Page 171 of Decimation

My gaze travels to the table of honour, where the Guardians sit in their ancient seats. Six of them, protectors of the bloodlines and arbiters of our sacred law.

I don’t need their love.

I need their obedience, and I have it.

Antonio sits among them. Even now, he’s never asked me about what happened because asking would mean acknowledging what he did, and acknowledging would mean consequences neither of us wants to face.

So he stays silent, and I stay grateful.

We both pretend that the blood on his hands is righteous.

He’s brought his children today, a boy and a girl, both dark-eyed and serious, both watching the festivities with the wariness of children who’ve learned young that the world is full of knives. The boy is the heir, already being groomed for his future role. The girl is younger, softer, but there’s something in the set of her jaw that reminds me of her father.

She’ll be dangerous someday, if she’s allowed to grow.

His wife, Grace, is not with them. She’s at home, in their Scottish castle, far away from the heat and the politics and the memories. I don’t blame her. Some wounds don’t heal, especially not the kinds inflicted by her own spouse.

Antonio catches my eye across the hall and raises his glass. A toast. A benediction. I raise my own in return, and something passes between us; acknowledgment, perhaps, or a warning.

He knows enough to destroy me.

I know enough to destroy him.

We are balanced on a knife’s edge, and the only thing keeping us steady is the knowledge that if one of us falls, we both do.

I turn my attention to the other tables.

Paitlyn sits near the front, radiant in blue silk, her son balanced on her knee. The child has his father’s dark hair and his mother’s stubborn chin, and he’s trying to grab everything within reach; silverware, napkins, the tablecloth itself. Devin takes it all with the patience of a man who’s learned that some battles aren’t worth fighting.

How he survived that attack by my brother I don’t know. When I saw him at the mansion, he had enough blood around him to fill a reservoir. I believed he was dead. He looked dead, but clearly God had other plans.

Paitlyn laughs at something he says, her head thrown back, her throat exposed. She has no idea who she is. No idea that the blood running through her veins is a legacy that could destabilise everything my family has built. Her father took that secret to his grave, I ensured it. I made a call to my old reliable, Chris Casey, got him to break into the Brethren archives after dark and destroy everything they had; every record, every mention of his background. I know I could have had her killed. It would have been easier, cleaner, the kind of swift solution my father would have favoured. But Paitlyn is no threat as long as she remains ignorant. She’s happy with Devin, content in her role as a wife and mother, blissfully unaware of who she is. Why create a martyr when you can have a loyal subject instead?

At the next table, Magnus Blake sits with his wife. I still haven’t decided what to do about them.

The woman is technically an infidel, an unworthy, someone who should never have been allowed to marry into our circles. Konstantine’s ineptitude made it possible, he was so consumed with Ines, so distracted by his obsessions that he let all the rules slide. By the time I took power, the marriage was done, the vows were spoken and undoing it would have caused more problems than it solved.

Besides, it feels like she’s earned herself a reprieve. Perhaps it’s the quiet dignity with which she carries herself, the way she’s navigated our world without ever quite becoming part of it. Perhaps it’s simply that she’s never given me a reason to act against her, and in our world, that’s rare enough to be valuable.

Magnus meets my gaze and nods. I nod back. The gesture is small, but it carries weight. He knows he owes me, he knows his wife exists solely at my pleasure. He knows that the stability of his family depends entirely on my continued goodwill.

Good. Let him know. Let all of them know.

Leandra shifts beside me, and I feel her hand tighten on mine.

“You’re brooding,” she says. “I can feel it. The colours around you are going dark.”

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s the same thing, with you.” She turns her head, fixing me with that impossible gaze, one blue eye, one white, both seeing more than they should. “Enjoy the feast. Enjoy the victory. You’ve earned it.”

“Have I?”

Her fingers trace the scar on my throat, the one that turned my voice to gravel and nearly ended my life. It’s a familiar gesture now, almost casual, but I feel it everywhere. I always do.

“You’ve earned everything,” she says. “Now stop worrying about the future and be present for once.”

I lift her hand to my lips and kiss her knuckles. The gesture is second nature now, I’ve done it a thousand times, but it still makes her blush.