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Chapter thirty-five

Seraphina

S he had stabbed him—the Crow.

The murderer. The monster. Her fiancé.

The man who haunted her dreams every night. The man currently straddling her waist.

She had stabbed him .

Ever since the summit, ever since having first laid eyes on the Crow, Seraphina had slept with her bodice dagger tucked beneath her pillow. She had just never imagined she would have to actually use it.

But now here he was, on top of her, bearing down upon her form with all of his weight. Was this what the vision had been trying to tell her? Had the Lord been trying to warn her she needed to bind the Crow? Keep him locked away?

It was too late now.

He shouldn’t have been that heavy. He was so much shorter than she. Logic dictated she should have been able to easily shove him off of her.

But she couldn’t.

She couldn’t break free.

His callused hand covered her mouth and nose. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t call for help. She choked on the scent of his sweat and the metallic tang of blood as he slowly smothered her.

Pure panic sent her blood pounding in her ears as she thrashed beneath him, working with all of her strength to buck him off. But again, she failed.

The man was like a leech, refusing to budge.

Instead, he clamped his hand all the more tightly over her mouth while hissing a low, “Be silent,” into her ear.

Be silent ?

She might have laughed at the hilarity of a man currently trying to kill her ordering her to be silent, were she not on the verge of passing out from a lack of air.

I’m going to die , she realized through the haze of her breathlessness.

She was going to leave Elmoria without a queen. Without a king. Without so much as an heir.

But just as the world faded at the edges, an animalistic shriek shattered the muted quality of the moment. A blur of scales and wings shot past her swiftly darkening vision to tangle itself with the shadowed silhouette of the man looming over her .

Alyx .

Her usuru wasn’t supposed to be there that night. She had been staying in the Roost with the rest of her kind. But Seraphina hadn’t wanted to sleep alone, not after the Crow’s earlier taunting about her love of Sovereign had drawn forth painful memories of her mother.

Praise the Lord for that.

Whatever else the little monster atop her was about to snarl into her ear shifted into a strangled growl as he fended off the winged serpent’s ferocious assault with the hand not currently crushed against her face.

And that was when he finally made a mistake.

The very moment he shifted his hand’s grip over her mouth to press the meat of his middle finger between her lips, she didn’t hesitate for a single moment.

Seraphina bit down. Hard .

Abandoning all that remained of her dignity, she bit the hand of the man who dared think he could murder her in her own home, in her own bed, on her own birthday , with all the ferocity she could muster. Like a varhound ripping into a dire bear’s jugular.

His vile blood filled her mouth, and she didn’t even care.

She no longer cared about anything at all except surviving that moment.

When the Crow finally snatched his bleeding hand from her face, Seraphina sucked in a gloriously deep breath. She wanted nothing more than to bask in that small victory. She wanted to simply sit there and breathe .

But there was no time.

Vision swimming, Seraphina blinked the dark spots from her gaze and scrambled backward along the bed. She put as much distance as she could between her and her fiancé-turned-assassin.

But now her senses were no longer being filled by him , Seraphina became aware of a most horrifying realization.

They were not alone.

And the other man had a knife.

“Aldric!” Seraphina tried to scream, though the word was little more than a strangled whisper on her lips.

Still kneeling on her bed, wrestling with Alyx, the Crow turned without hesitation to face the true assassin. And though he was unarmed save for the dagger jutting from his thigh, still the man launched himself at the intruder. In a tangle of thrashing limbs and beating wings, they tumbled to the floor.

Alyx went down with them.

By the Light, she had stabbed him. And he had only been there to…protect her?

I’ve killed him , she realized with a growing sense of horror.

But that didn’t make any sense. His being there didn’t make any sense.

Nothing at all made any sense as Seraphina frantically wiped the Crow’s blood from her mouth and scrambled her way off the bed. Her initial adrenaline had already oozed away, leaving her shaking like a newborn foal.

Fear settled into the chasm left in the adrenaline’s absence, like icy fingers gripping her heart .

“Run!” Aldric snarled to her the moment her bare feet touched the floor.

Her legs threatened to give out, almost unable to bear her own weight. But even once she steadied herself, she still couldn’t find it in herself to run.

She should have run. She knew she should have run. She should have called for help.

She should have done something , anything at all to save herself.

But there was Aldric, fighting for his life. Fighting for her life. And Alyx alongside him.

The assassin’s dagger flickered in the moonlight, and though Aldric was quick, he wasn’t quick enough. His nightshirt soon became dark with blood.

The smell of it choked her senses. The sight of it turned her stomach.

Without warning, Seraphina’s body decided her fate for her.

“Leave him alone!” she screamed while launching herself at the stranger who had dared creep into her room.

A madness gripped her in those moments just as surely as she gripped the back of the assassin’s head. Her fingers tangled with the stranger’s hair and she used that point to haul him off the Crow.

When the assassin turned toward her instead, all Seraphina could see was the gleam of his eyes and the flash of his blade through the darkness. Pain burned a course across her stomach in the wake of that blade’s passing, before the stranger’s gaze widened as his left leg abruptly buckled .

In the next moment, the assassin went down, and Seraphina watched in horror as the Crow finished wrenching the other man to the floor by his cloak and tackled him all anew. She realized too late what her fiancé was doing when he wrapped his arm about the assassin’s throat from behind.

It was a terribly smooth sort of transition. Clearly a practiced movement.

No doubt the Crow had strangled a man before.

Seraphina couldn’t watch. She couldn’t just stand there and witness a man being killed—assassin or no.

Stumbling away, she closed her eyes and waited for it all to be over.

Only when the sounds of struggle finally ceased did she dare peek back that way. The man who had come to kill her lay limp on the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

Leaving her merely staring down at him . Her unlikely savior.

The Crow of Drakmor.

“You’re…you’re bleeding…” she gasped on a hitched breath as she took in the sight of the man, now bearing fresh wounds she knew she had nothing to do with. Blood soaked his shirt from collar to hem and he had a cut across his left cheek seeping crimson down into his dark beard as well.

But the Crow’s growled reply of, “As are you…” left her merely confused until she glanced down to see what in the world he was talking about.

Blood .

Yet more blood bloomed upon her own nightgown, staining it further moment by moment. She was hurt. The assassin had wounded her.

“Oh…” was all Seraphina could utter before the room spun like a top and her legs gave out beneath her.

From far away, she thought she could hear the Crow shouting the word, “Guards!” over and over again, but she was too busy falling to pay much attention to anything else.

She had never fainted before. But she was sure that when one fainted, they usually crashed to the floor.

She did not, though. She but floated up and away as the room continued to spin and darkness threatened at the edges of her vision.

It wasn’t until that scarred, one-eyed face she was swiftly becoming entirely too familiar with in close quarters swam into view that she realized he was holding her.

The Crow was holding her.

“Hold on, Sera,” he whispered, his warm breath ghosting against her face with the words.

But even on the verge of consciousness, the sound of that diminutive on the Crow’s tongue sent her lips pressing into a thin line. “Don’t call me…Sera…” she quietly complained. She had not given him leave to call her Sera.

In the wake of her words, silence ticked onward.

The prince offered no reply to her correction, perhaps having simply accepted her decree without argument.

Or perhaps he was no longer there .

“Aldric?” Seraphina asked of the darkness as she struggled to keep her eyes open. She felt herself slipping away, the sweet embrace of sleep.

She wanted to sink into that sleep. To let this all just be one strange nightmare rather than her reality.

An extension of the vision that plagued her nearly constantly.

Perhaps she would simply awaken in the morning with a throbbing headache and a reminder of why one should not overindulge in pity wine.

“I’m here,” the Crow’s low voice rumbled back, those two words vibrating against her chest as he spoke.

She was vaguely aware of activity around them—of doors crashing open, of booted feet, of worried shouts. She heard words exchanged, though none of them made much sense to her. All she was immediately aware of was the fact that the Crow was still holding her. He was still there.

He had come for her. He had saved her.

Perhaps he was her ally after all.

“Thank you,” Seraphina whispered at last, finally remembering what else she had needed to say to him.

But in reply, all her fiancé could snarl was a quiet, “ No ,” which made about as much sense as everything else that had happened that night.

Which was not any sense at all.

“Never thank me for this,” the man whispered directly against her ear. “Never, do you hear me? Never. ”

The W hy? she wished to voice never came as unconsciousness claimed her at last. But that soft utterance of his, that never , chased her into the darkness, nagging her all the way down.

Who was Aldric Hargrave truly?

King? Pawn? Madman? Murderer?

Protector .