The Sentinels cast a calming blue onto Godwin’s chambers and Prince Stroke’s soul. He hummed a song stuck in his mind, tapping his foot and enjoying the soothing rain drumming against the glass of the window. He cracked his knuckles, then his neck, rolling his shoulders and limbering up each muscle with deep and lengthy stretches, releasing moans of excitement and pleasure as he laughed at his own reflection.

  He finally wiped away the shards of glass from his skin. He did it rough, cutting into his cheeks and jawline. The blood didn’t bother him. He felt alive and with one purpose: avenge Runaya, kill them all. Make a world where they could’ve lived peacefully.

  “Do it, my sweet boy,” Stroke heard. “Kill them all. Kill them. I want to spend my life with you.” He didn’t know if the voice was real or fake, and frankly, he didn’t care. Hallucination or not, it was her, the girl he loved, and he would never ignore her voice. “Slice the whore open. Make her feel what I felt. Do it, my love. You were meant for this. You are my everything.”

  “I hear you, Runaya,” he whispered. “Just hold on. I’ll follow your voice and find your soul. I haven’t lost you yet.”

  The melodies in his mind were drowned by the faint weeping behind him. He turned with anger, slamming a palm onto the table he’d dragged into the room. Mara was choking, gagged by a cloth, her limbs tied to each corner of the table, pools of blood at each of the wooden legs. He’d peeled the skin of her arms and thighs down to the muscles, broken as many bones as he could without killing her. He left her in the white silk, now a pretty red against her darker skin, treating the craft of torture like art.

  “Do you have something to say, whore?” He ungagged Mara and put an ear close to her mouth. “Is the pain too much? I haven’t even started the ritual yet. I think I could snap a few more of your bones, cut your muscles, cut out your eyes… and then I get to do it all over again. Isn’t that great?”

  Mara turned her head from Stroke’s cruel laugher. Fiasco was on adjacent table, bound in the same way, still unconscious from the strike. There was a tear in her leather uniform, just above her breast and showing where her heart would be.

  “Fi—fi—asho,” Mara slurred. She never thought speaking with no teeth would be so difficult. “Peath—heh—he…hep.”

  Stroke straightened her head and slapped her face. “No, no,” he whispered. “You don’t get any help. Fiasco is sleeping. It’s rude to wake her up. I’ve heard her sleep through thunder at the top of the tower Quinn lives in. It’s just us two.” He showed her a tear of the angel, teasing her eyes with it. “You, I, and this rock. Let’s begin.”

  “Nuh.” She shook her head desperately. “Nuh. Peath.”

  “The Sentinels stay blue. They see what I do, and they don’t care about you. You’re nothing.” He slammed a dagger into the table, inches from her head. “And you will do nothing. You will watch as your death creeps, and you will get the punishment you deserve.”

  He gathered Mara’s blood into a wooden bucket and formed a pentacle around her table. He lit candles, searching his memories. “I don’t know the symbols of the ritual,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. All I need is this symbol.” He held the tear of the angel above Mara. It pulsed red, as did the blood of the symbol. “Feel the pain.”

  Her body tensed and she released a wet scream. Her peeled skin snapped back to her muscles, sealing with sizzles. Her bones clicked back into place—her teeth grew back, her beauty returning, and the ritual began with an unharmed host.

  Of course, the first thing Mara did was scream for Fiasco with her returned voice. When the woman failed to wake, she began to cry again, as that was the only method she’d ever used to get her own way. “Please,” she said. “Please, Prince Stroke. I’ll tell the whole of Vatanil that I lied. Don’t kill me. Gods, please don’t kill me. I don’t wanna die.”

  He repeated the same for Fiasco, drawing a pentacle around her table and linking the ritual to the tear of the angel.

  “You went too far,” he sang. “There’s no forgiveness for this. I hear the god’s demands… I hear their whispers.”

  “No, you don’t,” she begged. “You’re going mad. Let me go. I can—I can—PLEASE DON’T KILL ME! FUCK! I’M SORRY!” She battled the ropes and tried to break free. Stroke giggled as the table scraped pitifully across the floor from her thrashing. “DON’T KILL ME! DON’T DO IT! I CAN CHANGE, I PROMISE! I’LL DO WHAT YOU SAY, ANYTHING YOU ASK!”

  Stroke put a hand on her ankle, running it up her leg and between her thighs. He squeezed between her legs with a smug look, listening to her feign moans at his fingers. “You’ll do anything I ask?” he said with a grin. “No matter what it is?”

  She wore her innocent eyes and nodded. “Yes,” she purred. “I am yours, Prince Stroke. All of me is yours.”

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  He removed his hand from under her dress and bashed his fist against her stomach. She wheezed, coughing, winded from the blow.

  “That was your chance to change,” Stroke taunted. “A whore is a whore. You don’t change.” He took the knife out the table and stood by her scalp, grabbing her chin and holding it steady, putting the freshly sharpened edge against her soft throat. “I would’ve let you go if you denied me,” he lied. “How unfortunate.”

  “No! No! Please!” She pushed her head against the wood, trying to distance herself from the blade. “PLEASE! Ple—please! I’m s—I’ll be good. I can be a good girl. Please.”

  “There’s nothing you can offer me.”

  “I can make your dreams come true,” she pleaded. “I can fuck you in ways you’ve never thought of. I can make you forget the pain of her memory with every part of me. I’ll—I’ll marry you! I’ll give you children! I’ll give you everything!”

  The prince put the knife down and cocked his head. He put a hand on her cheek. “Tears. So many of them. They won’t do a thing for you. Your life is already over.”

  They dripped down her cheek, mixing with the spit of her screams and gags between her short breaths. Snot strung together from her top to bottom lip like slimy prison bars, keeping her lies inside. She shook her head with vehement refusal, thrashing against the ropes and belts even further—as a reward, the fibres ripped their way into her wrists and ankles, leaving them with burns.”

  “I’m pregnant!” she claimed. “You can’t! I am two!”

  “Oh really?” Stroke mused, picking up the knife. “Which poor soul is the father?” He ripped open her dress and exposed her belly. He squeezed it hard, laughing. “No baby in here. Wouldn’t matter if there was! Nothing will save you.”

  “She doesn’t deserve children,” he heard Runaya say. “Take it from her. Make her suffer.”

  He raised the knife with a wide smile. Mara begged one final time. The knife came down at the side of her waist, he dragged it from one end to the other, the steam of her body left through the massive wound. She spat blood, crying in agony as the prince dug into her intestines and ripped them out like parasites.

  “Too high,” he whispered. “That cut was too high. No seeds must be spread through you.”

  He cut lower, an even wider gash, and clawed his way inside her with his fingers and the knife, slicing through ligament, bone, and other organs to free. The more he cut, the more she bled, but the ritual forced the blood back into her veins whenever she grew faint and close to death. He had no idea if he’d found what he was searching for, but it looked good enough to him. He ripped what he correctly believed to be her womb out of her body, cutting the bits that remained and joining it with his prize, tossing it all into a bucket by his foot. He stabbed her in the kneecaps, controlling her screams, satisfied with his work.

  “PLEASE!” she shrieked. “STOP!”

  He covered her mouth with a bloody hand and shushed her. “You can’t die during a ritual. Not unless I rip out your heart.” He stuck the knife into her lung, a penetration she wasn’t accustomed to. “Runaya felt all of this, and more. You drove her to that. You.”

  She weakly lifted her head and looked down at her body. She didn’t recognise herself, screaming after seeing the steaming mass of purple and red flesh dragged out of her.

  He flaunted the soaking knife by her face. The whole room stunk of iron and death. “How many have been in your throat? Hm?” he said flatly. “This knife is not the worst thing to go inside you. Fucking my brother was far worse. You are a whore. Feel same. Dirty. Fucking. Whore.”

  He stuck the knife into her eye and plucked it out of the socket. Her screams were too loud for him, so he sliced her throat down to the bone in one quick swipe. She gurgled on blood, her lips moving to form words, but nothing came. He plunged the dagger into her chest and cut from collar to belly button, splitting her ribcage with only the strength of his hands.

  He carved his way to her beating heart, grabbing her throat and looking into her remaining eye. “For Runaya,” he whispered. “She was so much better than you.”

  He plunged the dagger into her heart, then took it out, then in again, then out again, speaking a single word each stab, each louder than the last. “Whore. Traitor. Harlot. Parasite. WHORE. WHORE. WHORE.”

  He stabbed her between the eyes. Still, she did not die. He took the tear of the angel and shoved into the cuts of her heart, then took the knife out of her skull. Her body convulsed, beginning to heal a second time, completing the ritual.

  “It will take time,” he heard Runaya say. “Minutes. Rest. You have done a good thing.”

  “There is still one more,” Stroke said, looking at the tear of the angel on Fiasco’s table, then to the spare in his palm. “I can get one more after her. They will do by bidding.”

  He cut the tip of his finger and wrote Godwin’s name on Mara’s shaking arm. The name burned into her flesh. He wrote Quinn’s on the other, then Zishang’s, then finally, Bollo’s.

  He did the same on Fiasco’s flesh, gently caressing her sleeping face with an apology for what he was about to die. He put the knife over the opening in her uniform, then stopped.

  He felt something strange about the ritual. He carefully lifted up her shirt, following his instincts, seeing how her stomach swelled slightly. He rubbed the raising, feeling a second heartbeat inside her, amplified by the ritual.

  “That’s why you wanted to leave,” Stroke realised. “I’m sorry. This is unfortunate, but I must do this.” He put the knife back to her heart. “I don’t know if you can hear me. The ritual won’t claim your child, not if your targets refuse to target your stomach. If all goes well, I promise I will return you to your original form with the power of the God Arm before it dies… I’ll let you live your life with it.” He stuck the dagger into the middle of her chest. Fiasco jolted awake with a gasp, but Stroke was prepared. He put the tear into the single wound and comforted her as her body shook. “I must do what my Runaya asks of me,” he whispered. “Everything will be okay.”