Chapter 54
Gustav
Peighton’s scream slices through the castle. “Gustav!”
I sit very still on the old bed in my mother’s tower bedroom, back against the carved headboard, one leg stretched, one bent.
Our daughter sits on my lap, supported by my hand, batting at the air with tiny fists.
Beside me, the bare white skull stares at the wall.
A neat hole sits between its eyes. My fingers rest over it, middle finger tapping lightly against cracked bone. The contact is almost affectionate.
Footsteps pound up the spiral stairs. They burst into the room like a storm. Peighton. Micha. Keira.
They all freeze.
“Hello,” I say calmly. “You are just in time. We were talking about family.”
Peighton’s eyes go straight to Vera, then the skull. Her face goes pale.
“Gustav,” she whispers.
I tilt my head. “Say hello to my father, mishka.”
Her gaze drops to the bullet hole. Her throat works as she swallows. Micha’s jaw clenches. Keira crosses her arms, nervous.
“Mother kept him in the nightstand,” I explain. “She said it was so he would not go to another woman’s bed. Even dead, she wanted to keep him close.”
A raven taps the window. Hard. The glass rattles in its frame.
My focus slides back to Peighton. She looks fragile and fierce at the same time, hair loose around her shoulders, eyes bright with fear and fury. My wife. The mother of my child.
“How many times,” I ask softly, “did you sleep in Brutus’ bed?”
She blinks. “What?”
“The photos,” I say. “You looked very comfortable in his arms. Did you go to him at night, like your mother went to my dad, tempting him?”
Her hands shake. “The photos are fake,” she says, voice trembling. “They were altered, Gustav. You know that. I told you.”
“All I know,” I reply, “is that you have liar’s blood. Just like her. Rotten blood cannot be bled out. It lives in the bones.”
Her chin lifts even as tears gather. “Then you are tainted too. Your father was unfaithful.”
I consider that, then nod slowly. “Da.”
I toss a worn notepad toward Peighton. It lands at her feet.
She stares at it, then crouches and picks it up with shaking fingers.
My mother’s handwriting bleeds across every page in dark ink.
Instructions. Reasons. Vengeance written like scripture.
I watch the moment she understands. Her lips part.
“She told you,” Peighton says hoarsely, “to marry me. To have a child with me. Then kill us both?”
“An eye for an eye,” I agree. “Magnus slept with your mother. Blood must answer blood. The Picciano line stains ours. Mother wanted it cleansed.”
Her voice is barely audible. “Then you’ll kill yourself too?”
I smile. It feels wrong on my face. “That is part of the plan.”
Another raven strikes the window. Crack. Another. Crack. Tiny fractures spiderweb across the glass.
“Gustav,” she says. “Please. Look at me. Not at them. At me.”
She steps closer. Brave girl. Stupid girl. My girl. Our daughter squirms in my hold, making soft little noises. I look down at her, then back at Peighton.
“Gustav, you are a loving man. A father. A husband. You’re not like your mom. You can’t kill your own family.”
I snort, but unamused.
“Do you know,” I ask quietly, “how I got my burns?”
She shakes her head, eyes never leaving mine.
“My mother poured lighter fluid on my back while I slept,” I say, almost conversational. “She struck a match. I woke up on fire. I jumped through a window. The snow put me out. After that, I stopped trying to save her broken heart. I tied her to a stake and burned her like the witch she became.”
Keira gasps. Micha stiffens. Peighton flinches, but she does not back away.
I stand, leaving Vera rested against a pillow, and waltz to a drawer, retrieving a clear plastic bag. Ash, fine and gray, shifts inside. I hold it up.
“Mother,” I say softly. “She still talks more than she did.”
“Gustav,” Peighton whispers, voice rough. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Do you still think I am a loving man?” I ask her.
She looks at me like she is seeing every version of me at once. The man I was. The madman I became. The husband I tried to be. The father I am failing. She draws a breath that shudders and straightens her spine.
“Yes,” she says.
The word hits me harder than any bullet.
“You didn’t know what love was,” she continues, voice gaining strength, “but you do now. Me. Our daughter. That is love. What you did for me in the forest, the coma, that was love. Not this. Not her.”
She points at the bag in my hand, at the ravens that are now clawing at the cracked glass. “She is a casualty of her own hate. She wants the world to hurt as much as she did, and she will kill everyone through you if you let her. Don’t let her.”
She gazes into my eyes, hope swirling behind their depths. I feel her. Through the madness, I feel her. I need her. She’s the only one who knows I’m still in here.
I barely whisper, “Peighton.”
The window explodes inward with a shatter of glass. Ravens flood through the opening like a black storm, wings beating, beaks snapping. They scream and dive, going for the smallest, weakest thing in the room.
Our daughter.
“Vera!” Peighton shrieks.
Micha and I fire into the air, shots echoing off stone as birds scatter and regroup.
Keira, the closest to the baby, dives for the bed, snatching Vera into her arms, shielding her with her body.
A dark shape coalesces by the fireplace.
The flames roar higher, fanning up the walls, and my mother steps out of the fire, eyes black, torch in hand.
“Enough,” Sophia hisses. “I’ll finish what I started.”
She slams the torch down. Fire races across the floor in a furious line, circling me and Peighton, cutting us off from the others. Heat roars up my legs. The air thickens with smoke.
Keira clutches the baby. Micha tries to reach us and is forced back by the flames.
I could let it happen. I could step into the blaze and vanish. I could drag Peighton with me and fulfill every word Mother wrote. One simple choice and the noise in my head would stop forever.
Peighton turns to me instead of running. Always instead of running. Her hands shake. Her eyes are bright, fierce, so full of me it hurts.
“I love you,” she says simply. Not shouted. Not screamed. Just spoken, like a truth that does not need defending. “You are not your mother. You are not your father. You are mine. She can’t have you.”
Something in my chest snaps like a taut wire finally breaking.
I grab Peighton’s face in both hands, ash smeared over her jaw, and kiss her hard. Her hands fist in my shirt. For one second, there is no fire, no birds, no ghosts. Only us.
“I love you, too,” I breathe against her lips. Then I turn her and shove her toward the edge of the flames. “Run.”
Micha lunges forward, grabbing her wrists and yanking her through a narrow gap. I try to follow, but the fire closes in. She screams my name but the fire swallows the sound.
Heat sears my skin. Flames curl around my legs, higher, higher.
I’m on fire — burning alive.
No escape.
The voices scream in triumph and terror.
Mother’s laughter cuts through it all, wild and delighted.
This is what she wanted. She killed my father and wanted to do it again.
To kill anyone who has his blood. She loves the taste of vengeance.
That’s why she wanted a baby. Vera. Another life. Repeat the cycle.
“My God,” I exhale.
A sound cuts through the chaos.
Peighton.
Bare feet slap against stone. She barrels back into the room with a thick wool blanket in her arms, ignoring Micha’s shouts.
She doesn’t hesitate. She runs straight into the fire to get to me.
Then the blanket slams into my body. She wraps herself around me, trying but failing to smother the fire, gasping as embers sear her lungs.
“We promised,” she pants. “We’d never leave each other!”
The room shudders.
The line of fire around us sputters and then extinguishes as if someone turned off a gas valve. The heat drops. The crackle fades. When I blink, Sophia is gone. The torch is gone. The ravens burst back through the window in a frantic flurry, black feathers vanishing into the bright sky.
Silence.
Real silence.
No whispers.
No voices.
Nothing.
I am on my knees, holding Peighton, breathing hard. Both unburned. She clings to me as if she will never let go again.
“Gustav?” she whispers.
I search my own head for the familiar noise, for the itch, for the shadows. There is nothing. Only the sound of my own breathing and the frantic pounding of my heart.
“I’m here,” I say, and for the first time in years, the words are not echoed by anyone else.
We stumble down the stairs together, half-laughing, half-crying. In the main hall, Keira runs to us with our daughter. Micha stands guard, eyes sharp, gun still in his hand.
I exhale.
Our baby is fine. Alive.
Keira hands the baby to her mother and steps back, wiping at her own eyes. I slide an arm around my wife and look down at the tiny creature we somehow brought into this cursed world.
She opens her eyes. Gray. Clear.
The window behind us holds no ravens.
I press my lips to Peighton’s hair. “I am done listening to the dead,” I murmur. “From now on, I listen only to you.”
She beams at me and can’t wipe her smile away. “You sound like an American man right now.”
“I think I was cursed, but not that badly.”
She snorts and shakes her head disapprovingly. Then she leans back into me, our daughter between us, our family in a circle that no curse can break.
For the first time, the quiet feels like peace.