People flood the garden, following the sound of that scream. Another person yells. Someone else shouts. A man pushes past me, a man with a familiar gait, unbalanced because of some ailment (gout), a cane (topped with a silver lion’s head) clattering to the ground. He doesn’t seem to see me. I see him but I cannot make sense of what I am looking at, even as he collapses to his knees, his cane forgotten. A sound comes out of him that I have never heard come from a human before. A low and terrible wail.

The wailing cracks as the wailer’s voice breaks, stricken clean through with sharp-edged despair.

“My son,” cries that broken voice. “My son, my son…”

I know that voice.

I don’t want to look back. But of course, I do.

Kneeling beneath those swinging boots is Don Carlos de Sonza, my guardian and father of Eustaquia.

And Alejandro.

Alejandro, who is now hanging from a tree.

Dead.

CHAPTER 11

Kiki

Like everyone else, I followed the scream. I’d heard it, clear as day, from my hiding spot on the balcony just outside the grand hall where I’d been dancing with Sebastian. A crowd had already formed by the time I reached the garden.

Something had caught my eye. Red hair, billowing in the breeze. An emerald dress, vivid even against the soft dark of night.

She—Ana—was standing rigidly still even as the people all around her fell to hysterics or, worse, desperate gossiping. Her eyes were riveted to something before her.

I shouldn’t have looked.

I shouldn’t have come out here.

I shouldn’t have followed the scream.

My eyes see, but my mind refuses to make sense of it. Any of it.

Time stands still.

No.

It freezes.

It solidifies into something hard and incomprehensible.

I forget how to breathe.

My lungs fail to fill themselves with air.

My vision goes pink at the edges, the way your eyelids look from the inside when you close them against the sun.

There’s something cold and unyielding beneath me, bruising my knees.

It’s the ground. I have fallen. I do not remember it. I do not remember pushing through the crowd though I must have. I am closer now.

Closer to the thing I wish I could not see.

“Kiki. Kiki, get up.”

My eyes blink, and my head moves to the source of the voice, but they’re not working in tandem.

My eyes. My eyes are the problem.

They refuse to move. To detach themselves from the sight before them.

Boots, swinging slowly in the wind.

Moonlight dances across the leather. It’s been polished. Recently. Just last night when he—

He wouldn’t do this—

He wouldn’t—

No.

It’s not a he, that thing swinging there, jostled with nauseating tenderness by the wind.

It’s not a he. It’s not him.

It’s not.

It can’t be.