Free Deadly Lovers (The Prussia Series) by Karisha Prescott Page A

drop he could manage, I saw it. It started in his empty eye socket. Like the birth of a firefly, the ember sizzled to life and took off, bursting into several smaller embers and moving over every millimeter of the Duke’s face as though a flame caught in dry grass.
     
    His eyebrows relaxed, his mouth went slack and I smiled slowly, watching the embers seek out and destroy every trace of the virus in the Duke. His skin turned gray before my eyes. The blood still trickling through his lips and down his throat streamed down a pile of ash in the shape of the Duke, until the disruption of the liquid on the dry ash caused the image of the Duke to implode into a pile where the Duke had once been. I felt a rush of hot air whoosh by my face. What had once been the Duke now had been transformed into piles of hot ash and warm blood.
     
    I wiped my wrist on my dress again, keeping my eyes on the piles of ash as I tried to get the feel of the Duke’s gnawing teeth off of my wrist. But all I could wipe away was the blood, my blood, still trickling out of my wrist. The memory remained. I stopped trying to wipe my wrist and stared at the floor, small pieces of ash still floating down and settling among the dirt.
     
    I felt the blood still streaking across my skin but it felt familiar now. I had spent so much time bleeding, wounded, injured, covered in my own blood, that it felt like I was still all together. I had more blood outside of me than inside of me anymore. And the blood continued to flow, the gash in my shoulder still oozing and the scratches along my arms still streaming steadily.
     
    “Now there will only be half-truths, not whole lies,” I said, the Duke’s blood dripping from my elbows to my wrists, “He attacked me and ultimately died from overfeeding on me,”
     
    I walked over to the table, the pitcher that John Campbell had brought still half full and began to drink it as quickly as I could, my thirst unquenchable, my throat drier than sand in the desert. Even as I finished the pitcher, I wished there had been more. I looked into it, empty now, with disappointment and returned it to the table. The room was very quiet. I looked over at Sebastian, still standing over what remained of the Duke but looking at me.
     
    “Prussia…” said Sebastian, shaking his head and covering his mouth, eyebrows raised in horror, “What has happened to you?”
     
    “When?” I snapped, “When you left me alone with him or when I was only half a dozen feet from where you stood in the castle and he managed to drag me all the way back into here and break nearly every bone in my body and drink half of my blood before you showed up. I saved myself. Is that what you mean? What has happened to me? What would have happened to me if I wasn’t immortal? You weren’t here. It was just me and him ,”
     
    “But torture? Murder?” asked Sebastian, his hand motioning to the still smoldering piles of ash that had taken up residence in the metal chair, “This isn’t you…”
     
    “I…” I wanted to slice him with my words, to cut him down with my words but he was right. I looked at the chair, streams of my blood trickling throughout the piles of warm ash. The floor was littered with streaks and streams and pools of blood, both mine and the Duke’s. I looked at my hands, dripping in blood. Some was mine, some wasn’t.
     
    The door to the dungeon creaked. Both of us looked at the door to find John Campbell with a humble look on his face. He cleared his throat but didn’t make eye contact, looking instead at the floor with only a fleeting glance to Sebastian’s face, clearly worried.
     
    “The Queen,” said John Campbell, “Would have a word with the Princess in her office, the office of the Chancellor,”
     
    I looked from John, who wouldn’t make eye contact with me, to Sebastian, who continued to judge me with every passing second. I threw my hands up in the air in frustration before storming towards the dungeon door.