The Fatal Judgement

"Keep going." A Covenant elder slammed his hand against the projection frame. "We want to see the killer's face."

Lucian raised his hand. "Increase the extraction. I want the memories from the night she died."

The soul mage gritted his teeth and pushed the lever forward.

The Prism drove three inches deeper.

My whole body seized. A scream tore through my throat before I could stop it. The hall went white at the edges. Blood-red light exploded behind my eyes.

Memory fragments tore across the screen.

The castle's lower kitchen. Seraphine standing on a chair to reach the top shelf, passing things down one at a time. I was seventeen. I had not laughed in four months before that night.

The screen cut.

The Covenant's eastern courtyard. First winter after we were turned. I slipped on the ice and Seraphine dropped beside me without pausing, completely straight-faced. "The ground attacked you. I saw the whole thing. We're pressing charges."

The screen cut.

A training room. Lucian standing across from me, watching me try to control the feeding reflex for the first time. After the sixth failed attempt he walked over without a word, put his hand over mine, and held it there until the shaking stopped.

"Again," he said. He didn't move his hand.

In the hall tonight, another torch grazed my shoulder. The fire bit into skin.

"Crocodile tears!" The elder lunged onto the platform. He pointed at me, his knuckles white. "Cael knelt outside her door for years. His head was bloody from the stone. She never once opened it. Why is she playing innocent now?"

No one answered.

From the entrance came the sound of small, barefoot steps.

Cael stood there. His eye sockets were sunken. His pupils looked somewhere far away.

He moved toward the projection screen like he was sleepwalking. His small hands pressed flat against his mother's image. "Mom." His voice was barely sound. "Come back. Please come back."

His body started shaking.

"She won't even move for a child."

"She watched Seraphine die and felt nothing."

Lucian crossed the platform in one stride. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard. His eyes were red. "Look at him." His voice cracked down the middle. "This is what ten years of your silence built."

"I pulled you out of a gutter. I gave you everything. And you repaid me by protecting the monster who killed her."

He raised his hand and hit me across the face.

The force of it snapped my head to the side. My lip split. Blood ran down my chin.

He stood there.

His hand was still raised, as though he had expected something from the impact and hadn't received it. I hadn't flinched. I hadn't made a sound. I just turned my face back toward him and looked at him, and whatever was in my expression in that moment — whatever ten years of silence and caves and animal blood looked like from the outside — it made him go very still.

Something moved in his face.

He put his hand down.

"Seraphine." My voice came out barely above a whisper. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry?" Something tore through the word. "What good is sorry?"

He went still again. A memory flashed across the screen without warning — ten years ago, the night after Seraphine died. I was curled in the corner of my cell, my nails dug into the floor, splitting one by one. I was slamming myself against the stone wall. Over and over.

"Seraphine. Why did you leave. Why didn't you come to me first. Why—"

On the platform now, tears were running down my face. Blood dripped from my broken nails onto the stone beneath the chair.

The entire hall went quiet.

One vampire near the back said softly: "She looks... actually suffering."

"But she still won't speak," someone else said. "Ten years. She'd rather fall apart in that chair than give us one name."

My sleeve had torn when the guards dragged me in. The Blood Oath mark was visible now on the inside of my wrist. The deep purple scar tissue. The kind that only comes from a soul-level binding — the kind no one takes willingly.

Lucian looked at it.

He knew what it was. Every vampire in the Camarilla knew what it was. A Blood Oath that deep doesn't get taken for nothing. Someone had asked something enormous of me. Someone had come to me and put something so heavy on the table that I had agreed to seal it into my own soul rather than let it out.

A single tear slid from the corner of his eye.

He wiped it away immediately.

His face locked back over. Hard and cold.

"Until I find whoever did this to her, I will not stop."

"And when I find him — you and he go to the same place."