Page 160 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

The terrible sensation that I had been hollowed out, that an unseen hand had reached inside me and ripped all the color out of the world.

There was only silence, the chill crawling over my skin, the sucking abyss in the center of my being.

I had done this. I was a terrible thing, something that shouldn’t exist, and I had driven the warmth and light out of my world.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from the letter, from the words of her soul, openly condemning me.

To become a fiend is a dark and twisted thing…

I’d rather be dead.

Had she been coming to tell me that she was leaving, that this was a cage she couldn’t abide? My love, a leash she was desperate to slip?

Of course she had been. I should never have told her of the ritual.

I would rather she had told me herself. Said goodbye so I could look into her eyes one last time and fully understand that I was the one who had done this. I had made this happen.

I exhaled, wanting to tear the letter to pieces and throw them in the Ark, unable to so much as pierce it with my claws.

My love’s last words to me. This was all I had left. This, and the portrait I’d torn apart in front of her.

She’d watched me rend her face in effigy. That would be her last memory of me, destroying her, shouting at her.

I had broken… everything.

As night fell, I remained in the darkness, holding her final words to me close. Smelling the reek of blood from above. Listening to the change of guards, the soft call that all was well, and not hearing anything at all. Eyes unseeing, the words on the page becoming a blur.

Sometime later, beyond my reckoning, there was a soft knock on the door. The light of dawn was coming through the window; Cirri was gone.

I had obeyed her last wishes. I would let her go.

Visca stepped in, her face hard and frowning, her nostrils flaring as she smelled the blood.

“Good ancestors, Bane, what are you doing, crouching in here like that?” She wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you let someone in to clean the body up? We’ve got warg-sign in the southwest, and as I was planning to pay a visit to Coran regardless, I’m going to direct two of the legions to the south. We’re riding out today.”

I blinked, the words swimming back into focus.

I imagined eyes like the deep forest, but hard and cold. Her hands forming irrevocable words:You are just the same as them. Monster.

“Bane?” Visca’s voice, growing sharper. “What is it? Where’s Cirri?”

Wroth had been right. My brother had told me… and I had not listened.

I shook my head, wondering how I could ache inside when I was hollowed out into nothing.

Strange, how calm I sounded. A far cry from the fiend screaming inside my head. “My wife has… Cirri has left me. She’s gone.”

Chapter 39

Cirri

The world was swaying. My bed was not the warm, deep softness I’d grown accustomed to but a bundle of hard sticks, jabbing into my shoulder, side, and hips.

A headache gnawed at my temples as I cracked my eyelids open. They felt dry and gummy, my mouth sour, and the swaying of my bed made my stomach churn.

I expected to see Bane, or the inside of a carriage I’d inadvertently fallen asleep in, not a wall of wood. I squinted at the boards, picking out a whorl in the grain, several sharp splinters jutting precariously close to my eye.

With an internal groan, I shifted in place, wondering where Bane had put me. What was this? The sticks were iron hard, poking into sore muscles.

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