“Why should I, or anyone else, believe you weren’t his concubine? It’s common knowledge that Omort liked to mate his sisters, and you lived under his protection for centuries!”

—You want to know the truth about what life was like under his protection? Horrifying. We lived with his insanity, saw it made manifest every day! He routinely threatened to kill me, came close so many times.—

“Again, you lie. If you hated what was happening, then why wouldn’t you abandon him? I know that you and Sabine were free to come and go. And why would he want his own sister dead?”

She turned away, her gauntlets balled into fists. —Go to hell.—

“You’ve already taken me here. Now answer me!”

Silence.

He grabbed her shoulders. “Feel the serpent’s breath?”

She struggled in his arms, weak as a babe. —He poisoned Sabine and me with the morsus.—

“What is that? I’m not as versed in cowardly poisons as you Sorceri are.” They loved deploying their poisons as much as they loved drinking and gambling, deeming themselves “toxinians.”

—The morsus kills from withdrawal. If we left him for more than a few weeks, we’d die of pain. He had the only antidote, doling it out at intervals, so long as we didn’t displease him.—

It sounded too strange to be true, which had Thronos leaning toward belief. Only a sorcerer would do that to his own family. “Why should I believe you?”

—A) I don’t care if you believe me or not because you don’t matter. B) Your friend Nïx will verify everything I’ve told you.—

He . . . believed Melanthe. Which meant Thronos’s old friend wrath was placated a degree. The sorceress hadn’t been a delighted participant in those atrocities.

Though she was lacking in so many other ways, Thronos decided then that she would suffice as a wife. “I do believe you in this, which means I will be marrying you. You’ll be pleased to know that torture is now off the table.”

Her eyes flickered. —As if I’d ever accept you as my husband! You have no right to abduct me! You’re no different from Omort. Taking away my choice, my life. And we killed Omort at the first opportunity.—

“Threatening me again?”

—The only reason we went with him in the first place was that he promised to protect us from Vrekeners!—

“Not from me. I’ve seen you only a handful of times over these years. I dogged your heels, but always when I closed in, you escaped through sorcery. If there was a splinter group who targeted you, I had no knowledge of it.”

—How could you not know what your own men were doing?—

He felt her probing his thoughts, trying to read his mind. He put up his shields within an instant, but apparently that was all she’d needed; she gasped.

—You truly didn’t know! Allow me to fill you in. Not two years after the abbey, your knights of good flew Sabine to a height and dropped her for fun. I saw her head crack open on the cobblestones. I barely pulled her back from the dead.—

Vrekeners were the curse of evildoers; they did not commit evil.

She read his expression. —Don’t believe me? Why do you think I grew to be so afraid of heights? Because I’ve seen what happens to a body when it lands! And then, not a year later, your kind were upon us again.—

Her gaze went distant. —We hid in a hayloft. But these huge winged males swept up after us, your knights. Laughing, the leader picked up a pitchfork and stabbed the hay.— She flexed her right hand. —Sabine jumped from the loft, running to distract them from me. They chased her into a river. She couldn’t swim and drowned!— Melanthe faced him once more, leaning in aggressively. —I found her on a bank three towns away, and debilitated my power to bring her back.—

“You expect me to believe that my own men tried to gore my mate to death when she was a helpless little girl? Ah, but it gets better. Only Sabine’s selflessness saved you? How false that rings!” Melanthe was lying. She had to be.

Because Vrekeners didn’t.

—I don’t expect you to believe that. Just like I don’t expect you to believe that we weren’t isolated cases. That your knights brutalized other Sorceri even worse.—

“The enchantress spins her tales.”

—The enchantress is DONE with Vrekener bullshit!— She spat blood in his face.

Thronos shot to his feet, lifting her with him. “You provoke me?”

—I wish I’d put you to sleep with the rest of those dicks!—

“Then why didn’t you?”

She averted her eyes.

“Why, Melanthe?”

She frowned at something past him. He glanced over his shoulder, saw several serpents, in a prism’s worth of colors. How many were there?

That was when he noticed that the shape of their little island had changed.

He bit out, “The water’s rising,” just as she said: —I think they like my blood.—

TWELVE

Naturally, Lanthe had spat in the face of the one person who could save her from being serpent chow. The rain was still washing red streams off his chiseled cheeks.

Of all her fears, being food was up there, just under Vrekener attack. Time to make nice with her hated tormentor.

Choking back the pain in her mouth, she faked a flirtatious demeanor. —I seem to have gotten my blood on your face. Bad Lanthe! Hey, I have an idea. Let’s team up!—