Page 127 of A War of Crowns

“Leave him alone!” she screamed while launching herself at the stranger who had dared creep into her room.

A madness gripped her in those moments just as surely as she gripped the back of the assassin’s head. Her fingers tangled with the stranger’s hair and she used that point to haul him off the Crow.

When the assassin turned toward her instead, all Seraphina could see was the gleam of his eyes and the flash of his blade through the darkness. Pain burned a course across her stomach in the wake of that blade’s passing, before the stranger’s gaze widened as his left leg abruptly buckled.

In the next moment, the assassin went down, and Seraphina watched in horror as the Crow finished wrenching the other man to the floor by his cloak and tackled him all anew. She realized too late what her fiancé was doing when he wrapped his arm about the assassin’s throat from behind.

It was a terribly smooth sort of transition. Clearly a practiced movement.

No doubt the Crow had strangled a man before.

Seraphina couldn’t watch. She couldn’t just stand there and witness a man being killed—assassin or no.

Stumbling away, she closed her eyes and waited for it all to be over.

Only when the sounds of struggle finally ceased did she dare peek back that way. The man who had come to kill her lay limp on the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

Leaving her merely staring down athim. Her unlikely savior.

The Crow of Drakmor.

“You’re…you’re bleeding…” she gasped on a hitched breath as she took in the sight of the man, now bearing fresh wounds she knew she had nothing to do with. Blood soaked his shirt from collar to hem and he had a cut across his left cheek seeping crimson down into his dark beard as well.

But the Crow’s growled reply of, “As are you…” left her merely confused until she glanced down to see what in the world he was talking about.

Blood.

Yet more blood bloomed upon her own nightgown, staining it further moment by moment. She was hurt. The assassin had wounded her.

“Oh…” was all Seraphina could utter before the room spun like a top and her legs gave out beneath her.

From far away, she thought she could hear the Crow shouting the word, “Guards!” over and over again, but she was too busy falling to pay much attention to anything else.

She had never fainted before. But she was sure that when one fainted, they usually crashed to the floor.

She did not, though. She but floated up and away as the room continued to spin and darkness threatened at the edges of her vision.

It wasn’t until that scarred, one-eyed face she was swiftly becomingentirelytoo familiar with in close quarters swam into view that she realized he was holding her.

The Crow was holding her.

“Hold on, Sera,” he whispered, his warm breath ghosting against her face with the words.

But even on the verge of consciousness, the sound of that diminutive on the Crow’s tongue sent her lips pressing into a thin line. “Don’t call me…Sera…” she quietly complained. She had not given him leave to call her Sera.

In the wake of her words, silence ticked onward.

The prince offered no reply to her correction, perhaps having simply accepted her decree without argument.

Or perhaps he was no longer there.

“Aldric?” Seraphina asked of the darkness as she struggled to keep her eyes open. She felt herself slipping away, the sweet embrace of sleep.

She wanted to sink into that sleep. To let this all just be one strange nightmare rather than her reality.

An extension of the vision that plagued her nearly constantly.

Perhaps she would simply awaken in the morning with a throbbing headache and a reminder of why one should not overindulge in pity wine.

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