In my lifetime, I’d been shot, stabbed, staked, burned, bitten, beaten, strangled, hit by a car, and tortured by physical and metaphysical means. Nothing compared to the anguish I felt when our gazes met and I saw the acceptance in hers. She knew nothing could save her, and despite her obvious fear, she’d come to terms with that. Maybe it was because, in her short, captivity-filled existence, she’d never known there was more to life than ugliness and death. So much more, like hope, love, laughing, dancing . . . and now she’d never know.

It would all end here.

Something shattered inside me. I managed to hold back the tears, but I couldn’t stop the sound that escaped me. Agony became breath and broke the silence that had gripped the room.

Then two words slid into my mind, spoken in a whisper that somehow managed to resound through my thoughts.

Trust me.

My eyes bulged. Mencheres was the only person I knew who had the ability to communicate telepathically, yet that hadn’t been his voice.

It was Bones’s.

A sliver of me was awed that he had this ability, but the rest was too destroyed with grief to care. Trust him? He was as helpless as I was to stop this!

Trust me, his inner voice repeated, emphatic enough to drown out my mental railings.

Anger flared through my grief. Trust what, that we’d get through this together? Or that time would heal all wounds? Well, I had no intention of healing. I wanted to feel this pain forever because it was all I’d have left of my daughter—

Trust me!

Thonos’s blade began to descend toward that tiny, vulnerable throat. Katie still stared at me, and for a split second, her eyes changed from the same deep gray as mine to something else.

Red.

Katie’s gaze should have only been able to turn one other color. Bright, vampire green. Red was the sign of another race. The only one the child wasn’t supposed to have in her mixed genetic makeup.

Hope blasted through me with enough force to knock me over if I’d been standing under my own power, but I wasn’t. Mencheres still had me in that invisible vise, and in the gut-wrenching instant before that deadly blade met flesh, I saw the boiler room through new eyes.

Four Law Guardians, three council members, and the queen of the ghouls were all present for the execution of the mixed-species child. Everyone from Bones’s line might be considered unreliable witnesses for personal reasons, but no one would question any of them on whether it had really happened. They’d never acted mercifully before when it came to protecting the power balance between the races, and nothing had changed in the centuries since.