Chapter 39 Safiya
Chapter thirty-nine
Safiya
The ballroom was littered with debris and slick with blood, but she did not falter. She did not feel the stone cutting through her boots or the heat of fire on her face. There was only that buoyant pull which carried her toward her final task.
Her revenge.
Safiya lunged, a dagger in her outstretched hand and rage on her face. Her blade sunk deep between two ribs, soundless but for the soft gasp of her victim. Shocked blue eyes met hers, dark and stormy. The tempest that had grown within her spilled forth after years of holding the floodwaters at bay.
“Do you remember me?” Safiya asked, twisting her dagger until he cried out. She felt it scrape against his bones—clashing and killing. “My name is Safiya Keres.”
She retracted her blade from the king’s chest in one leaden, undoable moment.
Life’s blood spewed from his pierced heart and gurgled in his throat.
Her fist came down again. “I came to this Goddesses forsaken country to heal what had been broken. I left my family behind. I sacrificed comfort and love. I found a kingdom that could not be healed.”
A strike for her, for her mother and father, one for every one of her six siblings. A deep, hacking slice for Alora—the girl she had loved and lost at Tarquin’s will. She stabbed him for Ayla and Harkin and every Acsillan citizen who had suffered under his rule.
“Do you know why Acsilla could not be healed?”
His mouth opened but only blood dribbled out, sticky with drool and bile.
“The problem with this kingdom was not the Ordelésans. It was you. You do not want peace, and now you shall never have it.” Safiya bared her teeth, shoving him to the ground.
He teetered for one weightless moment, and then he fell. An irrevocable part of her past made meaningless.
Safiya did not stop carving her blade into his chest until her face was covered in his cooling blood. She did not rest until the King of Acsilla lay lifeless before her.
Relief flooded through her as she sank to her knees. Her lips tilted in a smile, and her dagger clattered to the floor, sticky with dark blood.
She was free.
The ballroom was unbearably silent for the longest breath, then Ayla screamed, a sound like grief and anger and betrayal becoming one, and everyone in the room knew that their world had been irreparably changed. Safiya knew that she had brought forth irreparable change.