She had no destination in mind. She had taken nothing with her from the Curzon Street house save what was in her pockets: a few coins, a handkerchief, her stele. She had bolted out the back door without a single thought for anything but getting away. The ground was icy and she was wearing only silk slippers; she could feel her toes freezing. It was strange to be fleeing without Cortana, but she had done what she needed to do with the blade earlier that day. She had hated to do it, but there had been no choice.

Her feet skidded on a patch of ice, and she caught at a lamppost, leaning against it to steady herself. She could still see them in her mind’s eye. James, and wrapped around him, her hands locked behind his neck, Grace Blackthorn.

They had not been kissing. But in some ways, the ease of their intimacy was worse. As she watched, Grace lifted her face to James’s; her arms tightened around him and her body pressed against his. They were lovely together. His hair so dark and hers so fair, both of them strong and slender, both of them achingly beautiful. They looked as if they belonged together in a way Cordelia was sure she and James never could.

Unwelcome thoughts came thick and fast: James laughing with her over a game of chess, saying, Touch me—do what you want—anything, the way he’d recited the words of their marriage vows to her in Mount Street Gardens. All the tiny little bits of nothing that she had gathered up and stored away, fragments of hope that formed a mirror of dreams through which she saw a life with James spread out before her.

She had been lying to herself. She saw that now.

I had to tell you, darling, Grace had said, and every word was a new spike in Cordelia’s heart. I am going to end it with Charles. I cannot bear it anymore, James. I will not marry him. There never was anyone for me but you.

Cordelia had known she shouldn’t be listening—she should back away, give them their privacy, hide herself upstairs, where she could shield herself in not knowing. But she couldn’t make her legs move. Frozen in place, she’d watched helplessly. Watched the blade rising, hovering over her life, her dreams, her carefully kept illusions. The blow about to land.

James had exhaled with relief. Thank God, he’d said.

The blade came down, shattering her dream-mirror into pieces. Leaving them to fall away in glittering, once-beautiful shards, abandoned now to tumble through the darkness into the whirlpool of her shame and horror. Even finding out she was Lilith’s paladin had not been as terrible as this. Lilith’s scorn she could stand, and her friends had stood by her.