“I know everything,” he continued, voice shaking but pistol steady. “You might be little more than a back-country twit, but you were right when you said she trusted me more than you with her secrets. Her greatest secret. I know who she was, who you are, what he is, and more about them than you could even dream of.” He wiped his face with his free hand. “Most of all, I know that you are the one who was supposed to die, but instead…” His eyes flickered down to my mother’s corpse, then back to me. “All I have left is revenge.”

He gripped the pistol with both hands, leveling it at my face. It couldn’t end now. Not after everything. Not like this. “Please.”

He bared his teeth. “Not so brave without your troll to protect you?”

“She doesn’t need a troll for protection from the likes of you.” Sabine stepped out of the bedroom and pressed my mother’s gun against the back of his head. “A human is plenty good enough.”

Julian was quiet for one heartbeat. Two. Three. Then he smiled. “When you’ve lost your reason for living, much becomes worth dying for.”

The retort of the pistol shattered my ears, and pain sliced across my face. I staggered sideways, my head ringing and hot trickles of blood coating my fingers as I pressed them to my cheek. But it was nothing in comparison to the gore pooling at Sabine’s feet.

“Idiot,” she said, lowering the still smoking gun. “What good is dying for the dead? They are past caring.”

Lifting her head, Sabine’s eyes landed on me. She dropped the gun and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, Cécile. Your face!”

“It’s fine,” I said, even though my cheek burned, the line the bullet had scored across my skin deep enough to mark me permanently. A fraction of an inch closer, and I would’ve been dead, and no amount of vanity could undermine that fact.

We both stumbled forward, collapsing into each other’s arms. “I knew he would do it,” she said. “I knew from the moment you came in that I was going to have to kill him. He was never one to think beyond the moment.”

Much the same could be said about me. The world still shook from what I had decided in a moment. The implications of my actions had begun to descend with leaden wings the moment that dragon’s scream had shattered the night air, filtering through the rush of adrenaline-fueled fear to brush against me in the courtyard when Tristan had left me alone in the snow. Now they settled their full weight upon my shoulders, and I found I could not think. I could barely breathe.

“She’s dead? Your mother, I mean, Anushka?”

I squeezed my fingers together. They were tacky with my blood. Her blood.

“And the trolls? They’re free?”