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Below the image were just a few words, in dark bold writing.

FEY VEBBER—WANTED BY THE CROWN FOR MURDER. EX-BLADE. ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

The soldiers posted them everywhere, on every lamppost, on every window, throughout the city. And with the posters came the rumors.

Hushed whispers delivered in fearful voices.

A Blade had been named. A Blade had gone rogue. And what do you do when a monster has been set loose? Who do you turn to when the most feared creature in the realm has snapped their leash?

Fear gripped the city. Panic.

Who could save them from the Queen’s Broken Blade? Who could protect them?

It was a relief when new rumors started. When whispers from the palace leaked out into the city.

Fey Vebber was dead.

The Queen’s Broken Blade was no more.

Chapter 44

JOY

Dameon was speaking to them, but Joy wasn’t listening. The words were garbled and meaningless. He could have been speaking another language, for all the good it did him. She was too lost to hear it now.

Joy was drowning, lost in a sea of pain.

Alice.

Willow.

Fey.

They were gone, all of them. Each loss had fractured her heart a little more, each death cutting a little deeper.

Love was an unlimited resource. Joy had known this since she was just a child, long before her Awakening, long before she’d joined the Queen’s army, long before she’d been selected to be a Queen’s Blade. She had been so full of love, so willing to share it with the world and all its beautiful creations from the moment she’d been born.

Her life before the Blades had not been an easy one. But Joy had always tried to focus on the positive memories, always tried to focus on the love she felt for everything around her.

Once, she had admitted to Alice something she had kept hidden away inside her since she’d joined the Queen’s army. She told Alice that she loved everyone, if only a little bit. Even her assignations, even the people she had been sent to kill.

She loved them, and she tried to make their last few moments as painless as possible. Loved them even as she spilled their blood, as she took their last breath from them.

We are all children of the Goddess, all worthy of love. Joy believed that with all her heart. Why would the Goddess have made us exactly as we are, if She herself did not love us? There was not a single being in the realm—regardless of Faction or Creed or past—who was undeserving of love, in Joy’s eyes.

Some people treated love as a finite thing, something to be hoarded, to be doled out in snippets only when earned or when required. Her parents had been like that—they kept their love close to their chests, refusing to give any more than what they were given, and each of them refusing to ask for more. It left both of her parents ravenous and starved for love, searching for crumbs of it wherever they could. With whomever they could.

But they had been so wrong. Love cost nothing to give, even if it wasn’t returned, and Joy was far too full of love to be so miserly with it. She loved every bug and animal and plant in the realm, all of them creations of the Goddess. She loved Alice, her soulmate. She loved her assignations, if only a little. She loved her sisters. She loved Merle, who brought such beauty and comfort to their little family. Loved him for his soft, happy purrs, for the time he spent with her, satisfied just to be near her, just to share his presence with her.

Love was infinite. But so was pain, and Joy could feel herself shattering under the weight of it.

It was becoming too much for her. It was too heavy, all of this loss, all of this pain. Lilith and Dameon were talking, arguing, their voices raised and full of anger, but Joy was far, far from them both, lost in her sea of pain.

And she worried she might never resurface.

Chapter 45

How long had she been lying here? How long had she screamed? Had she fought against the chain holding her? How long, how long had she shouted and sworn, screaming herself hoarse, screamed until her words had turned to sobs? Sobbed until she’d collapsed, exhausted, and slept.