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Emery’s eyes widened. Slouched on the floor, his legs trembled but didn’t move with his efforts to rise.

Hellebore said, “Now that you know my dad’s secret, he wants me to deal with you.”

Emery stilled. He managed a fearful grunt in his throat, but nothing more.

Hellebore turned from the fire and looked at the empty wine bottles scattered across the floor, kicking one.

It rung glassily across the stone. “You made it way too easy for him, you know. Drinking yourself stupid. Lashing out at him in front of the other guild members. Falling behind in classes after all that business with the professor.”

Emery managed a noise again, this one furious and indignant.

“I know you weren’t sleeping with him. Shit, you’re not that lonely, desperate, and stupid. But everyone else believes it. It won’t be hard for them to believe you killed yourself, either.”

Ambrose’s heart stopped. The fog around Morcant’s schemes cleared.

Painting Emery as troubled by hexing his pastries with maggots at the charity event, goading him into lashing out in the graveyard in front of his peers—humiliation hadn’t been the end goal.

It gave everyone the impression Emery’s sanity held on by a thread, and now Morcant could cut that thread himself and frame it as a suicide.

Born of a guilty mind, they’d say, when their spells found Emery’s blood on the dagger along with Craig Kendrick’s.

Ambrose’s magic gurgled hungrily at the thought, and the witch king’s voice insinuated its way into his mind soon after.

Let him fall. Let her kill him.

Ambrose shuddered. He couldn’t bring himself to kill Emery. Could he really stand by and watch Hellebore do it for him?

Emery’s face drained of color as Hellebore knelt next to him, her grip white-knuckled on the dagger’s handle. Her expression soured.

“I hated you, you know. Every time you got yourself in trouble, I got dragged in. It was my responsibility to keep you in line. I hated you, but not this much .” She reached for his arm.

The dagger shook in her other hand as she pressed it to Emery’s vein.

“I hate you most of all for this. Because goddammit, Emery, I never, ever wanted to kill anyone else. You weren’t the only one distraught when you found out about the rats, but did you ever ask?

We could have been friends. Could have handled it together. ” Her voice quavered. “So fuck you.”

Emery had enough movement to clench the fist not held by Hellebore. His big, dark eyes searched the shadows for Ambrose, a silent plea in their depths.

Ambrose liked to think he knew his strengths. In his youth, he’d been especially tall for his sex and liked challenging the boys to wrestling competitions, where they would tell him boys were stronger than girls. When he gloatingly won, he could say, “Guess I’m a boy.”

He’d prided himself on his strength. Strength and loyalty—the two virtues he clung to.

He did not feel very strong looking into Emery’s eyes and being begged wordlessly for help while the witch king ordered him not to. He didn’t feel loyal with his heart torn between his oath and this boy he’d only known a fortnight.

Hellebore tilted her head, interpreting correctly the desperate plea in Emery’s eyes. “Waiting on the Grim Wolf to save you? If he was going to, I think he would have by now. I wondered if maybe you’d befriended him enough that he’d help you, but I guess we have our answer.”

The stricken look of grief on Emery’s face carved a hole in Ambrose’s heart.

He turns your head in so little time? When you are nothing but a tool at his disposal, when he barters his own survival by risking yours and mine.

Ambrose winced, and his magic licked its lips.

Let her kill him. Is his death not a worthwhile price for the reward of our reunion?

Guilt gnawed on Ambrose’s insides. Letting Emery die, failing the witch king, both brought him shame.

The former should be easier. He should hate Emery for using the compulsion when he’d said he wouldn’t, for dragging him into this cult’s business.

He shouldn’t trust a man who’d murdered a boy and his own familiar.

In his early days of knighthood, Ambrose had viewed the world in idyllic colors, tarnished only by people like the bandits who killed his family.

The witch king had rescued him from death and given him the tools and training to become a hero in his own right.

A person with the strength to save others rather than requiring passive rescue.

Or so he’d believed …

The events of the past days had resurrected memories he wished he could have left in the grave. Memories that forced him to question whether all his years of service to the witch king had really been so virtuous as he’d romanticized them to be.

He’d believed they acted in pursuit of a better future.

He’d clung to that belief because abandoning it would mean reconciling with all the things he’d done in service of that belief.

Ambrose could not pinpoint the moment he’d realized his heroic aims had been twisted to villainous means, but it was too late now.

He couldn’t cleanse his sins any more than the moon could make daylight.

That he’d never broken his oath, this was the only virtue left to his rotten name, which even the annals of history had erased in favor of his dread title. Grim Wolf.

He’d loved and stayed loyal to the bitter end. He could not abandon his king now.

So he stood and watched as Hellebore pressed the knife to Emery’s wrist.