Page 157 of A Dance of Lies

“Throw me the rope,” Illian says simply, “or I will finish her off while you watch.”

Lights wink through my peripheral vision; I fight to remain conscious. My stomach empties onto the stone. When I glance up, I find Illian banding the rope around the railing.

He knows I will not get far with the wound he inflicted.

The pain is blinding, burning, as if the dagger had been made of molten rock.

But my body is familiar with pain.

I drag myself up, using the balustrade for support. A strange sort of trepidation settles thickly in my lungs—an ominous feeling I’ve felt only once before, when Emilia died. It’s like a shadow, cold and hollow, sickly sweet.

Breathing through the anguish of the hole in my leg, I say a silent prayer, knowing that, this time, the Fate of Morta is close enough to hear.End this. Take us both.

Enough blood has been spilled today; the floor is marbled in it. Surely she is satisfied—especially now that I offer her my life.

Illian whips toward me, his face stained pewter, a remnant of the millen I threw at him. He grazes my bustier with the glass dagger, then pockets it, knowing I’m too weak to run. “I am going to tie us together.”

“I want you to know that someday, somehow, I will find a way to kill you,” I tell him. “My life may be in your hands, but one day, I will break free. And I will drag you to the depths of Morta’s hell myself.”

He doesn’t even flinch. “You fail to frighten me, Vastianna.”

“I’m going to call your bluff, brother.”

Brother?

I freeze, everything tunneling to that voice.

That voice.

It is both familiar and altogether impossible. I must be hallucinating. Losing blood.

The rope falls from Illian’s hands.

And when I manage to lift my head, I see him.

He looks the way he did when I left him alone before an audience the first night of the Gathering—radiant, limned in the gold of a glowing, storm-wreathed moon.

Only, he isn’t quite himself. There’s something different, something ethereal, about him—almost as if he’s absorbing the shadows around him.

His name falls from my lips in a whisper, maybe even a prayer.

And beside him is Basile, looking thoroughly put out.

“How?” Illian rasps, pale as a wraith. His eyes whip toward the chandelier. I follow his gaze, but the chandelier is there, unmoved. Except there is no corpse pinned beneath its spikes. “You are a ghost. An aberration. You must be . . .”

Anton’s smirk is devilish. Devastating. “Come and find out. Though if Mount Carapet wasn’t enough to convince you, nothing will be.”

Mount Carapet. He had told me he hadn’t died. Hadn’t he? But then . . .

I woke on a jut of rocks along the mountainside.

He had woken.

Not from being rendered unconscious, but from death. He hadn’t lied.

The rumors are true.

He came back to life.