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Melanthe had driven a blade into his Queen. There would be no trial. No long years left to rot in a cell. He would end it here, with his own hand, the way grief and a crown sometimes demand a thing be ended.

He took the dagger a guard offered him without a word, crossed the cell, and drove it home.

It wasn’t slow or cruel but a swift, certain stroke of a man who could not bear to draw the moment out, and Melanthe folded around the blade with a soft, wet gasp.

And then, gods help me, she laughed.

Bloody, broken, and rattling in her chest, but unmistakably a laugh, and the sound of it raised every hair on my body.

“Oh,” she breathed, her eyes finding his, and there was something almost gleeful in the ruin of her face. “Oh, you foolish, foolish man. You should not have done that. Not so soon.” Blood spilled past her lips. “You ought to have kept me. You ought to have begged me on your knees.” Her smile widened, scarlet and dreadful. “Wait, my king. Just wait and watch and see what becomes of your precious queen. See how long the worst takes to pass. See how strong she truly is when the cold finally finishes its crawl through her veins.”

I watched the words land. Watched the very first flicker of something terrible cross the King’s face. The first cold breath of doubt he would not understand for years yet, and would never, ever forgive himself for once he did.

But it was already far, far too late.

The shadows were already gathering, peeling from the stone, leaking from Melanthe’s dying body like smoke drawn toward a flame.

“My son will know of this,” she breathed, her voice beginning to climb, gathering the dark up around it. “Wherever you hide him, whatever family you buy, however many years you steal from me, he will know. He will know that his mother died here, on her knees, in the dark, by his own father’s hand!” Her eyes blazed, black bleeding into the whites of them. “He will feel it the very moment he wakes. He will carry it every day of his life. And one day, my love… HE WILL AVENGE ME!”

The scream tore out of her, and the darkness erupted with it, bursting outward from her chest in a great black wave shot through with one single, blinding thread of light. It punched through the cell, through the stone, through the very fabric of the world. It screamed away into the night as though it were hunting something. As though it carried something with it… A memory.

A wound.

A poisoned gift.

One flung across the leagues to bury itself in the heart of a sleeping child who would wake in a stranger’s house knowing precisely how his mother had died, and precisely who to hate for it.

And I made myself watch. Someone had to. The witch and the broken king and the terrible things she had released upon the world with the last of her breath. Because that, I understood now, was the true cruelty of her. Not the blade she had put in the Queen. The two slow poisons she left curdling behind her. One in the Queen’s veins and one in her son’s soul, both of them set to bloom long after she was cold in the ground.

The darkness pulsed in to swallow the scene whole, and the very last thing I saw was Melanthe gone still upon the cold stone. That and the King standing over her with the bloodied blade hanging useless at his side. A grieving fool who didn’t yet know that he had just put a knife through the only cure his dying wife would ever have.

I prayed, then. Prayed to be ripped back up out of all of it, back to that warm and terrible little chamber beneath the castle. Back to where the worst thing in the world was a beating heart in a box.

But when the dark cleared, there were stars above me. A cold night sky, vast and indifferent. And I knew there was more. And honestly, I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. How much heartbreak and horror a person could be made to swallow in the space of a single stolen night.

A shadow shifted at the edge of my sight, and I turned toward it.

And once again, my breath stopped.

Demetrios.

He was younger, thinner, caught somewhere in that raw country between boy and man. But it was unmistakably, undeniably him. And as I stared, the last piece slid into place with a quiet, sickening click. The child. The bastard son of Melanthe and Hyperion, the boy I had ached to save through every moment of that vision.

I had been right, he had been Demetrios all along.

He stood with a shovel braced in his hands, his breath misting in the freezing dark, staring down at the ground in front of him. Grief and a raw, terrible determination warred across his face. Every movement seemed to cost him, each shovelful of frozen earth wrenched up as though it took with it some piece of him, he would never get back. His jaw was locked, his lips pressed white. And beneath it all, I could feel the way I had felt everything in this nightmare, the bottomless, hollow ache in him that nothing would ever fill.

The shovel rang as it struck the frozen dirt, metal on stone, and I flinched, glancing around, certain the sound would bring someone running.

And that was when I truly saw where I stood.

My hand flew to my mouth.

I knew this place.

I had been here before. This blasted, barren ground, this exact stretch of frozen earth beneath an empty sky.

This was the Rift. This was where it had torn open. And his mother, I understood with dawning horror, had been buried here, in an unmarked grave, in the very place the worlds would one day split apart.