Life was funny like that. Choices we could have made, things we could have done, always seemed to come when the most horrible of realities faced us head-on.
I should have taken Luna away, but instead, my head was nodding slowly against my will.
“Thirty seconds,” I heard myself say even as I told my mouth to stop talking. “That’s all. You can look, but then, we are leaving. The guards need to know about this.”
“Thank you,” she breathed.
I placed my finger beneath her chin, tilting up her head until her eyes met mine. “Luna, it’s not… good.”
That was an understatement.
I had seen an abundance of death, but little compared to what was on the other side of this door.
“I understand,” she whispered. “Give me a moment. I’ll prepare myself.”
I didn’t really think there was a way to prepare oneself for the scene we were about to enter, but I didn’t say that. Luna deserved a moment of peace.
My mind was already focused on the next problem. Someone in this castle was a murderer. As if I didn’t have enough problems between the war brewing in the south, the wasting illness in the northern human villages, the Tether I never asked for, and the wife pushing her way into my heart. Now there was a murder?
If I didn’t know any better, I would say the gods had a sick sense of humor.
“All right.” Luna drew in a deep breath, straightening her back. “I’m ready.”
Drawing on my shadows, I kept my wings curled around us both. The darkness enveloped us like a kiss, brushing up against us and moving us from the hallway into the middle of the bedroom.
The stench of fresh blood was overpowering. A cool breeze blew in through the broken window, but it did nothing to hide the acrid scent of fear underlying everything else.
My stomach twisted as I took in the bloody room. Whoever did this was not kind or clean or merciful.
The killer’s black heart rivaled my own.
Taking in the bedroom that would have been Luna’s, I couldn’t help but picture her broken body in the middle of the bed. If Ciro hadn’t Tethered us, it would have been her things strewn all over the floor. Her mirror would have been the one reduced to hundreds of tiny shards of glass, littering the floor.
Her blood would have been painting the once-gray walls.
“This was a mistake,” I said, pulling on the shadows, intent on taking us out of here. “We should leave. I need to get the guards, and—”
“No,” Luna said. “I need to see.”
She turned in my arms, her back against my front, as her hands landed on my wings. She tried to draw them apart, but I held them firm.
“You can’t, Luna.”
I tried to pull her into my arms, but she batted my hands away.
“It’s too much,” I said. “Coming in here was wrong. We need to leave.”
“No.” Her hands curled into fists, and she pounded on my wings. I fed more shadows into them, strengthening them against her assault. When it became clear, she wouldn’t break through the barrier, she sagged. I looked up at the ceiling, wishing we had never come here.
Luna drew in a shuddering breath, and she shook against me. “Please, Sebastian,” she whispered. “I need to see.”
There was something about the way she said “please” that broke me. Desperation laced her voice, and the look in her eyes was like a dagger to my heart. Against my better judgment, I opened my wings an inch. Just enough for her to see the destruction in the room.
It was an inch too much.
A ragged sob escaped Luna, and she wilted against me as she took in the devastation. Copious amounts of blood covered the floor, the bed, and the walls. Two torn blue wings lay crumpled and bloody on the floor.
The worst of all was the broken, lifeless body lying in the middle of the red mattress. Julieta’s hair had been pulled away from her neck, which was snapped at an odd angle, and her face was frozen in a silent scream as twin trails of blood ran down her skin. The violet ribbon dangled from her broken fingers, a final taunt from her murderer.