Page 159 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

She was nowhere.

She had run away from me and vanished.

I paused in the doorway of the keep’s entrance, and Koryek gave me an odd look as he passed.

“My Lord,” he said politely, keeping a wary distance.

I nodded, amazed at how suffocating such a thing as true terror felt; gods, was there anything else like it?

This was because of what I’d done. I was merely… not myself. She was here, she simply didn’t wish to see me.

Well, that was it. I could give her breathing room, let her come to terms with the facts of the matter: that she was trapped here, married to a murderous brute.

And yet.

Walking on hands and feet, forgetting the civilized walk of a man, I found myself once more lurking outside the Tower of Spring.

Surely she was in the upper tower with the door locked, biding her time before she had to face me and my bloodstained hands again.

I crouched outside her door, clearing my throat, and debated what to say.

My mind was blank, still glazed with the odd terror that she would never want to see me again. She would shut her door to me forever.

But she hadn’t locked this one.

I fumbled the latch in my haste to be inside, creeping in on silent feet.

“Cirri?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Cirri, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you…”

There was no answer. Twilight had fallen, the sky outside the windows studded with stars and a column of black smoke—the Ark, sending Ellena’s final remnants into the open air.

I frowned at them, creeping in further, and saw what I had missed in my first chaotic search.

Her dresser’s mirror reflected an empty expanse of wood. The velvet-lined boxes containing her jewels were gone; her wardrobe door was askew, several dresses torn down and puddled on the floor.

I inhaled sharply, still smelling nothing but ash, and tasting the sharp terror that built in me.

“Where?” I breathed, my eyes grazing her desk and seeing nothing. Would she really leave without a word? With nothing to say?

But the jewels were gone, her cloak was gone…

I turned blindly, striding until I reached the Tower of Winter, and my first footstep was onto paper.

A single page of it, slid under the door.

Fear was a tight restriction in my throat, an ache in my gums; the ungodly taste sickening in my mouth as I bent to pick it up.

It was her writing, her lovely, neat hand.

Fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, she had written, and beneath it was her letter.

I cannot live hereanother moment. You are just the same as them—a monster. I refuse to live on your leash. I’d rather be dead than the wife of a warg.

Let me go. If you really love me, don’t come after me.

Cirrien lai Darran

The icein my spine hardened, crystallizing into something new and awful.

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