The moon was full, and the hall had gone very quiet.
Averifa stood in the middle of that quiet with her dress stained from the confrontation, looking down at the woman on the floor. Lorenza Orietta Raffendora. The woman her husband, Ares, had secretly loved for years, in rooms Averifa was never invited into, in a life that ran alongside her own without ever once touching it.
She remembered exactly what she thought in that moment, and she would remember it for the rest of her life, which was not going to be long. She thought: you were never worthy of him. Not once, not for a day. Whatever he saw in you, it was never worth what it cost me.
Lorenza lay motionless.
Then the small door at the side of the hall opened, and a boy came in.
He was little. His hair was white. He was calling for his mother.
Averifa was stunned into silence. She stood with the stain drying on her skirts and she looked at the child and she understood everything at once, the way one understands a wound only after seeing the blood. The boy had her husband's hair. He had Lorenza's eyes. There had been a child. There had been a child all this time, and she had never known.
The weight of it came down on her in a single crushing motion. Not an affair of months. Not a lapse. A life. A house she had never entered, a family arranged around a table she had never been asked to sit at. She could see it as clearly as if it were painted on the wall in front of her — the three of them, happy, whole, complete without her — and it went through her like something sharpened.
Even in death, she thought, you found a way to torment me.
She did not know it yet, but this single act of passion was the thing that sealed her fate.
Her mind raced. It went, of all places, to her own belly, to the child growing there — hers and his, the rightful heir to House Nozenleaf, the one thing she had that no mistress could take. She raised her bow. The boy stood in the doorway calling a name that no one would ever answer again, and her aim was steady, and for one brief and terrible moment she held it.
Then she lowered it. He was innocent. Whatever his mother had been, whatever his father had done, the child had done nothing, and she could not follow through. She let the arrow drop. It struck the floor with a soft clatter.
The great doors flew open.
Ares stood in them. She watched his face change — shock first, then something that stopped being an expression at all and became weather, a storm coming down out of him. He screamed her name, the whole of it, Averifa Sheram, and the sound of it went around the hall and came back.
Then he ignored her completely. He crossed the floor past her as though she were furniture and went to where Lorenza lay, and he gathered her up and held her, and his grief was so total that he did not seem to hear his own son crying three steps away.
At last he turned to his wife.
"How could you do this?" he said.
What followed was not a conversation. It was a standoff, the two of them and the child and the dead woman, and it ended when a blade flashed through the air and struck him, sharp and clean. It was her last desperate act, and it was the one that sealed her fate.
Averifa met his fury with a smirk.
"You can't even bring yourself to finish off your own child," she said. "Look at you."
His expression did not move. It was ice all the way through.
"I don't care," he said, "about any heir the two of us might have had."
He raised his sword.
"I'll end your life," he said, "and the child you carry with it."
Later — she was never sure how much later — she lay alone in the dark, and the consequences of everything she had done came down on her all at once.
He had never had any real interest in her. Not at the start, not in the middle, not now. She turned his words over one by one, every word he had ever given her, and every one of them was cold. She had simply refused to hear it. Now she was powerless and she was broken and there was a single tragic truth waiting for her at the bottom of it, and she made herself look at it.
The life that had been growing inside her was gone.
It was a brutal end for the woman once known as the villainous Duchess of Sheram, who had used her power and her beauty to obtain every single thing she had ever wanted. She had absolutely nothing left.
She lay in the dark and remembered how the obsession had eaten her. She had been born with immense power. She had played the part of the villainess with both hands and she had used that power to force her way into becoming the wife of Ares, the man she desperately adored, and she had told herself the force of it was a kind of love.
Deep down she had always known his feelings were not for her. She had known and she had clung anyway to the hope that she was his one and only, that the coldness was simply his nature and not a door held shut against her.
Then she learned the truth. He and Lorenza had a child together.
The delusion did not crack. It shattered.
Now, stripped of everything, she sat on the stone floor of a dark prison cell. Ares stood on the other side of the bars, looking in at her, and his voice when it came was perfectly cool.
"Have you reflected," he said, "on what you've done?"
Averifa looked up from the stone.
"I have," she said. "With every fiber of my being."
He waited.
"But my regret isn't what you think it is."
She smiled then. It was a calm smile, almost radiant, and it was the last expression she ever wore in that life.
"My only regret," she said, "is that I ever loved you at all."
Ares said nothing. He could not seem to process the words; they arrived and simply stood there in front of him, refusing to make sense. He could only stare through the bars at the ruined woman on the floor of his prison, wondering how on earth she could look so serene in her defeat.