The horse’s hooves clicked and clopped on the cobbles. They reached the central piazza, and Nomi could almost see Serina standing before the fountain with the other prospects from Lanos. She could remember with brutal clarity Signor Pietro saying Serina’s name, and how her own stomach had clenched in the anger of that moment.

She directed Malachi to her street, seeing the shabbiness and rust and cracked concrete with new eyes, with the Heir’s eyes. Arriving at her door took an age and only a moment.

Malachi slipped from the horse and then helped her down, his eyes constantly scanning the street. It was early; soon the bustle of the morning commute would begin, when all the workers would walk to the factories. Her parents would be leaving any minute.

“No sign of soldiers,” Malachi murmured. Just as he said it, the first doors opened and the first men and women stepped into the street. He tied the horse to a lamppost and turned to Nomi.

With a deep coal-clogged breath, she knocked.

When her father came to the door, would he give her a hug? Would he give her a chance to explain?

What would her parents think when they saw the Heir, presumed dead, alive and well at her side?

She waited a long time, but her father didn’t come to the door. Malachi put his hand on her lower back.

She tried the knob. It opened easily, and she wondered why her father hadn’t locked it. He usually did.

“Papa?” she called as she stepped inside. “Mama?”

The words caught in her throat and poisoned her on their way down.

The living room was in shambles. Chairs broken, the table on its side, dishes shattered on the floor. And bodies.

Two bodies, broken like the plates.

Nomi stumbled into the room, tripped on the torn-up carpet, and fell down beside her mother’s still form. There might have been blood, dried into the carpet. There might have been wounds, dark, gory breaches of flesh and bone, but she didn’t see. All she saw was the soft blue of her mother’s dress, the warm chestnut of her hair.

There might have been the smell of death and rot.

Nomi bent forward and sobbed.

Two bodies.

She forced herself to raise her head. The other body. Was it—?

Her father, not Renzo.

The realization wasn’t comforting. It was more grief, more pain piling onto her chest until she couldn’t breathe.

Her parents were dead.

Dead.

Like Malachi’s father was dead.

Had Asa tortured them himself? Or had he let his soldiers do his dirty work while he toyed with his new Graces in the palazzo?

Where was Renzo?

“Nomi,” Malachi said quietly, from behind her. “I’m so sorry. I thought they might ask your parents some questions, but I never imagined… I never dreamed Asa would order them to…”

She cried harder.