In that instant, I was met with an immediate sense of panic.
Not the kind that flails, or howls, or throws itself to the ground in some gloriously messy show of grief. No, this was the worst kind of panic. The kind that moves quietly, gliding in like a silk-draped executioner. It breathes down the back of your neck and murmurs ugly things into the soft, frightened parts of your brain. And me? I'd been kissed by panic before. I'd let it take me to bed, let it whisper my name in the dark. But this—this was different.
This was the kind that tasted like prophecy.
My boots slammed against the jagged stone as I ran, the sound echoing up through the haze like a choir of angry bells. My coat billowed behind me, theatrical and tragic all at once, as I tore across the balcony toward the towering palace doors. I didn't think. Couldn't. My mind was a hive of angry bees—all sting and no honey—buzzing and ricocheting from thought to thought in a mad, looping frenzy. The blood. The trail of blood. And the smell. Gods, the smell—
And yet beneath all of that buzzing chaos…was a silence.
A silence in my chest, settled like old dust. Because some part of me, ancient, cold, and cruelly perceptive, already knew what I'd find on the other side of those doors.
The Tower didn't lie. It didn't bluff. It simply…waited.
I reached the doors and didn't hesitate for a single moment. My hand gripped the blackened iron ring-handle and pushed. The door groaned open with the slow, shuddering creak of an old god exhaling its final curse.
And then the world changed.
I found myself in a throne room stretching out before me like a mausoleum dressed for a wedding. A vast cathedral of despair, dimly lit by windows high above that pierced the gloom with long, narrow sunbeams. Each column that lined the chamber was carved in obscene detail—twisted limbs, screaming faces, bodies bound in shapes that no mortal could survive. Art, in the way torture can be art if you squint hard enough and ignore the blood.
The air was cold. Reverent. Like even the sunbeams above had been shushed into silence.
And the blood—gods. The blood.
It was a trail, more so a river. A delicate, dreadful ribbon curling across the floor, sticky and glistening in the stray shafts of light. My eyes followed it, unwilling but compelled. I took a step forward. Then another. My boots didn't make a single noise now—no echo, no protest. The silence was too thick, too holy, as if the very concept of sound feared to intrude on what lay ahead.
And what lay ahead was this:
The throne.
Tall. Broad. Gilded, and cruelly soft. Its frame was black iron twisted into serpents and roses, blooming around the cushion of wine-colored velvet so deep it looked like a wound. And sprawled across it—gods, sprawled like the aftermath of some divine sin—was her.
The Red Mistress.
Helena.
She was beautiful.
No, not beautiful. Transcendent. That rare, violent kind of beauty that makes you want to fall to your knees and apologize for ever having eyes. Her hair was dark red, nearly black where the shadows kissed it, spilling in long, perfect waves over her shoulders and the arms of the throne like a river of molten garnet. Her skin was pale—too pale—luminous in that haunting, holy kind of way that makes divinity so very hard to trust. Her body was limp, yes, but posed—as though caught mid-reverie, head tilted back slightly, lips parted with the hint of a sigh.
And the blood.
It ran from her figure in waves, curling down the edge of the throne and pooling unto the floor below.
I didn't remember falling to my knees. But I was there, on the stone, my hand pressed hard against my chest, trying to hold myself together. Because I was breaking. Not in the loud way. No. This was the silent fracture of something too proud to shatter properly. Something important had died here, and I was mourning it even before I knew what it was.
And then, as if this twisted tableau wasn't already enough to slit my soul in half—
There was him.
Vincent.
Kneeling at her feet like a man before an altar. His forehead pressed reverently to the back of her pale, lifeless hand. His fingers curled gently around hers, careful not to bruise, as if even now—especially now—he wanted her to feel adored. His eyes were closed. Not weeping. Not smiling. Just still. And in that stillness was a kind of surrender I didn't know he was capable of.
And beside them—oh, because of course this story couldn't just have two characters in the final act—there was someone else.
A woman.
Unfamiliar. Elegant in a way that was too composed, too deliberate. She stood beside the throne, her posture ramrod straight, as if holding herself together was a full-time job. Her dark brown hair was tied back in a bun, but wild strands had escaped, framing her face with unkind honesty. Her robe was blood red, cinched tight at the waist, flowing down in sharp lines that made her look like an exclamation mark dressed for mourning.
I raised the gun.
Because what else do you do when the world didn't make sense?
It came up slowly, arms trembling, the revolver feeling heavier than it ever had. My voice scraped from my throat like a rusty blade being unsheathed by a lonely god. "Vincent, what have you done?!"
He didn't flinch. Didn't even look up at me.
"Answer me goddamn it!"
And then came his voice—soft as silk, but threadbare with ruin. A whisper, barely more than breath, cracking at the edges like old glass and hollowed out by something deeper than grief.
"Suicide."
The word didn't echo. It hung—low, intimate, offensive in how casually it cut through the reverence of the room. My brain stuttered, refusing to accept it, like it had skipped a page in the script and landed on the wrong tragedy.
I blinked. Once. Twice. My vision didn't blur—it sharpened, as if denial was trying to sculpt clarity from chaos. But no amount of blinking would change the scene.
No...I didn't believe him. I couldn't believe him. The Red Mistress—Helena—wasn't supposed to die like this. She was meant to be myth. A sovereign clothed in velvet and silence. The ruler of Ventri. Every whispered rumor, every veiled reference to her power painted her as something untouchable. Enigmatic. Ruthless. Sacred in ways that words couldn't reach.
She was supposed to rule from the throne, not bleed into it.
But my eyes, traitorous bastards that they were, drifted downward. To her wrists. Slashed wide, deep and clean. Blood spilled like silk from the wound, trailing down her arms, and splattering onto the floor in thick, grotesque droplets—each one landing with a wet, deliberate sound that echoed throughout the room. I felt my heart seize in my chest, every beat slowing, stretching, choking itself on disbelief.
"No…" I whispered. "No, that's not… that can't…"
But it could. And it was. And there, in the face of everything I'd fought to control, the world broke anyway.
"Why?" I asked, breathless. Desperate. "Why would she do this?"
The woman beside the throne shifted then. Her movements were precise. Hesitant. Her eyes found mine, and for the first time, I saw it—the crack. The tiny fracture in her composure. She was acting. Pretending to be fine. But grief was leaking through the seams.
She stepped forward.
Her voice was soft, cultured, but hollow—like someone reciting a story they'd told too many times to still believe.
"Pride," she said, and though the word was simple, the way it left her lips made it feel like a sentence. "It doesn't always strut and shout with arrogance. Sometimes it's softer than that. Sometimes… it's just the quiet, aching inability to admit that you're not enough. That you'll never be what everyone expects you to become."
I didn't speak. I didn't even breathe. The silence between us stretched, taut as a wound.
Then her voice returned, low and distant.
"She didn't want the role," she murmured. "None of them do. The Red Mistress isn't crowned by will. She's chosen. Plucked from the masses by the whims of a hidden order that claims to serve the city. The position is not a throne. It's a sentence. The Red Mistress is not a queen. She's not even a woman. She's a symbol. A warning. A martyr dressed in silk and painted in blood."
Her voice caught on the last word. She swallowed, but I could see the tremble in her throat, the battle she was fighting just to keep herself composed.
"Helena wasn't strong," she said, softer now, as if confessing it to herself. "Not in the way they wanted her to be. She was delicate. Gentle. The kind of girl who whispered apologies to beetles before brushing them off windowsills. She wrote sonnets in the margins of prayer books. She cried during plays. She used to press flowers between the pages of state decrees just to pretend something good might bloom in the world."
She paused. Her fingers curling into white-knuckled fists at her sides.
"And when they named her Red Mistress… she didn't fight it. She thought maybe if she tried hard enough, she could grow into the crown. Become the image they needed. So she straightened her spine, practiced her speeches, wore the mask with both hands—and somewhere in the middle of all that pretending, she forgot how to stop."
She paused, and for a moment, she looked so small. So impossibly tired.
"Because pride… it doesn't grow the way most think it does," she continued. "It's not something you can force, or fake, or pour into yourself like wine. Pride needs roots. It needs belief. And all Helena had was a sense of fear and obligation. So what she grew… wasn't pride at all. It was armor. It was poison. And it started to change her."
Her voice wavered, just for a moment. She caught it. Bit it down, and then continued.
"After a long while, in the wake of growing pressures and broken promises, what was left wasn't Helena anymore. Just the title she was gifted. Just the mask. And even that…was breaking."
I refused to speak.
"She came to the Tower," the woman said, "because she wanted to remember who she'd been. To strip away the mask and find the girl hidden beneath. "But the Tower, as you may know, is not so merciful. When she looked inward… all she saw was ruin. Pride without purpose. Power without personhood. She wanted to be better—for them. For the city. For herself. But the Tower showed her the truth of what she had become."
Her voice grew softer.
"And she decided then… that Ventri deserved someone better then the person she found herself to be. That, in being unable to relinquish her title, the best way to serve her people was to remove herself from the throne. Cleanly. Quietly. Not as a queen stepping down, but as a girl laying a burden. One final act of mercy in a life that had forgotten the word entirely."
I turned my gaze to Vincent.
His hand was still clutching hers.
And there it was—a single tear.
Slipping down his cheek, carving a clean path through his pride. It hung at the edge of his chin, trembling, then fell. One drop. One admission.
My chest ached. Because for all the jokes, the violence, the betrayal—I saw it.
He'd loved her. And maybe…in some broken, jagged part of himself… he still did.
I didn't lower the gun. But I didn't pull the trigger, either.
Vincent leaned forward, his body trembling, and slowly reached out with his one remaining hand—the one not mangled, not stripped of its fingers and dignity. It hovered for a moment above her face, wavering in the dim light like a final prayer he hadn't yet spoken. Then he touched her, gently, reverently, and closed her eyes.
It was such a human gesture. Quiet. Almost tender. And yet it throbbed with something heavier than grief—something angrier. Something damning.
I could feel the sensation rolling off him in waves—the slow, deliberate way he stood again, spine tight, shoulders stiff with a sense of fury he wasn't voicing. But I could hear it all the same, even in the silence. The unspoken rage. The betrayal. The heartbreak folding in on itself like scorched paper.
She'd left him. A woman too broken to ask for help, too proud to fall into his arms, so she'd vanished into death instead.
I watched as his jaw clenched, something ugly twisting behind his eyes.
Then he turned.
No—whipped around.
Before any of us could stop him, his hand shot out and grabbed the attendant by the throat. The sound of it was grotesque—a sharp, wet gasp as her feet kicked slightly off the ground, her body flailing like a marionette strung on panic.
His face—Gods, his face.
It wasn't just anger. It was betrayal distilled into something monstrous. A storm of grief wearing a corpse's smile. His eyes were wide, hollow, and wild.
"How could you let this happen?" he snarled through clenched teeth. "How could you let this happen?!"
The girl choked, clawing at his wrist. I took a step forward without thinking, my fingers tightening on the revolver, still warm from the chamber it had nearly emptied. My thumb slid against the trigger, ready to fire. Ready to put him down if I had to. I didn't want to now. But I would. If it came to that.
"Vincent," I said sharply. "Don't."
But he didn't hear me. Or maybe he did, but chose to ignore it. He was too far inside whatever torment was ripping him apart from the inside out. The attendant's eyes blew wide with fear—but not guilt. Not cowardice. Just pain. She rasped out words between strangled breaths, her voice a cracked reed against the tension slicing the air.
"I—tried," she gasped. "I tried to stop her—I begged her. I begged. I used every word I had. Every tear. Every ounce of strength in my soul. But her command is sacred. Her orders can't be defied. Not by someone like me. Not by someone who… who still believes."
She was crying now. Not the dramatic kind. The broken kind. The kind that doesn't even try to be pretty.
Vincent's hand slowly unclenched. His fury didn't vanish, but it receded—like a wave dragging shattered glass back into the sea.
She fell. Hard. Her body hit the ground with a sick thud, followed by a wet gasp as she curled in on herself, coughing, retching, sobbing.
No one spoke.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. My hand holding the gun fell slowly to my side, though the tension didn't leave me. It was still coiled in my gut, in my throat, in the ache behind my eyes.
Vincent just stood there, back turned to us, staring down at her body like he couldn't decide whether he hated her… or himself.
The weight of that silence pressed down upon us, a stark reminder that some wounds run too deep to heal, and some betrayals leave no room for forgiveness.