19. Nineteen #2
La Lune Noire was empty now, the hush so deep it made every footstep sound like blasphemy. Not even the air wanted to ruffle the velvet drapes, hanging limp as the tables vanished into the shadows. Above the stage, the rose window had gone from neon pink to a dead blue.
At the altar. Of course. Where else would an exile break curfew—a devil’s daughter hug themselves tight in the only place that wouldn’t reject her?
Kneeling, her head bowed low over the rails where so many men had mouthed prayers and left curses. Wet hair clung to her face. Her hands trembled.
She hadn’t heard me enter.
I’d let her have the last pretense of solitude—that much I’d give her.
Arms folded, I stayed at the rear, watching her mouth move silently, working through a script of confessions she’d never meant to speak aloud.
After five minutes, she looked up and saw me.
The flash of hate in her eyes was so clear, so bereft of anything but the primal joy of being alive and unbroken.
I walked toward her.
Each step was deliberate, chewing through the silence, until I stood at her shoulder.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t scramble back, just stared up at me, lips parted, as if caught mid-declaration.
The sleeplessness made her irises silver, the veins in her eyes red.
I stood in the hush and waited for her to tell me to get fucked.
She didn’t.
“Will you at least let me finish my prayer?” Harlowe asked, and the wrecked softness in her voice bored a hole through my spine.
“It won’t be answered,” I replied, but kept my hands at my sides—better to let her believe herself a martyr on her own schedule.
Her desperate laugh rattled the stained glass. “Not even the devil’s daughter gets a day off, huh?”
“You had your chance.” The candlelight flickered across the bruise along her jaw. “You’re bleeding. Right leg.”
She looked down, as if only just noticing the slashed leggings and the bright ribbon running down her shin. “It’s just a scratch.”
I knelt.
Then, for the first time all night, I looked at her. There was no lessening in her stare, not a drop of humility or hope.
Harlowe Virelli would sooner bleed to death, whispering slurs at my family than surrender an inch she’d already taken.
She refused to look away even as her leg twitched under her. Her chin lifted, and I could see how beautiful she’d be if she were capable of ordinary human needs, like rest or affection.
That wasn’t her gene pool. Virellis gorged themselves on hate.
“You knew I’d come here?”
She said it the way a wolf asks a trap if it’s impressed.
“Perhaps. But I hoped you’d make the hunt at least interesting.”
She scoffed. “What’s the plan then, killer? Drag me back to your house and try to court me with more pasta and implied murder?”
The word “court” made her mouth curl in contempt. It was an idea so alien, it might as well have been a threat.
I closed the gap.
The space was sacrosanct, but her body drew me in like a weather system. She twisted, tried to rise, but the knee gave way, and she ended up folded at my feet. She looked embarrassed, then angry, then nothing at all, as if the effort of switching emotion had finally stripped her down to the marrow.
“Get it over with,” she said, refusing to meet my eyes. “If you’re going to kill me, do it right here. It’ll be the only honest thing anyone’s ever done in this church.”
Her certainty in my darkness was something to envy—the way her voice shook, not from fear, but from absolute fucking exhaustion.
Instead of answering, I reached for her leg and peeled back the ruined material.
She tried to pull away, but I pinioned her shin to the stone with a palm and thumbed the bloody edge of her cut, inspecting the depth.
“It needs to be cleaned,” I said. “Otherwise, it’ll get infected, and you’ll die slow and ugly—not my style.”
She scoffed, looking off toward the shattered rose window, the way people look for rescue in the dark. “You’re a fucking doctor now? That’s cute.”
There was something raw in the way she said it, something almost pleading, but she hid it fast.
Without answering, I took a rag from the altar, and pressed it to her shin. She yipped, the first real sound she’d made that wasn’t calculated to being wounded, then glared as if I’d personally offended her ancestors with the gesture.
“Where’d you learn how to incapacitate my alarm system?” I asked.
She sniffed, hiding a grimace. “Trade secret. Maybe I remembered something my brother taught me, in all the years we spent stealing cars and not murdering each other for promotions.” Her hands trembled.
“I ran away from you, not your alarms,” she muttered, voice distant and almost childlike.
“If you’re going to force me to be the next Mrs. Romanov, the least I could do is make you work for it.
Not that you’ve ever actually wanted anything that didn’t scream. ”
I patted her shin and let the blood-stained rag fall to the marble with the lilies. “You’re wrong about me.”
Sitting on the edge of the altar rail, I reached into my coat for the flask, unscrewed the cap, and poured a touch of whiskey over the gash.
She hissed, but her hands didn’t so much as twitch. I watched her tuck the pain away, cataloguing the shape of it for another day. Harlowe Virelli’s pain was her only real inheritance, and she wore it with pridefully bad taste.
“Why’d you send your psycho cousin to babysit me?”
I laughed. “Natalya was a precaution. You, on the other hand, are an anomaly. You make loyalty inconvenient.”
“Fuck me.” She winced. “Do you keep me alive to parade around or to torment me?”
I considered the question, unhurried as ever.
“Neither. I want you alive because I like the way you resist.”
“You could chain ten women to this table and it wouldn’t fix the hole in the Romanov kingdom.”
My head tilted. “You think I want peace? I want unrest, Harlowe. I want a city ready to tear itself apart at the first wrong move, but built exactly in my image when it’s done.”
She looked up. “Then let me go.”
I took her chin in mine, slow and steady. “I could.” My thumb traced the cut on her lip, still wet in the candlelight. “But then you’d have nothing left to want, and I wouldn’t wish that on even a Virelli.”
Harlowe trembled—not from pain, not from fear, but from the effort of holding herself together. And I saw, in the glint of her eyes, the ghost of every woman who’d survived in spite of everything designed to break her.
“You think it matters if you win or lose?” she said. “There’s nothing left on the other side.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, little viper.” I moved my hand from her chin to the back of her head, threading through the soaked hair, pulling her close enough that we were one organism, breathing in the same oxygen.
She didn’t lean in. She didn’t pull back, either. She hung in the balance, perfectly taut, as if daring me to make the first move so she could hate herself for it later.
“Do you want to know the truth?” I pressed my lips to the shell of her ear.
“I asked my father for permission to have you. I told him I’d rather a city at war than a kingdom of sheep.
” I pressed two fingers against her pulse just to feel it skitter.
“I think you’d rather bleed than heal, and I can’t decide if that’s mercy or just a flaw in the breed. ”
“You want to be my messiah, Arrow? Then die for my sins.”
She kissed me then—or maybe I kissed her, hard to say, because it was teeth and heat and the sanctified violence of two species extinct but refusing to admit it.
I tasted her—vodka and iron and the last burn of sleep deprivation—and let her teeth bite blood from my own.
She fought, as I knew she would, choking on a sob, and digging her nails into my scalp.
We tumbled against the altar rail, knocking lilies and glass and the memory of a thousand kneeling orphans to the floor.
My mouth became her final source of air, and when I finally pulled back, letting our foreheads throb together, I saw her eyes were full of light—not forgiveness, but the holy clarity that comes after a gunshot.
For a second, we just breathed—breathing each other, trembling with the chemical potential for bodies to fuse or detonate, whichever came first.
“I can’t go back with you.” She gasped, voice pressed thin by the effort of not being alive. “If you take me back, I’ll kill myself.” Her hands shook, pulling my face closer, like the edge of a knife calling blood to its mouth.
I bit her bottom lip. Hard. Enough to punish, not break.
“Do it, little viper,” I said, tasting her blood mixed with mine.
“If you wanted a martyr’s grave, you’d have knelt by your brother’s side the night he died.
You came here because you wanted to win—to show me that you could.
” I slid my thumb down the line of her jaw, holding her gaze, as I dared her to argue.
“I’m going to bury you for what you did to my brother—what your family did to my brother,” she spat, her voice unsteady. “I’ll salt the earth with the last of the Romanov trash. Finish the job my father and every man before him was too chickenshit to do themselves.”
“Then do it.” I released her long enough to seize her wrist, shoved a shard of broken glass into her fist, and locked her fingers around it with enough force to draw blood. “You want the end, Harlowe? Aim for my carotid. I’ll lean in, so that you don’t miss.”
Her face twisted—loathing, fascination, shame. I wanted the hit as much as she did, maybe even more. Virellis were always better at finishing things; Romanovs were just the last ones standing when the dust cleared.
Held high, the glass trembled in her grip. I was certain she’d go through with it—grind glass through my skin and muscle until we were both covered in blood. But she let it fall, clattering to the floor. One sob tore loose, and she recoiled from the sound like it was something contagious.
“Fuck you, Arrow. Fuck the Romanov family. Fuck all of this.”