“Don’t!” I cry out. “Don’t leave! Please, Lucien…don’t leave me.”

My words ring in the heavy air.

Selfish and mad, the hunger taunts. What human would stay after what you’ve done?

There’s a beat, an unbearable moment of crushing nothingness, and then…

“How could I leave something I never had to begin with?” Lucien asks. His disappointed voice is an ice blade snaking through my veins, freezing me solid, every word stabbing me. Disappointed in me, in what I’ve done, in himself for believing in me. But he wastes no more time on me. He turns to his sister. “She should be questioned.”

“By us?” Varia blinks.

He nods. “The truth should be known.”

My stomach churns wildly, but Varia just sighs. “You realize Father won’t tolerate her in the city. She’s a Heartless. He’d sooner burn her over and over.”

His obsidian eyes flick to a distant tree. “Unless you convince him. He’ll listen to you, even if it’s to spare a traitor’s life.”

Traitor.

I sink to my knees. Is that what I am to him? Why isn’t he demanding I be punished, then? Why isn’t he demanding I suffer for the lies I’ve told him, the deceit I’ve woven around his heart?

Varia sighs, then laughs under her breath. “The Lucien I knew would never care about a traitor’s life, let alone ask his sister to beg their father for it.”

“People change,” Lucien says.

“Or they don’t,” Varia shoots back. “And they just want to bed a pretty thing.”

Twisted shock rises in me. Our kiss in the tent hours ago had dripped with longing. Is that why he’s being so merciful? Nightsinger chose me to seduce him because he has a type—even now, even after being betrayed, he wants to keep me around to use me before he casts me aside?

The prince doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t deny it, and instead his face softens minutely, fists unclenching. The Lucien I knew—no. He wouldn’t.

He could. The hunger slithers through me. He is nothing more than a human. Selfish, greedy, lustful creatures.

“This isn’t the time for argument, Varia,” he says. “You’re alive. Let’s go back. Father and Mother will be so thrilled to see you.”

“Give me a moment,” she says. “There’s something I must do first.”

I watch hollowly as she walks over to the remains of Gavik’s body, pulling a velvet bag stitched with black words from inside her cloak. I don’t want to read them, I don’t want to do anything but sit here and rot in my own misery, but she bends and picks up something soft and leaking and red, and it’s then I realize it’s Gavik’s heart she’s dropping into the bag, a bag that reads leech.