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I thought of the young soldier who had died, then the vampires I had seen on the battlefield. They looked terrifying from a distance, but when they spoke, they sounded human. “His vampires are not demons from hell. I think they are humans, who are…not quite human anymore. But that doesn’t make them monsters—”

A half sneer made me stop midsentence, Siwang was shaking his head. “I should have known a girl would never understand the price of war.”

My heart broke. There and then.

Words I’d been hearing all my life from men, other men, but never thought I’d hear from Siwang. “Well, this girl understands that we are outnumbered. This woman understands that a good emperor would never send his men out there to die for the sake of pride. Even if an emperor wins wars and conquers all the lands the four oceans have to offer, if he doesn’t love his people, put them first, then there’s nothing separating him from a tyrant. Sign the treaty, Siwang. Save what’s left of your empire.”

I pushed the treaty toward him again, and as I did, my finger brushed the scroll sitting at his right hand. The one he’d been reading before I entered the room.

Immediately, a blaze of vision burned across my eyes.

Fire. A whole city burning into the night, like the bloodiest of nightmares.

People screaming.

Men, women, and children, burning as they leaped from the city walls.

Fire swallowing everything it touched.

Humans and vampires, the flames did not discriminate.

Burning.

Burning.

Changchun.

I pulled my hand back, gasping.

No.

“You are going to burn down Changchun with everyone inside it.” I remembered the scorch marks in the other cities. This was not the first time he had tried to do this.

Siwang’s eyes went wide, and all his attention immediately fell on the scroll next to his hand. He snatched it from beneath my fingers, but I had already seen everything that would happen, felt the flames singeing my body as the city fell.

“How…?” Siwang couldn’t finish the sentence, his eyes flickering with shock and horror.

“You are going to kill all of them. Even your own people?”

“Fei…What did you see? You—” He grabbed my wrist. “What isthis?”

The red string that Yexue had tied around my wrist, which I had forgotten to take off. “It’s nothing.”

Siwang’s jaw went hard. “Tens of thousands of his army, both human and vampire, are inside Changchun right now. By burning the city to the ground, we will gain the upper hand again.”

“There are twenty thousand of your own people in that city!”

“They are collateral damage,” he murmured, turning away like a child who knew he had done something wrong but refused to admit it.

I laughed. It sounded more like choking. “You are just like Yexue. Like your father. Like every man who has tried to rule these lands!”

A pause as he slowly turned back to me, as if debating something.

“I should have done this a long time ago,” he said. I waited for him to yell for his guards to take me away and lock me up, but he didn’t. Instead, he set down a bronze token with his family seal. “Take this and go home, Fei. You don’t belong here, and I never should have let you stay in harm’s way for this long.”

“No,”I snapped. I wasn’t going to let him or anyone else decide what I could and could not do anymore.

I didn’t take his token. Instead, I grabbed the treaty and ran.