Page 19 of This Vicious Grace

He hauled the man to his feet, his expression stone, looking every inch the soldier, and she forgave him all the times he’d been a terrible guard.

Until he drew the man’s arm across his shoulder and said, “Stop your moaning until we get out of here.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Alessa stumbled off the couch. “He tried to kill me.”

Lorenzo spit on the ground. “You should have let him.”

She couldn’t do anything but stare as her personal guard half-dragged, half-carried her would-be assassin out the door, and two pairs of identical boots disappeared around the corner.

The walls bowed as though straining to crush her, and Alessa found herself in the hallway, searching for safety that didn’t exist.

The reasonable part of her wanted to scream for help, to demand her advisors and Captain Papatonis assemble a battalion of guards at her door. But they might not rally to protect her at all. Maybe they’d given the order to take her out. Would they be shocked to hear what had happened… or disappointed to see her alive?

How deep did the betrayal go?

She yearned to run, to hide, to become so small no one would ever find her. But she couldn’t run, and the only place to hide was the tiny chapel off the hall, set aside for the Finestra’s daily prayer. Inside, she locked the door and sank to the floor, laying her hot cheek on cold stone. With her eyes squeezed shut, she didn’t have to look at the murals of her predecessors in all their victorious glory.

No one came for her.

Alessa opened gritty eyes to glare at a life-sized mosaic of an idealized Finestra. Angelic. Perfect. Serene. Aggravating on the best of days.

It was too dim to read the ornate script haloing the Finestra’s blessed head, but Alessa knew the words by heart.

Benedetti siano coloro per cui la finestra sul divino è uno specchio.

Blessed are those for whom the window to the divine is a mirror.

If she had a mirror, she’d smash it and use the jagged shards to carve out every opalescent tooth.

Blessed. Oh, yes, she was theluckiestgirl in the world, fending off murderers on a daily basis for the right to live long enough to fight a swarm of demons slavering to chew on her bones.

The walls, floor, and ceiling of the tiny chapel were adorned with glass tiles and precious stones, but in the gloom, they might as well have been slate. Ages ago some poor artist had spent years crafting the mosaics that told the story of Saverio, a massive effort for an audience of one, and it was too dark for her to see more than outlines.

Saverio’s power system had grown unreliable over the centuries as the wires from the water mill to the city were gnawed on by vermin, and Saverians couldn’t produce the same materials the ancients once had, so she hadn’t bothered to tell anyone when the light bulbs around the perimeter of the room failed, blinking out one by one. It seemed only fitting for the lights to die during her reign.

The ruby eyes of onyx scarabeo leered at her from the upper corners of the chapel, along with silhouettes of monstrous ghiotte lurking amidst skeletal trees. The artist responsible either had some bizarre ideas about the sort of art that motivated a person or a sadistic sense of humor.

She dragged herself to a sitting position, and her elbow crunched the dried leaves of a bouquet on the altar.Thattribute hadn’t done her any good.

“If you prefer a different flower, there are easier ways to drop a hint.” Plucking a shriveled blossom from its wrinkled stem, she shredded the petals between her fingers. It didn’t deserve the punishment, but when haddeservingever protected anyone?

If she had died, another Finestra might be rising to take her place. Either that, or Saverians would’ve woken to find themselves completely defenseless. Her family would have lost their daughterandtheir last hope of survival in one moment.

Below her bare feet were depictions of the three remaining sanctuary islands.

The fourth wasn’t shown. The lost island had been wiped from the maps, forsaken to fade into obscurity after it fell during the first Divorando.

It was up to Alessa whether Saverio would survive the next.

She pushed to her feet, grimacing against the pain, and crept around the statue to the pane of glass set into the wall. She needed to face her enemies head on, and of the entrants on her rapidly growing list of foes, at least this one was dead.

The husk of a scarabeo, shriveled and dusty from centuries in its airless tomb, peered back at her with unseeing eyes. Like some enormous, warped nightmare of an Atlas beetle, it had three curved horns and a glossy carapace that appeared midnight black at first glance but was actually mottled with all the colors of the rainbow, like a spill of grease on dark water. The desiccated specimen, a souvenir from the first Divorando meant to be a testament to Saverio’s survival, taunted her.

The girl and the monster, face to face. The girl, a killer. The monster, dead. Or perhaps, the girl a monster, soon to be dead.

She curled her fingers against the glass, nails scraping against the surface.

Thousands of these…things…were coming. For her. For Saverio.

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