Lately, I’ve been having dreams. Dreams of her. Dreams of myself, driving my sword through my father’s chest. Dreams of a silver-eyed little boy thrusting a blade through my heart.
I didn’t come to Salinae to kill her.
I tell myself this, though I don’t know why. No previous Nightborn king would hesitate to kill such an obvious liability.
You’re too soft, my own father whispers to me, and I know he’s right.
I don’t need to kill her, I tell myself. I only need to kill the child. The child is the danger. She is inconsequential.
But when I fly over the Salinae human districts, burning and burning with Nightfire, and I land before the pile of ruin that used to be a house, I’m not expecting the intensity of emotion that spears me.
I stare at the house—what once was a house—for a long moment.
I smell no life. I hear no heartbeat. Once, I could sense her from across the room—across the castle—like her body itself called to me, making its presence constantly known.
Her absence now is even more overpowering. A great hole that has opened up in my soul.
Regret, fierce and unrelenting, tears me up.
Three of my soldiers surround the remains of the house, but they haven’t yet seen me. I consider flying away. Every part of me wants to turn away from this wreckage and lock it somewhere I don’t have to think about it.
But the absence of the heartbeat I was looking for made me miss the one that remained. The three Hiaj below were circling something, their interest piqued with hunger.
I can, at least, finish what I came here for.
I land. One of the soldiers is cursing and rubbing his bloody hand.
“A lamb?” he mutters. “More like a viper.”
Then the warriors notice me and hurry to bow. I don’t pay attention to them.
Because by then, I have seen you.
You are a lone flicker of light in an expanse of death. The only living thing in this pile of rubble.
In my dreams, my child is a mirror of myself. It is my own face I see when I think of dying by my Heir’s hand.
But you, little serpent, look so much like your mother.
I kneel before you. You are so very small. Surely small for your age, though I’m not sure exactly how old that is. Time can be strange for vampires. Your mother has lingered with me for so long that sometimes, I can’t remember how long it has been since she left.
You have long, slick black hair that covers your face, and freckles over your nose that blend with the smears of blood and soot, wrinkling as you sneer at me. They make me think of another time, long ago.
But those eyes.
You have my eyes. Silver as the moon, round and full of steel rage. The rage is mine, too. The fearlessness.
I reach for you, and though I can hear in your heartbeat that you’re afraid, you don’t hesitate to snap at me, sinking your little teeth deep into my finger.
I will not lie to you, little serpent.
I was expecting to kill you that night.
But what I was not expecting was to love you so devastatingly much.
It hits me so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, that I don’t even have time to brace myself against it.
You glare at me, like you’re ready to go down fighting even against one of the most powerful men in the world, and I smile a little, despite myself.
It takes me a minute to recognize the sensation in my chest. Pride.
I think of my own father and the way he spent my entire life crippling me out of fear of what I would become. Think of the night he casually threw my newborn baby brother out the window to the demons.
It is incomprehensible to me that my father ever felt for me the way I feel in this moment.
Surely no one ever has.
I cannot describe the depth of that emotion, nor the intensity of the terror that comes with it, bound together so inextricably. I came here to excise my greatest weaknesses, and instead, I now offer up my heart to it.
From that moment, little serpent, I could not entertain the possibility of killing you.
I’ll do the next best thing, I tell myself. I will raise you. I will protect myself from you by protecting you from a world that would teach you how to kill me.
It can be different, I tell myself, than how it was with my father and me.
It can be different than how it was with her.
I pick you up. You’re so tiny and fragile in my arms. Even though you’re terrified of me, you cling to my neck, like some part of you knows exactly who I am.
I’m already more afraid than I ever have been.
Afraid of you and what you could do to me. Afraid of the world that could kill you so easily. Afraid of myself, gifted with another fragile heart that I know I cannot keep.