Page 183 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

Did they think she was prone to them because she was a woman?

Only I knew she was down to the barest echo of humanity. That there was almost nothing and no one that could have garnered this reaction from her.

And my father was not here.

He hadn’t been summoned by her screams, hadn’t added to them with his own. There was no sign of him at all, though the door behind her was ajar.

My breath seized in my lungs.

Ava was so many things, nearly all of them despicable, but on her worst day, she wouldn’t have risked the dukes finding out about my father’s condition. It put her own position in danger—and her life, for that matter—if the other clans believed us to be weak.

So why had she left the door open?

“What’s happened?” Andreyev’s voice sounded far away, past the unsteady beat of my own heart pounding in my ears.

Ava finally straightened to her full height, pulling herself away from the, now obviously relieved, guard, wringing hands that trembled in a way she couldn’t have entirely feigned.

“I went to the sauna,” she choked out. “And when I returned, I found him…”

Found him.

If she had found him injured, she would be at his side, playing the part of the concerned wife I could never quite tell if she believed or not.

If she had found him in another pile of wreckage of his own making, she never would have alerted the entire palace.

So she had found him?—

“This was you,” she spat at me, but I ignored her, my feet carrying me unbidden to the room that was too quiet and too still and suddenly too small to house the man in question.

For all the carnage I had witnessed in my relatively short life, I should have been prepared. Hell, I knew it was coming from the moment I pushed open the door and the metallic scent of blood accosted me.

And it shouldn’t have bothered me.

His still body. His empty eyes, pale blue and shot through with blood. His bloodless lips still twisted up into a grimace.

Had he died in pain?

Did it matter?

Surely that was justice for the things he had done. I could hardly be upset about it now. After all, hadn’t I wanted this to happen? Needed it, even?

I swallowed, following the familiar lines of his face down to the blood still seeping slowly from his neck. The crimson pool almost seemed to glow…

My breath left me in a single exhale.

Itwasglowing. Or sparkling, rather, reflecting the firelight that danced along the many jewels encrusted in the familiar hilt of the dagger I had spent all afternoon searching for.

The bare-chested siren that no one from Socair would be caught dead carrying.

Rage coursed through my veins, clouding out my vision with a crimson hue the exact same shade as my father’s blood.

This was Iiro’s doing.

I didn’t know how theaaliohad done it, but it all made sense now, why he was so insistent on baiting me into accompanying my father when he should have wanted the duke here alone.

Why he had made sure I would bring my wife—my wife, whose dagger was protruding from my dead father’s throat. She stood beside me now, features painted in horror and understanding as she beheld her precious family heirloom coated in the blood of a man she hated.

Iiro’s oily voice slithered down the hallway, igniting my fury all over again. My entire body thrummed with the visceral need to reach for my swords. It would be so easy. He was no doubt distracted by what he saw as a victory, already basking in the carnage he had caused. I could draw both of my sabers and sever his head cleanly from his body in a death that was so much more painless than what he deserved before his guards even reacted.