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But she’s too far gone to notice. “She was fading. I couldn’t. Couldn’t let her—”

“So you offered yourself.” Not a question. Just a stark truth, hanging in the air between them.

Sorcha’s head jerks in a nod.

“And in return,” Kadamach continues, cool and remote, “he made you kill her.”

Silence. I watch Sorcha’s too-thin shoulders tremble. “Yes.” A rasp, barely audible. “Brutally.”

A considering pause.

“When,” Kadamach asks, almost gently, “was the last time he let you feed?”

Sorcha flinches like he’s struck her. I feel the memory rise up, thick and choking—the cramping, gnawing emptiness. The sickness carved into her bones, the way her body eats itself alive.

The terrified, animal knowledge that this is how she will die. Alone in the dark, unmourned and unmissed. Just another broken toy, used up and discarded.

“Two centuries,” she whispers. “Give or take.”

I swallow against the sudden thickness in my throat. It’s a small miracle she can stand at all. That there’s anything left of her to salvage.

Kadamach goes still. Only the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest betrays any semblance of life.

As if he’s a statue carved of ice and shadow.

But I see the way his eyes flare. The briefest flexing of his fingers against the arms of the chair, displaced violence seething just beneath the surface.

And in that moment, I understand.

He’s furious. Not at Sorcha, but for her. On her behalf.

Because in the end, she is Unseelie. His subject, his responsibility. And for all his monstrousness . . . Kadamach has a code. Vicious and unyielding, but a code nonetheless.

And this? This slow, agonising unmaking? It offends him on some bone-deep level.

Because Kadamach knows what hunger is like.

“Release her.”

The words are soft. Almost conversational, if you ignore the promise of suffering, of screaming agony, should he be denied.

The Strategist pales, hands scrabbling at his seat. “Please,” he says. “My King, I don’t—”

“Now.”

A single syllable, and yet it rings out like a death knell. Like the indrawn hush before the executioner’s axe falls, brutal and final.

The Strategist’s throat works around a swallow, but he can’t escape Kadamach’s stare.

“I . . . I release you.” A thin thread of sound, cracking and splintered. “From your vow.”

And just like that, it’s done. The chain snaps, the collar unclasped. I feel the magic rush out of Sorcha in a dizzying whoosh, the sudden lightness of a bird freed from its cage.

She staggers beneath the relief of it. The staggering knowledge that for the first time in a small eternity, she’s free. Beholden to no one and nothing.

Shaking, she lifts a hand to her neck. Traces the skin as the tattoos fade. Runs trembling fingers over the new smoothness. Tears spring to her eyes.

“My King,” she breathes. “I—”

“Don’t.” He holds up a hand. “I did only what was owed. Nothing more.”

But there’s a considering light in his eyes as he regards her. “You had a dream once,” he says. Careful, almost delicate. A scalpel easing beneath the skin, peeling back layers. “Of putting a blade through your master’s throat. Of watching him drown in his own blood.”

Sorcha nods. A dip of her chin, barely perceptible. But it’s enough.

Kadamach reaches for his hip. Unsheathing the dagger resting there with a soft snick of metal on leather.

And he’s offering it to her. Hilt-first, the rubies embedded in the handle catching the light. A possibility.

“Take it,” he says. Quiet, but inexorable as gravity. “Take your vengeance. Paint the world red with it until you’ve had your fill.”

Sorcha stares at the blade. At the delicate scrollwork, the edge honed to devastating sharpness. The instrument of her salvation, freely given. Hers for the taking.

I feel the moment it crashes through her. The staggering need . Her fingers close around the hilt.

The Strategist rises from his chair to flee, robes tangling around his legs as he lunges for the entrance.

But Sorcha is already moving. She slams into his back, bearing him to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Sinks the dagger in his side once, twice. Rips it free and buries it between his ribs.

He howls. Thrashes.

But Sorcha just snarls and buries her fangs into his throat.

She feeds on him with all the long years of helpless rage pouring out of her. She feeds while she hacks and tears until there’s nothing left, until his screams fade to wet, rattling gurgles. Until the light fades from his eyes, and he goes limp beneath her.

She keeps going. Long after his heart has stopped, after the blood has cooled on her hands. Stabbing and stabbing, as if she can gouge out all her hurt. All the helpless fury, the sickness and despair and howling emptiness.

As if she can fill the yawning chasm inside her with blood and vengeance, shore up the broken places.

Finally, she stills. Slumps over her kill, the dagger still clenched in her shaking fist.

But when she turns to look at Kadamach, she’s laughing. Her teeth stained red. Deep, unhinged peals, more screams than mirth. She staggers upright on legs that are strong now, the colour returning to her skin after centuries of hunger.

Kadamach watches her. Inscrutable, a dark god surveying his latest handiwork. There’s a glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes. Of approval.

Because he recognises the thing wearing Sorcha’s skin. Knows it in his bones. Knows the taste of blood on his tongue. The simple, brutal mathematics of it. Of violence begetting violence. A monster, unchained at last.

His monster, now. His creation, carved from the wreckage. A beast after his own black heart.

“What’s your name?” Kadamach asks.

“Sorcha.” A name she hasn’t claimed in centuries. Hers again.

“Sorcha,” he says. The name a dark purr. “Tell me, will you serve?”

She doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t flinch from the gravity of it. “Until my last breath,” she vows. “My life is yours. My blade, my magic. I am yours.”

And Kadamach smiles. Cold and pitiless, an abyss opening its jaws to swallow the world.

“Then let’s get to work, Strategist. Your King has need of you.”

*

The dream breaks apart to leave me blinking in the firelight. Sorcha crouches before me, eyes fever-bright. She studies me for a long moment, inscrutable.

“That night on Calton Hill,” she says, almost gently. “When you first found yourself at the end of my blade—if you’d had the chance to bury your knife in my heart—” She leans forward, a hair’s breadth from touching. “Tell me, how many times would you have twisted the blade?”

“You looked at me with regret,” I whisper. “You weren’t there when they tortured me. You came and put a coat over me, and then you—”

“Stop babbling excuses for me. I stabbed you in the heart,” she snarled. “ How many times would you have twisted ?”

I can’t answer. Can’t force the words out.

I would have made her suffer. Would have carved my grief into her flesh. The way I killed Arion and Thalion.

Sorcha watches me. “You understand now, don’t you? Why you should thank any god that’s listening he’s bound to me. When you live in his memory, you’ll be as you are now. Not what you’ll become.”

And then she’s turning away, curling into a ball. Conversation over. A door slammed shut. There’s agony in the tension of her. The knowledge that she’ll always be on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass.

She might wear his mark in the future, but he’ll never truly be hers.