On the third night it was not a yearning for Yeva that woke her—it was hunger.

Ranka jerked upright, an all-too-familiar knifepoint pain twisting in her gut, accompanied by the telltale slickness between her thighs.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no. Please, not now.”

The scents of the palace flooded her. She tasted every living body within these walls, from the guards in the hallway to the serving girls in the kitchens to the prince asleep in his bed. All of them vulnerable, all of them a life burning, thrumming, and hers to take—

Ranka clapped her hands over her nose.

It’d been three, four months since she’d last bled. Skra life made her menstrual cycles blessedly irregular. It was safer for everyone else that way.

A memory stirred of the first time—the blood, pain, and embarrassment. In those days there was no wave of bloodthirst accompanying her cycle. Only Vivna, laughing quietly, washing her bedclothes in snowmelt rivers fed by the Kithraki Mountains.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She’d wrung the fabric until the water ran from red to pink to clear. “Plenty of witches bleed, little sister. Plenty of witches don’t. Bodies are strange, changing, beautiful things. Now look, this is how you get the blood out. Let’s find some herbs to help the pain.”

After Belren, Ranka carried her clothes to the river alone.

Another throb rolled through her lower abdomen. The scent of the guard outside her door flooded through her—musk, rose soap, and sweat.

If she were in the Skra camp, she would head to the mountains for a week. Glut herself on hare, whitetail deer, whatever she could get her desperate, starving hands on until the hunger faded.

But she was stuck in this goddess-cursed palace. And there certainly weren’t any deer for her to slaughter.

The stables.

Percy, Aramis, and Galen had said something of tunnels. That had to be the way out. If she could make it out of the palace, she could settle for killing rats, something, anything.

Ranka drifted to the window. It was only a six-foot drop to the manicured lawn below. She held her breath and set out across the grounds.

Ranka stared at the horses, her hands over her mouth and nose. She’d searched for several minutes and found nothing. No way out, no hint of any secret tunnels, no indication of where the twins and Percy had come from.

And now she had a choice to make.

The horses stomped, bumping against the backs of their pens. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right. But she could feel it now—the whisper of what was to come. When her blood-magic demanded death, she didn’t feel the hunger that people who grew up with full bellies felt if they missed a meal.

Real hunger burned.