening the courtyard to the sky. Beneath the crimson light of the Blood Moon, black earth yielded groves of skeletal, white-barked trees whose branches dripped with silver moss.
And blooming in low, terraced stone beds were thousands of roses—not red, not white, but petals as black as polished obsidian, their edges rimmed with frost.
Standing at the edge of the parapet, framed against the bleeding heavens, was Julian.
He hadn't heard me. Or perhaps he had, and simply didn't care.
He wore no slate cloak now, only his dark combat tunic and the heavy weapons belt slung low on his hips. His broad hands rested flat against the stone coping of the battlements, his head bowed, his shoulders rigid under a weight that seemed far heavier than plate armor.
The wind off the chasm whipped his dark hair across his brow. In the crimson wash of the moon, the sharp angles of his face looked carved from marble—beautiful, exhausted, and terrifyingly solitary.
"You should be resting, Lysandra," he said without turning. His voice was quiet, stripped of the sardonic bite he wore like armor in the halls below. "The Sovereign does not favor exhausted meat."
I stepped into the garden, my boots crunching softly on the frost-kissed black gravel. I kept my hand resting near the hilt of my short sword.
"You called me a wolf yesterday," I replied, coming to a halt three paces from his side. "Wolves don't sleep when the trap is about to spring."
Julian turned his head slightly, his liquid mercury eyes reflecting the blood-red sky. They looked feverish, haunted by an encroaching darkness he had kept hidden beneath layers of mockery and discipline.
"This isn't a trap," he said softly.
"Then what is it, Julian?" I gestured toward the crimson expanse above us, where the bloated moon hung like an open eye. "The whole mountain is shaking. The air smells like a slaughterhouse. You look at me like you're memorizing the face of a corpse, and you still haven't told me what your master wants with my blood."
Julian turned fully to face me, leaning his back against the parapet. He crossed his arms over his broad chest, but his fingers dug into the fabric of his sleeves—a tell. The only tell of tension I had ever seen on him.
"He wants what the Sunlit Realm refused to give you," Julian said. "He wants you whole. He wants your rage."
"Rage doesn't pay a dowry."
"Neither does a blade through the ribs, yet here you are, bristling with steel like a porcupine." A ghost of that wry, insolent smirk touched his lips, but it faltered almost instantly, drowned out by the grim reality pressing against our throats. He looked at the bracer on my forearm, right where the nightshade needle lay concealed. "You re-poisoned the needle."
"Of course I did."
"It won't work on him, you know."
"Everything with a pulse bleeds," I countered, closing the distance between us until I stood barely an arm’s length away. The heat radiating from him was a searing counterpoint to the bitter mountain frost. "And everything that bleeds can die. Even your precious, nameless god."
Julian let out a low, ragged breath. He tilted his head back against the stone, looking up at the crimson stars.
"He isn't a god, Lysandra. He is a debt that was never paid."
"Then let him collect it from the kings who owe it," I snapped, frustration flaring hot and sharp in my chest. "Not from me. Not from the girls you lured here for a hundred years while you smiled and sharpened their knives."
The words struck him like a lash.
Julian flinched, his jaw locking so tight the muscle twitched under his skin. When he looked back at me, the cool composure was gone, shattered into jagged shards of agony so pure it made the air hitch in my throat.
"You think I wanted this?" he growled, taking a single, predatory step toward me. The sudden shift in momentum brought his chest inches from mine. "You think I enjoyed standing at those iron gates, watching ninety-nine women walk into this fortress, knowing what awaited them? Knowing that every single one of them was sold by men who claimed to love them?"
"You could have opened the gates," I breathed, refusing to step back, holding his furious, silver gaze. "You could have let them run."
"Run where?" Julian’s voice cracked, a rough, desperate sound that tore straight through my defenses. "Back to fathers who would hang them for treason? Back to lords who would drown them in the river to preserve an alliance? There is no sun for women like you, Lysandra. You know it. You carry the scars of it on your throat!"
His hand came up—fast, unthinking—and his fingers caught the nape of my neck, his thumb resting directly against the raised silver ring of the noose scar.
