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“Stop,” I said, the knot of guilt growing. It had not been about status at all. If Adrian had known, he would have killed Dragos, and while he had ultimately done so, it was in the aftermath of his victory over Revekka. “You know that isn’t true.”

“Ah, but it was,” he said, taking a step closer. His hand moved to my neck, his body flush with mine. I tilted my head all the way back to keep his gaze. “I was nothing but a glorified guard, but you—you were something more.”

I wrapped my hand around his wrist, not to push him away but to keep him close.

I shook my head, feeling something thick gathering in my throat. I could not help hearing the screams of my sisters—my coven—the night of their burning. It had been the first day of what would become the reaping and a complete decimation of every witch in Cordova.

I took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I got everyone killed,” I said.

“Dragos needed power, so he turned on the only people who had it,” Adrian said. “You were just a way to shift responsibility.”

I could barely breathe. When Adrian had taken my blood, I’d only known the consequences of the curse Dis had cast on him—that tasting my blood meant our lives were tied. If I died, he died. I did not know that the traumas of my past would also haunt me.

“Tell me how you killed him,” I whispered, searching his eyes.

Adrian tensed, his fingers pressing slightly into my skin. I wondered if he thought I would run, if he wasn’t quite convinced I was firmly rooted by his side, but there was nothing that would drive me away, save death.

“Will it help you to know?” he asked.

In truth, I did not know, but I answered anyway. “Yes.”

Still, he was quiet, but when he spoke, his gaze did not waver from mine, like he wanted to see how I changed with the knowledge of his execution of Dragos.

“I cut off his head. The blade was dull.”

I was not surprised by his choice of weapon or the brutal way in which he’d chosen to execute the former king of Revekka, and because of the last two days, I had no trouble imagining him hacking away at Dragos’s neck until his head rolled.

“And I kept it on a pike outside the gates where our treasonous dead are now. His body lay beneath it, and it was picked apart until it was nothing more than bones.”

“And the bones?” I had not imagined he would give Dragos the satisfaction of a burial in any form.

“Look closer at my throne the next time we hold court,” he said.

Something in the pit of my stomach twisted sharply. Adrian had built an empire on the bones of his greatest enemy. A month ago, I would have been disgusted, but life at Adrian’s court had changed my opinion on his brutality. There was no room for vulnerability here, no room for forgiveness. It was conquer or be killed.

Dragos had taught us that, and he had taken everything.

So had Ravena.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

I raised a brow. Adrian could hear my thoughts, but not always. I think it had become harder to break through the numbness that overwhelmed me since my father’s death. “You cannot tell?”

“Your emotions are quite tame,” he replied.

I didn’t believe him. I felt like chaos, but I respected that he asked.

“I am thinking about how I will fashion a throne from Ravena’s bones.”

The corners of Adrian’s lips curled, and he leaned closer, his breath on my lips as he spoke. “If that is your wish, I shall build it myself.”

Then his warm mouth was on mine, and his arm tightened around my waist. He was an anchor I grasped in the darkness of my grief, the only thing that brought feeling, and I craved this—his heat, our madness, the distraction.

I clung to him, my fingers digging into his biceps as his mouth left mine, lips trailing over my jaw and neck, his tongue caressing my skin, and I ceased to breathe when I felt the scrape of his teeth there. He seemed to notice and pulled away.

“I do not have to feed,” he said, his hand lifting to brush my cheek. “But I do want you.”