Chapter 123: Blood on My Hands

LYSANDER

It connected with his nose, and I felt the cartilage collapse beneath my knuckles. Blood sprayed across my hand, warm and slick, and I hit him again in the same spot because I wanted to feel the bone give way completely. I wanted to reshape his face into something unrecognizable. I wanted to pound him into the stone until there was nothing left but pulp and fucking memory.

Johann made a sound that might have been a scream if he’d had enough air in his lungs. His body bucked beneath me, trying to throw me off, but I had my knees planted on either side of his chest, and my weight anchored him in place. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t getting away. He was going to die here, in this courtyard, in front of all these witnesses, and I was going to be the one who killed him.

I hit him again. His cheekbone this time, and I felt something crack that shouldn’t have cracked. His left eye began to swell shut immediately, the flesh puffing up and turning purple before my eyes, and I wondered how many more hits it would take before he stopped struggling entirely. Before he stopped making those pathetic wheezing sounds. Before he became just another body cooling on the stone.

"Lysander!"

The scream cut through the red haze that had settled over my vision. It was sharp, urgent, and wrong. It didn’t belong to Johann. It didn’t belong to any of the sentinels who should have been pulling me off him by now if they were not so afraid of the consequences that came with it.

It was female, high-pitched with panic, and it came from somewhere behind me.

I ignored it at first and raised my fist again.

"Lysander, stop!"

It was then it fully sank into my head who it was.

Fia...

It was Fia’s voice, and there was something in her tone that pierced through the rage, something that sounded almost like terror. Not for Johann. For me.

My fist hesitated in midair. Johann’s face swam back into focus, and I realized with distant surprise that I didn’t recognize him anymore. His nose was flattened against his cheek. His left eye was completely swollen shut, the skin split above the brow and bleeding freely into his hair. His lips were pulped and torn, and blood bubbled from between them as he struggled to draw breath through the ruin I’d made of his airway.

He was choking. I could hear it, the wet gurgling sound of blood filling his lungs, and I looked down at my hands and saw that they were covered in red. It was all over my sleeves, my chest, my face. I’d painted myself in it without even realizing.

Then I became aware of the silence. The horrible, heavy silence that had fallen over the courtyard, broken only by Johann’s desperate attempts to breathe and Bonnie’s quiet sobbing from somewhere above me on the platform.

I looked up.

The sentinels were staring at me. Dozens of them, lined up along the walls and scattered through the crowd, their faces pale and their eyes wide with something that looked uncomfortably like fear. The Omegas who had gathered to witness the execution had pressed themselves back against the far wall, as though trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the monster they’d seen me become.

Fia stood at the edge, her hands pressed against her mouth, her eyes wet with tears she hadn’t bothered to wipe away. She looked at me like she didn’t know me. Like the man she’d called friend had vanished somewhere between the first punch and the last, replaced by something savage and uncontrolled that wore my face but had none of my restraint.

I looked back down at Johann.

He was still alive, though barely. His chest hitched and shuddered as he tried to pull air through his damaged throat, and blood continued to bubble from his lips with each failed attempt. His one good eye found mine, and there was no amusement in it now. Only pain. Only the desperate, animal pleading of a man who had thought himself untouchable and had learned too late that he was not.

I should have felt something. Satisfaction, maybe. Or at least the cold certainty that I had defended my honor. But looking at what I’d done to him, at the way his face had become a canvas of bruises and breaks, I felt only hollow. Only the sudden, crushing weight of what came next.

Because I’d let a man who deserved to die push me into becoming exactly the kind of person I’d sworn I never would be.

I stood up.

My legs were unsteady, and I had to brace myself against the platform to keep from swaying. Johann gasped and coughed beneath me, rolling onto his side to vomit blood onto the stone, and I stepped over him without looking back. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I couldn’t look at any of them.

My eyes found Bonnie.

She was still on the platform, still kneeling beside the body of the retainer she’d tried to save. Her hands were covered in blood up to the wrists, and the blue light had faded from her fingers entirely, leaving only the pale, trembling flesh of a woman who had given everything she had and received nothing in return.

She looked up as I approached.

Her face was streaked with tears and dirt and blood, and her eyes were empty in a way that scared me more than anything else that had happened this morning. She’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow. Somewhere beyond grief, beyond anger, into a quiet place where the only thing that mattered was the dead man in her lap and the failure of everyone who had promised to keep him safe.

I climbed onto the platform. The wood creaked beneath my weight, and I heard Fia start to move behind me, probably to intervene, probably to tell me that Bonnie needed space and time and anything other than my presence right now. But I didn’t stop. I walked across the platform until I stood over her, until my shadow fell across the body she cradled, and then I lowered myself to my knees at her side.

"Bonnie," I whispered.

She didn’t respond. Her gaze remained fixed on the retainer’s face, or what was left of it. The platinum wire had done its work, leaving a wound no amount of fixing could heal. I could see where she’d tried anyway. The skin around the neck was burned and blackened from her attempts to fuse the head back to the body, and the smell of ozone and charred flesh hung heavy in the air.

"I’m sorry," I said. The words felt inadequate, pathetic, but they were all I had. "I’m so sorry. I tried to stop him. But I was too late."

Bonnie’s head turned slowly. Her eyes focused on me with an effort that seemed to cost her everything she had left, and when she spoke, her voice was barely audible.

"You promised me."

"I know."

"You looked me in the eyes, and you promised."

"I know." I reached for her hand, then stopped when I saw the blood coating my own fingers. I wiped them uselessly against my trousers, but they were soaked through already, and nothing I did would make them clean enough to touch her. "I failed you. I failed them."

She stared at me for a long moment, and I saw something shift in her expression. Not forgiveness. Not even understanding. Just a weary recognition that I was as broken as she was, that I’d destroyed myself trying to destroy Johann, and that neither of us was going to walk away from this courtyard whole.

"He’s not dead," she said quietly.

I blinked. "What?"

"Johann." She glanced toward the edge of the platform, where I could hear him still coughing and gasping behind me. "You didn’t kill him. He deserves to die."