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‘No.’She calls you a redundant traitor’s daughter– as little as I liked her, I had no desire at all to rub those words in herface. ‘She, um, doesn't give the impression she is open to further proposals, either.’

For a moment, she sat frozen.

Then, so swift that none of us could have had any hope of catching her, she lunged forward, chained hands stretched out in front of her – aiming not for me but for the letter I was holding, snatching it from my fingers as if it was her last chance to live.

My cry of protest came far, far too late.

Thysandra staggered backwards, dark eyes flying over the words. Half a heartbeat, and she stiffened, staring at the message in her hands as if it was a death sentence – as if the parchment itself was all thorns and fangs, its poison spreading through her veins already.

The colour drained from her face.

I thought for an instant she might pass out, the way she went ashen before my very eyes – a hue I’d only ever seen on corpses before. But she stood, albeit swaying on her feet. Her lips parted, then faltered, soundlessly shaping the words as her gaze slid over the message one last time; then, with a shuddering breath, she dropped it.

The parchment fluttered to the ground like a dying butterfly.

‘No,’ she whispered hoarsely, and shattered binding or no, the sound of that one word cut through my soul with merciless jaggedness. ‘No.’

None of us spoke.

Her gaze travelled from face to face, beseeching, begging quietly for anyone to stand and admit that this letter was a fabrication, just a cruel joke … but Tared gave only a grim sigh. Lyn’s eyes were gleaming. Naxi laconically spread her hands, looking oddly satisfied, and I had to fight the urge to apologise, not sure what in the world I'd be apologising for.

But it was Creon –Creon, of all people – who looked up when she finally turned towards him, sighed, and flatly said, ‘Hurts, doesn't it?’

I couldn’t tell if it was smugness or sympathy in his voice. He’d gone strangely, eerily blank – as if a mask had slipped over his face, still flawlessly beautiful but wholly devoid of life.

‘What?’ Thysandra spat.

‘Being discarded like that.’ A nod at the crumbled letter on the ground. ‘As if you wouldn't gladly have died for her a hundred times over. As if you haven’t lived your entire life to serve her – as if she doesn’t know you have.’

She gaped at him – not so much frozen in shock, I suspected, as too furious to react.

‘If it helps,’ he added, lips twisting into a curve of bitter self-contempt, ‘nothing you could have done would have prevented this. It’s the way she lives, using and discarding, and you simply ended up on the wrong side of—’

Her face twisted with rage – raw and explosive. ‘And what in hell wouldyouknow of it, little prince?’

My breath caught.

Creon didn’t so much as blink.

‘She loved you,’ Thysandra snarled, scarred, black-and-gold wings twitching with uncontrolled hostility as she staggered towards him. Her dark skin flushed with colour again. ‘She adored the fucking ground you walked on, and thenyouwere the one to throw it all away and betray her – don’t pretend you have the faintest idea what I've gone through when you so easily—’

‘She left me behind to die,’ he interrupted, still in that strangely flat voice – like he was bored, and yet his tone lay further away from boredom than a tone ever could, taut with pressure like a stone about to shatter. ‘I don't suppose she ever told you that? Left me lying in the mud with my chest burned outand told the world I had served my purpose, then ran and saved herself.’

She fell icily silent, gaping at him as if he was telling her hehaddied on that cursed day and risen from the grave soon after. ‘You— What?’

Creon just shrugged. His eyes had gone so very black – as dark as the memories themselves. The colour of emptiness. Of bleeding hearts.

‘No,’ Thysandra stammered. ‘No, she wouldn’t …’

But she no longer looked like she might pounce on him any moment. She no longer gave the impression she wanted nothing more than to scratch his eyes from his face.

‘She didn't love me, Thys.’ Cold, simple facts, yet I knew that even I could scarcely imagine the hours upon hours of despair that lay beneath those words. ‘She was never going to love you, either. We were never more than tools to her, and tools don't complain when they are finally declared redundant. Tools just cease to exist and stop bothering her. As she no doubt expects you to do now.’

She gasped in a breath, chest heaving. ‘Don'tlookat me like that.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Like what?’

‘With … withpity.’ She took a wobbling step backwards, none of the usual lethal grace to her movements as she balled her fists at her sides. Her laugh was a shard of broken glass. ‘I wanted tokillyou when you were born, damn you! I wanted to smother you in your cradle and drop your wretched little corpse into the sea!’