Chapter 41
Asharp rap at the door interrupted them.
Ksenia’s eyes darted to Bohdan.
She leaped to her feet and tucked herself into the standing wardrobe, surrounded by his clothes, their cum sliding down her thighs.
Bohdan pulled his trousers back on and slipped into the tunic he had ripped off Ksenia.
The knocks became more insistent.
He swung open the door to see a red-faced Envorsen.
“What’s happening, Emre?”
“The Lord King is unhinged. He won’t stop rambling about Vezna and his study. He hasn’t left the garden, just pacing nonstop.”
Point break.
Bohdan dragged his guard inside and shut the door.
He lowered his voice. “He thinks Danika is the mastermind behind the assassinations. She made the key to his study; she’s a bondsmith, and she’s been within the castle the entire time.”
A sudden surge of fear pierced Ksenia’s heart.
“He believes this was her final act of revenge against him for killing her sister.” Emre rubbed the back of his neck. “He wants you at his side, immediately.”
Bohdan gave an affirmative nod as the guard exited and pulled the door closed.
Ksenia burst through the wardrobe the moment the latch clicked. “You have to convince him she’s not the killer.”
“Unless I’m turning you in, he won’t believe me.” Bohdan tugged on his second boot, jaw tight. “He’s beyond reason if he’s willing to kill his last bondsmith.”
Ksenia’s fingers fumbled with the laces on her boot. “Buy me time. I need to reach her before he does.”
“No.” His hand shot out, gripping her wrist. “I’m coming with you. You can’t face him alone.”
She wrenched her hand away. “I can, and I have to. Your best move is to stay quiet and loyal. He trusts no one but you now, and we can’t lose that advantage.”
His throat bobbed. “I can’t live this lie anymore.”
“You have to—listen to me—you have to.” Her fingers gripped his jaw, then softened. “But if we kill him, we can change everything—the kingdom, the bloodshed, all of it.”
His eyes searched hers, desperate for another option.
She gave him none.
“Ksenia—”
“Senka,” she corrected. “Trust me, please.”
His eyes clenched shut briefly before that familiar mask reformed and the captain returned.
“Go,” he said roughly. “I’ll stall him as long as I can.”
Ksenia dragged him close, her hands fisted in his tunic, memorizing the scent of him, every facet of his green eyes, the strength of his jawline, then the softness of his lips before she enveloped him in an embrace.
As Ksenia drew closer to the forge, the usual din of hammers and the roar of fire were absent.
She strengthened her resolve and pushed through the doors.
The forges were lit, painting the stone walls with pulsing oranges and reds. Shadows stretched and convulsed with each whisp of flame.
The air quivered and shimmered. It was hot, metallic, and stifling.
An odd pressure was building in her head, as if she had been trapped underwater. Her heartbeat thundered, and her breathing came stilted and quick.
She stared around her, hyper-alert in the dulled environment.
Ksenia spotted Danika in the center, knelt before her anvil. A thousand silver shards were scattered around her, like panes of a mirror, radiating outward in glittering fractals. Firelight danced across her dazed face in shifting hues—soft gold, then searing red.
She looked thinner, but her spine was straight.
The children huddled in the far corner, wide-eyed stares darting between Ksenia and Danika.
“Danika!” Ksenia’s voice shrieked inside her but came out muffled and sluggish, as if the air had thickened. “We have to get out—now.”
“Senna?” Danika’s voice sounded distant, surreal. Her lips were cracked and bleeding. Up close, Ksenia could see raw, fresh burn wounds that spiderwebbed up her hand and forearm.
No.
Fear doused her white-hot rage.
“We’re leaving.” She forced calm into her voice despite the tremor in her fingers as they wrapped around Danika’s upper arm. “Right now.”
Danika’s eyes lifted to hers—bright but vacant. “I did it.”
“Did what?” Ksenia whispered. But she already knew.
“My quiet rebellion.” Danika gestured at the shards. “I destroyed all of the kingswords.”
“What—how?” Ksenia took in the thousands of glittering fragments scraping beneath her boots.
Bound weapons had never been successfully destroyed. Not once in the history of bondsmithing.
“I figured it out. Bond nullification.” Danika’s dazed stare drifted to a strange hammer on her anvil—oil-slick black metal that seemed to drink in the light. “Krahomor. The hammer of unmaking.”
“You brilliant, reckless—” Ksenia broke off as she hugged Danika quickly, feeling her sister’s sharp intake of breath from her wounds. “Now, let’s go.”
Then she felt it.
A discordant echo pierced through the oppressive silence, reverberating from the hallway. The sound curled back on itself, creating a repetitive, dissonant chord that made her own heart claw to escape her ribcage.
He was coming.
Against all common sense, Ksenia straightened and prepared to meet the butcher king.
“Senna.” Danika’s voice was low and feverish beside her. “We have to destroy Radegast. I don’t know if Krahomor will work on a hellbound blade, but we have to try.”
“I know.” Ksenia reached past her and closed her hand around the hammer’s handle. The metal bit into her skin, so cold it burned.
She slung it onto her belt and pushed Danika behind her.
The door slammed open.
Karsan’s pale eyes locked onto them, searing as frostbite. His cloak billowed around him as he entered and kicked the door shut behind him with brutal finality.
Those eyes tore from the sisters and darted rapidly across the floor, taking in the carnage—all of his kingswords, shattered like wicked stars across the stone.
“What have you done?” His voice dripped venom.
“What my father spent the remainder of his life trying to accomplish,” Danika replied, tilting her chin. “Rid the world of your scourge.”
The shards on the floor reflected a thousand sneering Karsans.
“Sevrant,” he snapped. “By my side.”
“No.” A small, twisted smile crawled onto Ksenia’s face.
Power in a single word.
He blinked once. Twice.
“Come here,” he growled. His compulsion had bent kings and killers and everyone in between, only for her to just look at him. “You can’t refuse—”
“Oh, but I can.” Her voice pitched low as she threw a silver hairpin at his feet.
His eyes widened, and he shifted on his heels.
“I can do anything I want.” The sapphire brooch shattered before him.
She was never his to begin with.
“Kill anyone I want.” An obsidian medallion was crushed beneath her heel as she stepped closer.
She was completely outside his control.
“That is what you said, right?” She casually flourished Caromir in her hand.
Wide eyes and pinched brows transformed into a curled snarl and mottled skin. “You—the assassin—”
“Assassin? No—no, Lord King. I’m much more than that, don’t you see?” Her brows shot up, a manic smile painted on her face as she stalked closer. “I am the ghost of your past, the haunting of your present.”
Her eyes flashed, Caromir humming in her palm like a living thing.
Do you see me now?
She tilted her head. “You don’t remember me.”
A step closer.
“You invited me into Hearth.”
Another step.
“Crowned me your Sevrant.”
Another step.
“And you never once asked my name.”
She peered at his inadequacy.
“Say my name.”
Her voice cut him better than any knife could.
His red-rimmed eyes darted from the ferocity of her golden ones to the protective stance she adopted before Danika.
His lip quivered before he forced a smile to his face.
“Well played, Ksenia Drazan…” He laughed—a sharp, humorless bark.
“I certainly hadn’t expected a dead woman to avenge herself, nor for Vornaya to succeed in sending you back.
After all, she’s failed so many times.” His grip curled around Radegast, matching his snarl.
The blade’s blood-stained patina glimmered. Within the metal grain, a writhing pattern of hundreds of screaming faces formed in the dark and light stains along the steel.
His smile turned razor-sharp. “But now that I know exactly who you are…” He tilted his head, considering his prey. “I can try something new.”
The walls began to warp and twist, solid stone flowing together like melted wax, dripping from the ceilings to pool on the floor.
Karsan’s smile never wavered. “Embrace your true self.”
He took a step forward, his boot crunching on the slivers of metal.
Suddenly, he was everywhere. Emerging from the shadows, from behind the furnace, clawing out of the melting wall.
Each one, painted with that same pleasant expression.
Each holding a Radegast that’d caught the hellish light of the forge.
“Kill me, Ksenia.” Dozens of disembodied voices flowed in unison. “Isn’t that what you came here to do?”
The nearest one lunged at her, and Ksenia whipped Caromir through his neck with satisfying precision. His head rolled, and she could feel that heady surge of power. Strength flooded her muscles, speed sharpening her reflexes.
Her victory was short-lived as Karsan slumped to the floor before her.
They looked at one another, then simultaneously lunged at her. Their hands closed on her body wherever they could grab—fisted in her hair, clawing at her face and throat, holding her feet in place.
Then another appeared, and another, and another.
She screamed as she wrenched her arms free to carve through them with increased frenzy, the rush of power and strength feeding her hunger for more.
“Stop, stop!” They cackled, their lost limbs and hacked bodies piling on and around her. One bit down on her flesh, nothing but an armless stump on legs.
Blood sprayed across the stone.
Karsan’s bodies piled higher.
Eventually, some tried to flee, dragging their bloodied bodies and each other over the floor, but Ksenia bore down on them just the same.
Her need for violence became a bottomless pit as she stood amongst the lifeless bodies.
Crackkkkk!
The air split before her with a fissure, and the tinkling of sharp glass had a musical quality as it fell around her.
Ksenia stood in the center of a slaughterhouse.
Blood coated every available surface. Her clothes were sodden with viscera.
Around her lay the bodies of children who had tried to flee only to run straight into her blade.
She jerked her head back to find Danika.
Her sister lay crumpled against the far wall, clutching her bloodied abdomen. Her face was waxy, eyes wide with horror.
“Senna…what—” Her words were paper-thin; she was teetering between life and death.
Ksenia’s breath came in sharp bursts that never reached her lungs. The world tilted around her.
Her eyes were blown wide, pupils contracted. Her hands fisted in her hair, clawing through the strands before gripping tight and pulling—the individual hairs snapping until her scalp burned with the pain.
“No, no, no,” she whispered between gasping breaths, her body rocking back and forth on unsteady feet.
Karsan stood, untouched in the center of it all, still smiling that small smile, his hands slowly clapping.
“You are magnificent.”
She staggered backward, her hands covered in innocent blood, Caromir thrumming with excitement in her palm.
This was beyond what she could have prepared for.
It felt so real. The hallucinations touched her.
Her hands slammed to the ground as her body crumpled, her breath whistling from her lungs too quickly and shallowly.
Her limbs tingled, growing numb as the panic consumed every rational thought.
Not from fear.
From something worse.
With Radegast, Karsan had made her dance and made her kill. Made her obey.
She had prided herself on being untouchable. Unbreakable. Untamable.
Something fundamental shattered.
Her numb fingers clawed and curled against the ground, breaking her nails, clenching into a fist as she brought herself to stand.
Everything dissolved as she felt her jaw unhinge in a primal scream of anguish.
The monster within answered.
She struck him like lightning, her newfound speed and strength coursing unbidden through her veins, and he could scarcely blink his eyes open before his own blood spilled.
Up close, he was smaller, frailer than she remembered. The illusion of royalty stripped away—just a feeble old man in a crown and silk robes. How this man was responsible for the annihilation of her people seemed unfathomable in the moment.
She was surgical, cutting at his shoulders, across his back, slashing at his open palms when he lifted them in defense.
Radegast clattered to the floor.
Karsan fell to the ground, his blood making no difference to the mess.
His thin lips parted to form words, and Ksenia interrupted them.
She flayed him with Caromir’s wicked edge, from the hollow of his neck to the bottom of his stomach as he screamed.
It. Wasn’t. Enough.
Her bare hands dug into his chest cavity.
Tearing.
Pulling.
Breaking.
His ribs snapped beneath her grip. His nails dug at her cheeks, at her eyes, but it didn’t stop her.
His grip finally weakened, and he fell slack to the ground.
Ksenia was finally sated, looking at the weak pulse of his heart of darkness in a broken nest of bones.
She drew herself up to full height, picking up Radegast within her wet hands.
She drank in the fear of his blood-flecked eyes, the way life was fading from them.
Death was too kind a punishment, but to rid the world of his rot was the greatest kindness she could give after all the bloodshed.
She drove the hellbound kingsword deep into his heart, slicing through tendon, sinew, deep into the beating, convulsing muscle that kept the butcher king alive.
She did it for Danika, for Petra, for the children, for the bondsmiths and their families that came before her, and those who died standing up against the king.
It began quietly, like the pale gray light before dawn breaking over the mountain ranges—a blue waft of smoke that spiraled through the shaft of the blade to form a glowing bead of dew upon the fuller.
It delicately lifted from the metal before suddenly rushing back into the hollow cavern of her being.
Not air. Not breath. But something wholly her.
The piece of herself that had been caged within the blade, used as part of a pact that made her kill, and kill, and kill.
Her knees buckled. The sensation was like being struck by lightning made of memory and feeling.
And a terrible but beautiful sense of choice returned to her blood-covered hands.
It forced her to see it for what it was. Not through the numbed detachment of an enslaved murderer, but the monstrosity of her own making.
She stumbled away from Karsan’s body, shaking uncontrollably as every single life she had taken till that moment crashed over her like a shoal beneath the waves.
Her feet brought her to sink in front of Danika, her gaze half-open, staring into the beyond.
“We were supposed to escape together—” Ksenia’s voice was cracked and raw. “I’m a monster—”
Her bloodied hands reached out to Danika with infinite gentleness, pulling her close.
Danika’s lips parted. “Stay…sharp.”
Tears cut clean tracks through the blood on Ksenia’s cheeks.
Eyes ringed white.
A rattling breath.
Stillness as Danika passed.
Then, Karsan laughed.