But I’m not far enough gone not to ask my next question. “And who informed the husband that the midwife had been discovered in bed with the servant?”

My stepmother looks me dead in the eye and says, “I did.”

There’s a haze that clouds the edges of my vision, sneaks into the pounding of my blood against my veins.

But then I realize it’s not my heart that’s thumping, grating against my ears.

It’s Clarissa’s.

There’s blood all over her, I realize. In the flush of her cheeks as her fear envelops her. In the arteries that eddy through the whites of her eyes. In the blue of the veins that reside just underneath her pale skin.

Warmth and lust rush over me, and I feel my skin heat at the pace of her pulse.

Something must have changed in my expression, because my stepmother backs away on her hands. “Blaise, please…” she says. “You must know it was all for your own good. So you could grow into the young woman your father always wanted you to be.”

There was a time in my life when I would have screamed at my stepmother. When I would have forbidden her from ever speaking of my father again.

There was a time when I would have been angry with her. When I would have hated her for what she did to me. To my child. What she took away from us both.

From me, she took my child. From my child, she took the chance to be mourned properly.

Yes, the human Blaise would have been enraged. Heartbroken even.

Maybe I am those things.

It’s difficult to tell, given I’m mostly just hungry.

I stalk toward Clarissa, and she tries to shoot to her feet, but I grab her by her throat and shove her back down.

She thuds against the floor, and instantly I scent her blood, a wound freshly rent thanks to the grading on the wooden floorboard.

The fog on the outskirts of my vision bleeds red.

My stepmother begins to whimper, and she even has the good sense to try to scream, but of the two of us, I’m more prepared for this encounter.

“Don’t scream,” I tell her, and I relish the weight of my words as they drip from my voice.

There’s a bit of pressure against my gums as my canines break through.

My stepmother’s scream becomes a gargle of strangled pleas in her throat.

I could tell her not to cry, not to beg, but I don’t.

“Blaise. Blaise, my little girl, please.”

She’s buried her face in her hands, and that will not do.

I want my face to be the last thing she sees before the pain.

“There, there,” I say. “Look at me, sweetie,” I say, and her neck cranes of my volition. “I’d like for you to be very, very afraid.”

Clarissa’s eyes go wide, and she begins to shake violently. There’s anguish in the way her forehead begins to sweat, smearing the lavish paint she’s doused her pale skin in.

Tears soak her cheeks, creating streaks of black from the paint limning her eyes.

“Tell me again why you didn’t check to see if my child was a boy or girl,” I say, the words slithering from my throat, dark and heady and intoxicating.

Clarissa’s throat bobs, like the woman is actually fighting it, but then the words tumble out.

“Because I didn’t think to. Because I didn’t care.” Clarissa gasps and clamps a hand over her mouth, practically heaving into it.

A smile snakes across my lips. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me. I’m going to make sure of that,” I say.

And then I sink my teeth into her flesh.

In the end, it isn’t enough.

As long as her blood pools in my mouth, I’m in a state of impenetrable bliss.

Warmth and peace and something akin to happiness drape themselves over my mind, my body, and I lose myself in them.

Clarissa’s blood may be bitter and vile to the taste, but as soon as it hits my throat, my cheeks, it turns to opium in my mouth.

It is the best sort of bliss, because there is nothing, no one else there.

There are no visions to see, no warped memories to assault me. It is a drug that sails me higher than the moon, and there is nothing in the sky but cold black emptiness stretching out for eternity.

As long as I am drinking, there is nothing.

I hardly hear it when Clarissa breathes her last breath.

I barely detect the way her body goes limp, not in my arms, because I won’t give her that sort of death. I won’t let her be held as she dies.

I don’t really hear it when she thumps against the floor.

All I know is that there is nothing, and I hope there always is, and also that there never is again.

But then I take a sip and am met with the taste of flesh.

I drink, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

Because there is nothing left.

There is nothing left, but there are all the somethings, and they return with a vengeance, swarming my head with images and screams and Nox’s mournful eyes that aren’t actually here, and my baby is dead my baby is dead.

I open my eyes, expecting, hoping for there to be nothing, but it’s Clarissa’s empty gaze that stares back. I startle, pushing her body away from me, like somehow this will distance me from what I’ve done.

I killed her.