On her knees with her wrists bound, hair tangled, and blood on her lips is my fucking wife. Her shirt is torn, her lip is bloody, but her eyes . . . they burn when they find me.
Sunniva stands defiantly at her side, her body beaten and bruised, but her eyes telling me she would be fucking shit up if she could.
Giselda stands poised like a serpent behind them, her smile sharp and cruel. She holds a scythe in her hand, the edges of it covered in the blood of whatever person she gutted for fun.
“Bogeyman,” she purrs, licking blood from the blade. “Finally. I was wondering if you were going to get the chance to see me claim Cressida.”
Cressida flinches, her voice cracking. “Konstantin . . . don’t—”
I raise a hand, silencing her while keeping my focus on the woman in front of me with the small, custom-made scythe pointed at Cressida. “Say her name again and I’ll carve your tongue from your skull and wear it as a fucking tie.”
Giselda’s laugh is high and deranged. “She was mine first. My sister. My heart. You stole what I bled for.”
“She chose me,suka. Accept it.”
“She chose wrong,” she screams, lunging at me.
The scythe arches for my throat, but I duck, twisting to block the blade. Sparks scream as my knife meets hers. She’s stronger than she should be, her veins buzzing with whatever corrupted magic she’s pumped into her blood. What she fails to understand is that it’s fake. Not given freely by the Fates. Which means she will never match the natural power that burns in my blood.
She slashes and I pivot, my blade ripping across her ribs. Her blood paints the floor, but she laughs through it, coming at meagain and again. Our blades clash, each strike harder than the last.
Then I feint low, catching her wrist, and snapping it. Bone erupts through skin as the scythe hits the floor with a clatter. Giselda screams for a second, before falling into deranged laughter.
One second, she’s smirking—delirious and defiant—and the next, she’s airborne. Her body hits the wall with a sickening crunch that echoes like a snapped vow. She coughs blood as she scrambles to her feet, but I’m already there, the monster she summoned. My fist crashes through her chest, flesh, bone, and muscle tearing beneath my knuckles, until my hand closes around the thing keeping her alive.
It pulses once in my palm, twice, a twitch like it hasn’t realized it’s been taken.
“You dare take what’s mine,” I snarl, my voice unrecognizable with gravel and wrath.
She tries to speak, but blood bubbles at her lips. “I was only trying to show her—”
“You touched my wife. You made her bleed. You breathed near my unborn child.” My fingers tighten around her heart, the bones in my hand groaning with restraint. “You thought you could play games with the Bogeyman and he wouldn’t come, but the moment you laid a hand on my bonded, your death was written in blood.”
“I’ll haunt her,” she chokes out, her voice thin and her eyes glazing over. “She’ll see me every time she closes her eyes.”
“No, I won’t,” Cressida says sharply from behind me, her voice steady and unforgiving.
Using my grip on her heart, I guide Giselda’s knees to the concrete floor like a puppet string gone wrong. I step aside to make sure she’s facing the women she betrayed. “Now, kneel at my queen’s feet.”
“Cress—”
I rip my hand free, tearing her heart from her chest in a vicious, wet snarl of motion. “I said kneel. I never said speak her name.”
Her heart stutters in my palm, still fighting, still pretending it has the right to beat near mine, and I tighten my fingers around it.
The muscles spasms, pulsing a final time before it splits between my fingers with a wet crunch. Blood sluices down my wrist, thick and dark, the sound of it hitting the concrete loud as a verdict.
I stare down at it, that dark thing that dared to beat for so long. And I wonder . . . if even hearts can learn fear in their final moments.
Cressida doesn’t flinch or look away as Giselda drops with all the mercy of a guillotine. “She’ll never touch me again.”
I open my hand and let the ruin of what used to be a heart fall at my wife’s feet with a pulp of vengeance and ash.
It’s not a warning but a fucking crown.
Behind her, Sunniva groans from where Misha props her up. She squints at the mess on the floor then at me. “Shite. You couldn’t just shoot her like a normal man?” Then she mutters under her breathe, low enough that I don’t think she expected me to hear, “Drama queen.”
Cressida huffs something that might be a laugh. Something cracked, and real, and fucking mine.
