33. The Morning After the Night Before
THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE
Seraphina
Morning in Vulcaris begins like most others, as if everything hadn’t changed last night in the library.
Ferrum Company leaves our dorm early with sleep-filled eyes and walks down the corridor as a loose cluster, alliances and friendships branching off in our groups.
Khali and Az are arguing in low voices beside me.
“I’m telling you,” Az mutters, running a hand through his sleep-mussed hair, “if a game involves Reflection Khali again, I’m quitting and becoming a fisherman.”
“You can’t swim,” Khali shoots back.
“You didn’t meet Reflection Khali.”
Reiva walks on my other side, quiet as usual, his eyes flicking over every passing cadet, and the staffers carrying trays of food or baskets full to bursting with laundered uniforms or towels.
There’s the occasional member of the Iron Choir, too. As always, they don’t make eye contact or talk to the cadets they come across whenever their duties bring them back inside Vulcaris’s walls.
I keep my pace even. Normal. As if the night before hadn’t involved Elias bleeding out across the library floor while Silver watched me wipe his dagger clean.
As if it hadn’t ended in Silver and I rolling Elias in a carpet and ringing out sponges of his blood into a bucket.
As if the bit in the middle hadn’t happened. The thing that kept me awake most of the night, and the thing that I can’t think about without my stomach doing a flip.
We’re about to turn toward the mess hall when a scream tears through the corridor.
Not a cadet’s playful or angry shout, but a full-bodied, horrified scream. The type that sets your every nerve on edge.
It echoes from farther north along the East Wing corridor, toward The Meet or Overlord’s office.
Everyone freezes, falling into a fighting stance with whoever they trust most at their back.
Khali, Az, Reiva and I do the same without sharing a word.
“What the hell was that?” Az mutters.
Then the corridor erupts.
Nephilim and cambion spill from every doorway, all moving toward the sound, and Ferrum surges forward too.
When we near the bend at the top of the East Wing corridor, even more people converge from the opposite direction, including the familiar faces of Aes and Stannum cadets.
The crowd parts and the three Overlords stride through the gap, Silver at the center. Yuvi to his right, Zaheer to his left, both already scanning the corridor with a predator’s sharp focus. And padding slightly ahead of them, my favorite hellhound.
Cadets instinctively step aside, pressing themselves against the walls to give the Overlords, or perhaps the hellhound, space.
Silver’s posture is rigid. They must have heard the scream and come straight from their office or The Meet.
Another scream, a deeper voice this time, sounds. The crowd shifts again as everyone turns toward the source of the new scream.
We don’t need to push to see.
Elias hangs from the banister of the east wing staircase high above our heads.
The rope loops cleanly over the iron railings, dropping down to his neck where it cinches tight beneath his jaw.
His body dangles above us, boots swaying slightly in the faint draft drifting in from the sparring yard.
Gasps ripple through the corridor.
“The bartender hung himself.”
“Saints and sinners save his soul.”
“Is that Elias?” Reiva asks.
I nod. His head hangs limp, and I squint at his throat.
There should be a deep, open slit there. I know exactly how the blade cut him. I remember the resistance of skin, the warmth of blood spilling over my hand.
Hell, it took enough sponges to soak up all the crimson substance off the floor.
Now?
Nothing.
No torn flesh or blade mark. Nothing other than bruising spread beneath the rope where it presses into his skin under his weight.
Silver healed it. It’s the only explanation.
He’s healed him not to save him, but to save me.
To erase the evidence that he’s been murdered and to stop all eyes landing on me, his rumored ex and the person who he saw last.
The person with a fresh new tattoo visible above the line of her corset. The subject of conversation already this morning among Ferrum as we’d pulled on our training gear for the day ahead.
The memories of last night flash sharp and clear in front of my eyes, and my stomach flips.
The assassination, the kiss, the revelation that Sister Eurya is neither angel or demon but something in between.
The spawn of a high demon and archangel.
The child of a prince of Hell and a member of the heavenly council.
Something different, the result of a pairing I’d have said was impossible a few months ago.
Then there was the library, smelling of blood and ink. Elias’s body rolled up in a carpet, Silver standing over him wearing an expression carved from stone.
And then his voice. “Tell me about the girl he raped.”
I’d told him everything I knew about the nephilim kitchen worker, Nyrielle.
How I’d found her a couple of nights ago on this very staircase, standing on the very banister Elias’s rope is tied to.
How Elias had raped her. The importance of virginity in Chastitas more than any other region of Virtus. The shame she’d worn. How she’d been trying to end it all, and how her wings had saved her.
I hadn’t known what it meant at the time, but I remember the moment understanding slid across Silver’s face on what he needed to do with the body. The flicker in his eyes as the idea must have formed.
Now I’m staring at it.
Elias’s wings are fully visible as they hang limp from his back. In death the glamour has fallen away, as it always does, leaving pale gray feathers on show.
I swallow when I see how they’re tied.
Rope wound tightly around the thick bone part that sinks into the spine, binding them so they couldn’t open.
So they couldn’t catch air and save him the way Nyrielle’s had saved her.
Silver staged every detail, perfectly.
Despite so many people filling the corridor, my gaze is pulled to a blonde girl who’s pushing through the crowd toward the stairs, a hand over her mouth and unshed tears welling in her eyes.
It’s her.
Nyrielle.
For a moment, the noise and crowd fade into something distant until it's Nyrielle and I on the staircase again.
“I can’t live here,” she’d said that night before we went our separate ways. “Every corridor, every room, he’s everywhere,” she’d sobbed. “But I can’t leave here either. I’m trapped and I just want it to stop. What choice do I have?”
She’d tugged at the white sheet tied around her throat, and I remember moving before she could stop me. My newly stolen dagger had sliced through the sheets again, in one clean motion, and the makeshift noose fell away completely.
She’d staggered back, clutching the railing. “Why would you—”
“Because you’re doing his work for him.”
Her face had twisted. “No.”
“Yes. You dying doesn’t punish him. It erases you. He’ll do it again.”
“To someone else,” she’d gasped, mortified by the idea.
“Yes. Rapists don’t stop. They don’t learn. They don’t repent. They don’t wake up one day and decide to grow a conscience.” My voice had stayed calmer than I’d felt. “Monsters like Elias only stop when someone stops them.”
Her eyes had dropped to the dagger which ultimately ended Elias’s life, and her throat had bobbed. “You’re talking about murder.”
“I’m talking about justice.”
“You’d get caught.”
“Maybe.”
“And then what?”
I’d shrugged. “At least the world will have one less monster in it.”
“Why would you risk that… for me?”
I remember thinking about that for a moment before answering.
“Because evil thrives on silence. Because the world is full of people who look away when monsters like him ruin lives. And because sometimes vengeance is the only language sinners understand.”
Her breath had caught.
“Your life is not the price for his sin,” I told her.
“Then what is?”
I hadn’t hesitated. “His.”
The word landed between us like a blade striking stone.
“You’d really do it? You don’t even know me.”
“Yes, I would. And no, I don’t need to know you.” My voice hadn’t wavered. “Rapists are unrepentable. They are cowards who hide behind power and reputation. Behind people who refuse to believe their victims.”
I’d leaned closer, as I am now, watching her looking up at her rapist, his body broken and final breath long ago taken.
“But unrepentables bleed like everyone else,” I’d told her. “Let me deal with the monster.”
“You swear?” she’d asked after a stretch of silence.
“I swear. You survived him, now it’s time for you to live.”
And just like that, the promise had been made.
Because some men deserved redemption, and some men deserved the rope. Elias deserved whatever was coming for him.
Now, as she continues to stare up at her attacker, I wonder what’s going through her mind.
Perhaps she’s thinking he deserved it. Or about how the nephilim she trusted to mark her skin forever had gotten greedy and took more than she was offering or asking for.
That he’d drugged her, raped her, driven her to wish for death.
Now he’s found the fate she almost made for herself.
She drops her hand and her shoulders visibly relax.
Eventually, she looks around and our gazes meet through the crowd.
The look in her eyes isn’t gratitude exactly, and it’s not complete understanding either. But it’s close enough to both that my chest tightens.
She gives the smallest nod, barely a movement. Anyone else would miss it.
But I see it.
A quiet acknowledgement. A silent I know.
Then, as though saving us from becoming suspicious, a sudden blur of black fur and muscle barrels through the crowd.
Ravi.
The mad mutt charges straight toward me, scattering anyone not quick enough to move as she goes.
Nyrielle turns her back to me and Ravi skids to a stop in front of me, pressing her massive head against my stomach, letting out a low rumbling huff.
My hand rises automatically, fingers sinking into the warm fur at her neck. “Hey,” I murmur softly.
I don’t have to look up to know Silver’s staring at me, I can feel the weight of it burning into me.
Our eyes meet and my stomach flips.
Silver’s expression doesn’t shift, not even a flicker. His face is perfectly composed, the mask of the Overlord firmly in place.
I force my own expression to stay neutral, but inside, my emotions twist together into something chaotic.
Shock mixing with relief and perhaps something warmer that I refuse to name.
Az leans closer to me, lowering his voice.
“So,” he murmurs, eyeing the hanging body. “What kind of depressing shit did you say to Elias last night for him to go and off himself after?”
Khali elbows him sharply.
“What?” Az protests quietly. “Everyone knows she was meeting him last night for a tattoo. You’ve been admiring the evidence engraved into her skin all morning.”
Several cadets glance at me now, pity in their gazes where accusations should be.
I focus on my fingers in Ravi’s fur, grounding myself.
“We talked a bit, mostly about the design. Nothing depressing. He finished the tattoo,” I say evenly. “And we both went to bed.”
All true enough.
I hadn’t planned to actually get the tattoo, but it was the only way. I knew I’d need it as proof, or insurance, that we’d met as planned, he’d tattooed me as planned, we’d parted ways.
Az studies my tattoo again. It would still sting had Silver not healed it with that incredible, magical mouth of his.
“Damn. Guess my critique jokes are off the table.”
“Elias was the best, any critique you find would be exactly that, a joke,” Brandor Bane says, tone defensive. He’s covered almost every inch of his skin in ink, many of which were likely done by Elias’s hand.
Reiva’s gaze flicks between me, Az, the Overlords, hellhound and the hanging figure with quiet calculation. He’s mulling things over quietly as he does, making me nervous. But everyone else, Az included, seem to have bought Silver’s narrative. Accusations of depressing him to suicide aside.
Across the corridor, Silver watches the scene unfold with the calm detachment of someone who already knows exactly how it ends.
The rope creaks softly above us and Elias’s body turns slightly in the draft.
Bound wings, bruised throat. A tragic yet simple story of suicide.