Pip's coin came to rest at Seraphine's feet, tails-up.
A stupid thing to notice while death danced around them, but there it was—the chipped edge where he'd once tried to bite it, the faint stain of raspberry jam from breakfast three days past. The sight of it, so ordinary amidst the carnage, made her throat tighten.
Then a blade flashed.
She barely dodged, feeling steel kiss her ribs as she rolled behind the war table. The wood splintered under an axe's blow, spraying her face with jagged teeth of oak.
"Seraphine!" Kaelan's voice, raw with something she'd never heard from him before—panic.
She turned just in time to see him take a dagger to the gut.
Not a clean strike. A butcher's cut, the kind that spilled a man's secrets along with his blood.
Tristan's favorite.
Her vision tunneled. The cavern air turned thick as syrup, every sound muffled except the wet *shuck* of steel leaving flesh. Kaelan didn't cry out. Just looked down at the ruin of his abdomen with detached curiosity, like a scholar presented with an interesting equation.
Then his knees buckled.
Something inside Seraphine tore loose.
She didn't remember crossing the distance. Didn't remember seizing the fallen axe or howling like a gutted animal. There was only the meaty *thunk* of steel meeting flesh, the spray of warmth across her cheeks, the way Tristan's pretty blue eyes widened—
*Oh*, she thought. *This is what vengeance tastes like.*
Metal. Bile. And the faintest hint of rosewater.
Behind her, someone clapped.
"Bravo," drawled a voice like honeyed arsenic.
The Queen of Thorns stepped over Pip's still form, her boots leaving perfect bloody prints on the stone. "I do love a passionate performance." She nudged Kaelan's shoulder with her toe. "Pity about this one, though."
Seraphine's fingers ached around the axe handle. "He's not dead."
"He will be." The queen sighed. "Unless..."
A vial appeared between her fingers, filled with liquid the color of a fresh bruise.
Seraphine lunged—
And froze as cold steel pressed against her nape.
"Ah-ah," murmured her mother, the knife in her hand steady as a surgeon's. "We don't take from queens, darling. We bargain."
The coin at their feet gleamed in the torchlight.
Heads this time.