Chapter 40
“ I -I heard plenty,” I stammer, one hand clenching at the fabric of my dress, just above my heart. “I heard that you only pretended to care about?—”
“ Ophelia ,” Nyatrix implores, reaching out for me. I pitch myself away from her grasp, almost tripping over my feet. She flinches at my reaction, her hands curling into fists at her sides. “I’m sorry. I should’ve explained more to you sooner.”
She leans out into the hallway, keen gaze looking left, then right, scouring the darkness. A few moments later, as if satisfied no one is listening, she steps out of the waiting chambers and closes the door behind her. Then it’s just me and the Lupa Nox and the shadows, the flickering light of the torches and the scream held in the back of my throat. Against all reason, the tender place between my legs still throbs for her.
She is so close—I could take one step toward her and be firmly within her embrace. And I want to. In the name of the First Son, even after everything I’ve just heard, I want to—with every fiber of my being.
“Explain it to me now,” I find myself saying, my voice firm despite the way everything inside me wobbles with uncertainty.
Nyatrix nods, dragging one hand through her hair. “I told you I’d need to do some politicking,” she replies, her gaze finally meeting mine. “That was the commander of the Sepulchyre army, Maxima Cato. I said those things to her because I don’t know if I can trust her any longer. I . . . I don’t want her to know how much I care— Look, please just understand that Liminalia is a very dangerous place right now.”
I startle at that, pulling farther away from her, my back grazing the stone wall. “You told me I would be safe here.”
She closes her eyes for a long moment, and when she opens them, she looks so weary, so ground-down, so utterly spent, that I have to lean against the wall and cross my arms to stop myself from reaching for her.
“I am doing my best, but it is madness,” she explains, keeping her voice low, her eyes darting now and again around the hall. “Allegiances flipped, alliances broken, the entire balance of power disrupted.”
I stare at her, uninterested in this talk of the Sepulchyre’s political body. I want to know how she feels , if she aches for me, too, or if she just peered into the depths of my loneliness and found all the places it might be exploited.
“I don’t care about any of that,” I hiss. “At least not right now. What I’m asking . . . What I need to know is this: do you care for me at all, Nyatrix?”
That hard, fierce expression of hers collapses. Her hand reaches out to cup my jaw, fingertips knifing into my hair. As her thumb traces my lower lip, every last piece of me hums with wonder.
“Nyatrix!” a voice shouts, muffled, and for a long moment, I cannot understand the direction it’s coming from. But the beautiful Fatum knight with her hand in my hair, her eyes trained on my mouth, is gifted with much more acute hearing. Her fingers slip away from me, her head snapping to attention in the direction of the room she just exited.
She looks at me, back at the door, and then at me again. In a movement so quick I don’t even have time to process it, she sweeps me into her arms and moves toward the waiting chamber.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
“Please trust me, little dove,” she replies, her lips brushing my ear. She shoulders through the door, bringing us both into the room. “I beg of you. Unless you wish to face Lucretia’s Expurgo. Or perhaps something even worse.”
I twist in her arms, trying to see what awaits us, and come face-to-face with Centurion Primus Lucretia. She’s standing in the simple, earth-walled chamber as if it’s a throne room. No windows provide illumination, the only light coming from a candelabra sitting atop a small wooden table and a few blackened iron sconces dripping with beeswax. One guard—tall, powerfully built, armed with a short sword—stands at her side, the candlelight dancing on his helm.
“So,” says Centurion Lucretia, crossing her arms, “I hear your little stray is not the Avatar we seek.”
“No, she is not,” Nyatrix replies, her hand curling around my waist. “And the trial has exhausted her. We’ll be returning to my domus.”
Lucretia holds up a hand, and her soldier instantly draws his sword. “Nyatrix,” the Centurion warns, “she may not be the power we want, but she is Tithed. Which means she must be returned.”
Panic fills me, pinpricks needling across my skin, which is suddenly warm and clammy. Against me, Nyatrix goes utterly still. “ Tithed ?” she snarls.
I register the word for the first time as it leaves her mouth. And then it is terror—not something so simple as panic—that leaks into my veins.
“Yes, Nyatrix,” Lucretia says, sounding bored. “You’re right, for the record. About everything since the Tithing Massacre. That’s why Centurion Decima wasn’t alive by the time you got back. If our prior Centurion Primus was ready to tell you the truth, we couldn’t take the risk she might find someone else to confess her sins to.”
I grip Nyatrix’s shoulders, my gaze darting around the low-lit room, looking for ways we might escape. Through the door we came, perhaps. Or the door at the Centurion’s back. Surely Nyatrix could fight off two mortals. My body screams at me to flee, to find a safe, dark burrow and hide until the danger is gone.
But, of course, the woman holding me is the danger.
“I will slit the throat of everyone involved in this scheme,” Nyatrix snarls at the Centurion. I can feel the rage thrumming in her chest, the constriction of her muscles that are as good a promise of violence as anything.
But instead of cowering, Centurion Lucretia just laughs. “You’d have to kill half of your own people,” she replies with a grin that makes my stomach churn. “Or were you not quite smart enough to discover just how deep all of this goes? Nyatrix, look around you. We have a handful of greenhouses. One measly river, though it’s barely more than a creek with so little rain these days. The rest of our land is uninhabitable. How do you think we’ve been surviving all these anni?”
I want to cover my ears, to close my eyes, to disappear into the floor. I was right, I think, that first night in Liminalia. All is lost. There is no honor in survival; it only means I have taken from another’s cup. I had hoped that more people here would be like Nyatrix.
But she is the last of her kind, isn’t she?
“You are Tithing our own people to the Host?” Nyatrix demands.
I expect another taunt from Lucretia, another dry laugh, as she steps closer— closer to the Lupa Nox, like an utter fool. Instead, her expression moves into something I’ve seen before: devotional, half-mad, so utterly convinced of her truths. I know this look well; it’s haunted my own mirror all my life.
“We give the Host just enough to stay alive,” Lucretia says, clamping her hands to her heart. “Just enough to keep fighting. Keep enduring. Please believe me when I say that I know this horrible sacrifice will be worth it in the end. They think they’re bleeding us dry. And maybe they are. But a tick engorged on blood is easy prey. Especially with a weapon like you at our disposal. So please. Let me return the Tithed girl. And then let me return the Sepulchyre to the glory our ancestors knew.”
Nyatrix’s grip on me loosens as she moves to gently set me down.
Wordlessly, I claw at her blouse, tears pricking the backs of my eyes. “No,” I cry out. “Nyatrix, please, no.”
“That’s a good soldier.” Lucretia sighs. “She would’ve been worth more were she an Avatar, but He’ll be wanting her back regardless.”
I look up at Nyatrix, grabbing for her forearm, but her face is expressionless, all of her attention on the Centurion. Desperation fills me, and I eye the dagger on her belt. I won’t go back. I can’t go back. I’ll throw myself into the waters crashing against these ancient sea caves. I’ll let a Hexen tear out my throat. I’ll invite the sands of the Sundered Lands to fill my lungs.
But I will not go back.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I snap at the Centurion, steadying myself on my cane. “Least of all to Lumendei.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Lucretia tells me, growing impatient. “You’re Tithed. You belong to the First Son. And for that, I am sorry. Truly. But I must put my own people first.”
Rage rattles the bars of its cage somewhere deep in my chest. All the parts of myself that I locked away, the things that weren’t suitable for a lady of the Host. In Lumendei, I had to be sweet and kind and accommodating to survive.
Not anymore.
“I belong,” I shout, “to myself .”
Those four words hum low in my marrow. Something uncoils from that hidden place in my chest, and I think it might be power. But the expressions of the Centurion and her soldier do not change, and the earthen walls all but swallow the sound of my voice.
“Nyatrix, please gather her up,” Lucretia commands. “This has grown quite tiresome.”
“Centurion Primus,” Nyatrix replies, cool and collected. “It would be best, I think, to listen to the lady. And she says she belongs to herself.”
Elation fills me, sweet as any Feast Day wine, and I turn to look at the Lupa Nox. Her eyes—just her eyes, the rest of her utterly motionless—slide to me. The edge of her mouth curves into something that makes me forget there are other people in the room and that both of them mean to harm me.
“I will not let you jeopardize our future and the sacrifice so many of our people have made. I will bring the wrath of the entire Centuria down upon you,” Lucretia hisses. Her guard draws his blade and steps forward. “It will pain me, but if you can’t be the weapon we desperately need, I’ll hang you from the Ossuary Wall until you’re nothing but blackened bones.”
Nyatrix grins, like she’s finally enjoying herself. “You’re certainly welcome to try.”
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, “to you , 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. But you will. 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...and yet ...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.
“ That is why I bound myself to the Centuria—to alter the legacy of my people,” Nyatrix whispers as Lucretia begins to choke, 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.
“Tiberius,” Nyatrix breathes. I force myself to open my eyes. “Go, if you need to. I would never hold it against you.”
The soldier pulls off his helm, the deep hue of his skin gone pale. “No,” he says, shaking his head, his gaze darting to me. “My loyalty is to our people. And to you, Nyatrix.”
She sighs and her body sags, as if all the violence has been spent for now. I almost relax, too, but then a sharp knock sounds at the door. Tiberius whirls, raising his blade, at the same time Nyatrix takes a step forward.
“Ophelia?” comes a familiar voice. Agrippina’s, I realize. “Nyatrix?”
“Let her in, please,” the Lupa Nox murmurs, moving toward the door. “We can trust her. I swear it.”
Tiberius looks over his shoulder, unsure, but then nods and unlatches the lock. Agrippina slips inside, her eyes wide. The woman glances around the room, her gaze finding me and then the fallen Centurion. She gasps, pressing her hand to her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Nyatrix says, coming to stand beside Agrippina.
“I wish you hadn’t done that.” Agrippina sighs, massaging her temple. “How long do we have until the Centuria is upon us?”
Nyatrix shrugs at the same moment Tiberius lets out a huff. “Depends,” he says. “But probably not long.”
I look between the three of them, unsure of Tiberius, the new addition to our ragged, unlikely group. My wariness of men is ground-in, ancient, something I fear I’ll never shake. But then Nyatrix’s gaze drifts to me. When our eyes meet, I forget everything. It’s just her.
“Tiberius is one of my oldest friends,” she tells me, like my mind is open to her. And then, hesitantly, she asks, “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I whisper, my voice coming out so very small.
“You two are coming with me,” Agrippina says, a note of finality in her voice as she finally looks up from the Centurion’s corpse. “There are many places to hide in the Conclaves.”
“I’ll escort you,” Tiberius says firmly, resettling his helm upon his head. “If we meet any Centuria guards, I’ll deal with them.”
Nyatrix frowns, glancing at the soldier and the healer. “Have you both considered the possible fallout?”
Agrippina scoffs, throwing her hands up. “Well, someone killed the Centurion Primus. You’ve had a contentious relationship with Lucretia for anni, and everyone knows you were here together. It’s not long until the Centuria gets antsy about being picked off and just points fingers wherever they can. Might as well keep you hidden and use the chaos to our advantage. A good storm always brings interesting things to the shoreline.”
“You’re sure?” Nyatrix asks, her chest rising in a long inhale.
“Couldn’t you both be implicated, then?” I ask, finally peeling myself off the wall. I just met Agrippina a few days ago, but there’s already a tender spot in my heart with her name written on it. And Tiberius, well—if Nyatrix cares for the knight, I don’t want anything to happen to him.
“Certainly,” Agrippina replies. “But I’m the one who’s been poking around birth records and asking questions about the reports of missing children. I’m likely already implicated.”
“I’m High Commander Maxima Cato’s son,” Tiberius says with a wink, leaning back against the doorframe. “Not untouchable, no. But close. And I’ll gladly stand between Nyatrix and the Centuria if it comes to it.”
Nyatrix sighs, her shoulders sagging. “I’m sorry. I... I couldn’t stop?—”
Without looking at the knight, Agrippina reaches out her hand and places it on Nyatrix’s muscular bicep. “I know, love.”
I watch the exchange, my mind tumbling toward something that might be understanding. “Like you told me this morning?” I ask in a whisper. “You couldn’t stop again, Nyatrix?”
She looks at me, so weary, as if there’s a thousand stones dragging her down into the dirt. “Yes,” she replies hoarsely. “There’s this . . . chamber inside me. A monster lives there. Sometimes it gets out.”
Her words—a chamber inside of her, so much like my inner room—make my heart pound. “You said you didn’t believe in the Votum.”
Nyatrix’s smile is nothing but sadness worn into a bitterly sharp shard. Agrippina’s fingers on the knight’s bicep tighten into a squeeze.
“I don’t,” Nyatrix whispers, her jaw clenching. “It would be nicer to believe. But I think I’m . . . I think I’m just broken.”
A wave of emotion rises and crashes against my rib cage. I am drowning, I think, even though I stand on dry land. Instinctively, I reach out for Nyatrix, foolish enough to think my touch could tame whatever lurks within her.
But then the sound of voices shatters my conviction at the same time Tiberius warns, “Someone is coming.”
Agrippina bursts into action, striding for the door a few paces behind me as she produces a large ring of keys from her pocket. “Follow me,” she says, her tone short as she dives through the door into the hallway waiting beyond.
Nyatrix makes her way across the room, pausing where I stand. She looks down at me, her lips parting. “Ophelia, I...” She glances over her shoulder. “I fear I’ve destroyed your life.”
Of all things, a laugh bursts out of me, edged in thorns. “I destroyed my own life,” I murmur. “How many anni I lived in that city, knowing in my bones that something was wrong. That everything was wrong. I knew, Nyatrix. And I did nothing.”
That sad smile again, tugging at the curves of her mouth. “Perhaps,” she replies, one brow arched, “our stories are more similar than we first thought, little dove.”
My heart pangs. She offers me her hand—the same hand that just took a life—and I do not hesitate to take it. Then, her fingers closed around mine, I follow the Lupa Nox into the dark.