With a low sound, Dain stalked around the guards and behind the man. He leaned his mouth close to Aleksandr's ear and said, "And her? Does she also deserve to die for my crimes?" When the man didn't look at me, Dain's hand whipped up and grabbed his face by the jaw. He wrenched his head to the side, forcing him to stare in my direction. "Answer me," he snarled, the raw fury coming out in his words. "You were once exactly like her. What did you think when you looked at her and decided to kill her? How could you justify using blood magic to rot her alive?"

"None of this matters. You're going to kill us regardless of what we say," the fae woman spat.

"I wasn't speaking to you, Viessa," Dain said in a conversational tone. "I was asking your soulmate."

"I know with what passion my heart belongs to Viessa," Aleksandr said, his voice bitter. "I love her in a way a thing like you could never imagine. But even something that can only fight and fuck will feel pain when its soulmate dies. I looked at her and saw you—"

The man's voice cut off with a wet sound as Dain's sword sprouted out of his chest, gleaming red with blood. The fae woman's voice rose in a wail of despair, and Dain yanked his sword out of Aleksandr's heart.

I watched him stalk over to the woman, sweat breaking out over my whole body, my legs shaking even though I wasn't standing. I held onto my chair like a barnacle on a ship, and watched Dain stop in front of a woman whose heart he had just impaled. At least he did it cleanly, I thought, trying to hook my mind onto something besides the blood, the blood, the blood. He'd done it in rage, but he'd done it fast.

Would I feel it? I thought with grim fascination. If Dain died, would I feel it? Or did we have to be in balance, a matched pair for eternity?

If someone killed him in front of me, even now, I didn't know how I would survive it. I hated that knowledge. I'd survived when James had died in front of me, clawed my way up a broken cliff and walked miles in agony to a lake, and asked strangers for help. Maybe it was only that I was still picking up the pieces, still healing, and the wound could be reopened too easily, but I couldn't do it again. I couldn't survive it.

"And you?" he said, in his deadly-calm voice. "Do you also think I don't know what it is to love?"

"It doesn't matter to me if you do," she gasped out between sobs, hanging from the arms of the guards. "Just kill me. Start your war."