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Chapter One

Shan

It should have been more difficult to assassinate her father.

Not in the actual execution of it: that Shan had prepared for. Her father was a powerful Blood Worker and had once been considered the brightest of his generation. That had been many years ago, though, and Lord Antonin LeClaire had fallen quite far indeed. But still, he had guards, magical wards and a lifetime of training at his disposal. And she had accounted for all these things.

No, there should have been something—anything—in her heart that railed against this. Despite everything he had done over the two decades of her life, patricide was still the most despicable of all crimes; it ought to twist her stomach and fill her with guilt. She shouldn’t relish this kill, shouldn’t feel this boundless relief.

But she did.

She was a shattered, broken thing, and this only proved it.

Her father lifted the glass to his mouth, the amber whisky sloshing in the finely cut glass, and took another deep drink as he shifted through the papers in front of him. Shan watched as he licked his lips, taking in more of the poison that would give her power over him.

It was a potent poison, frightfully expensive, but she had learned long ago that secrets were worth far more than coin. It had taken her years to find, and a couple bits of hard-won information to pay for it. Yet watching her father drink it—in a glass handed over to him by his own daughter—Shan knew that she would have paid any price for this moment.

So she sipped idly at her wine as she waited, fiddling through the books that had been laid out across her father’s grand wooden desk. Books of their financial records, filled with tables of transactions written in the cramped hand of her father’s secretary. They detailed how much had been spent by their estate over the past years—or what remained of the LeClaire estate. Drained and destitute from generations of mismanagement, made worse by her father.

But by morning the books would be hers and that was what mattered.

Her father coughed suddenly, a deep, racking thing that shook his whole body.

Shan cocked her head to the side, eyes wide in the perfect mimicry of a doting daughter. “Are you all right, Father?”

Lord LeClaire looked up, his grey eyes narrowed in that paranoid way of his. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by another round of coughs, blood splattering on the desk before him.

Shan stood quickly, knocking the books aside. Her glass crashed to the floor, shattering, the wine pooling at her feet. Deep. Dark, like drying blood.

She smiled at the fear in her father’s eyes.

Another cough. Another spurt of blood. Shan leaned forward, dipping her fingers in the warm liquid. She swirled them around and brought them to her lips, unminding of the poison. The antidote already flowed through her veins.

“Well,” Lord LeClaire managed. “About time.”

Shan sucked her fingers into her mouth and felt the power explode through her. The blood acted as a catalyst, a source of power that connected them, forming a bridge that she could use to reach out and—ah!

She bent the very blood in his veins to her will, flinging him against the wall and slamming him into the hard mantle, the sounds of his bones snapping the sweetest music to her ears. Circling around the desk to where her father had fallen, she felt his blood calling to her. Fighting her control with every last bit of his strength. He was strong-willed. He was stubborn.

But she was indomitable.

With a flick of her fingers she had him sprawled out on the floor, his arms pinned to his sides by the force of her magic. He struggled to move, thrashing against the bonds of her will, but for now his blood was hers to command.

Shan produced a dagger from the sheath up her sleeve, feeling its comforting weight in her hands. Her father eyed it, recognition shining in his gaze. Out of all the weapons she could have chosen—the knives he had gifted her for her most recent birthday, the steel-tipped claws she earned from the Academy—she chose this.

Her mother’s dagger in her bare hands.

Shan sank to her knees, not caring that her fine, silken dress was stained in the process. “Goodbye, Father.” Placing the knife against his throat, she only hesitated when she saw him smile.

“You were always my favorite,” he rasped out. “Do me proud.”

Grimacing, Shan dragged her knife through his skin, feeling it split under the strength of her hand. She cut deep, down to the bone, embedding the steel in his flesh. The blood welled and spilled, but she dared not remove it, not until it was done.

She couldn’t have him healing himself. She doubted the punishment would be as light as it was last time. Then she had been but a child of eight, lashing out in a fit of anger and despair. When he had driven her mother from their home in one of his fits of paranoid violence, and she had taken up her dagger and turned it against him.

She had failed then. She wouldn’t fail now.

This was carefully planned vengeance, and she watched until the light faded from his eyes, his blood seeping into her dress and staining her hands. Still she remained, waiting for the body to grow cold, for the skin to pale, for all signs of life to vanish.