No, there should have been something—anything—in her heart that railed against this. Despite everything he had done over the two decades of her life, patricide was still the most despicable of all crimes; it ought to twist her stomach and fill her with guilt. She shouldn’t relish this kill, shouldn’t feel this boundless relief.

But she did.

She was a shattered, broken thing, and this only proved it.

Her father lifted the glass to his mouth, the amber whisky sloshing in the finely cut glass, and took another deep drink as he shifted through the papers in front of him. Shan watched as he licked his lips, taking in more of the poison that would give her power over him.

It was a potent poison, frightfully expensive, but she had learned long ago that secrets were worth far more than coin. It had taken her years to find, and a couple bits of hard-won information to pay for it. Yet watching her father drink it—in a glass handed over to him by his own daughter—Shan knew that she would have paid any price for this moment.

So she sipped idly at her wine as she waited, fiddling through the books that had been laid out across her father’s grand wooden desk. Books of their financial records, filled with tables of transactions written in the cramped hand of her father’s secretary. They detailed how much had been spent by their estate over the past years—or what remained of the LeClaire estate. Drained and destitute from generations of mismanagement, made worse by her father.

But by morning the books would be hers and that was what mattered.

Her father coughed suddenly, a deep, racking thing that shook his whole body.

Shan cocked her head to the side, eyes wide in the perfect mimicry of a doting daughter. “Are you all right, Father?”

Lord LeClaire looked up, his grey eyes narrowed in that paranoid way of his. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by another round of coughs, blood splattering on the desk before him.

Shan stood quickly, knocking the books aside. Her glass crashed to the floor, shattering, the wine pooling at her feet. Deep. Dark, like drying blood.

She smiled at the fear in her father’s eyes.

Another cough. Another spurt of blood. Shan leaned forward, dipping her fingers in the warm liquid. She swirled them around and brought them to her lips, unminding of the poison. The antidote already flowed through her veins.

“Well,” Lord LeClaire managed. “About time.”

Shan sucked her fingers into her mouth and felt the power explode through her. The blood acted as a catalyst, a source of power that connected them, forming a bridge that she could use to reach out and—ah!