Page 7 of Nocte

However, his virus did not infect me as perfectly as the others.

I do not love Cassius, my benevolent master.

I hate?—

You don’t,he replies, his tone so damn assured.My loyal Caspian.

Oh, how he loves to turn my disgust into a game at my own expense. I hate him. Love, love, love.

My master, my creator. Oh, how I love and adore him.

“No.” Teeth gritted, I keep moving, pushing past a group of startled fae, single-mindedly focused on one goal. Cassius won’t take this from me. I won’t let him. “I do this work for you,” I say. I lie. “For you, I do this.”

Sweating, I reach my prize and brandish it in a fist—a delicate blossom taken from a cart sporting hundreds of the damned things. Smelly things.

The merchant—a dark-skinned lunaria—eyes me and sniffs. Only they, the wolf kind, can leave this damn realm and ferret back mortal trinkets to hawk for coin. Or so they think.

“I want it,” I say.

He grunts and names his price for it—two silver—a fortune these days. All for what?

A stupid flower. A rose to be exact, white, and pristine among the dark stone surrounding it.

Cassius wants me to wait and strike like he would. Like a snake with fangs bared and poison at the ready.

But where is the fun in that?

I will do this my way. My own devious, deceitful way.

I will kill her on my own.

At the ceremony.

Maybe before.

Her life is mine alone to take.

CHAPTER3

Niamh

Only those entrusted with safeguarding the repository are permitted to enter the catacombs below the Citadel proper, where the old knowledge is stored.

To enter without permission is forbidden.

As a keeper, my only role is to protect this place from outside eyes, but as I hear the sound of approaching footsteps, I swallow. My lips twitch. Maybe I smile.

“I can hear you,” I call out tentatively. Quietly.

“I can see you.” The voice is disembodied, and I can’t tell which direction it originated from. Still, I spin around. My lips twitch again. It’s a smile—not really. To do so would be an insult.

For one such as myself should never dare to greet an unblemished fae as an equal.

“Day,” I say instead, wrestling my lips into a neutral line. “You came.”

He steps forward from behind a row of wooden shelves. Bathed in lamplight, his eyes twinkle though his lips also remain in a flat line. Once I strived to find any resemblance between us. Any at all. Maybe the shape of our eyes was the same, though his are green, mine black. Our hair, at one point, might have been the same dark hue until his took on the redder tones of a fae at the height of youth and beauty.

Once… Perhaps in the womb, we were the same.

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