The girl’s gaze found hers and all traces of bravado fell from her expression. Defeat took its place—hooding her eyes, carving shadows into her features as she bowed her head. “Nyx.” The word shuddered and cracked.
Elodie accepted the name: the first true thing this girl had told her. Her fire, sated, died down to sparks. She crossed her arms—to hide how her hands trembled, though she wasn’t sure why—and let her lips thin into a satisfied smile.
“Nyx,” she repeated. “Good. Now, we can talk.”
NYX BELIEVED IN EXACTLY ONE THING, and that was her brother Tal.
He was why she had trekked to that doomed mining town yesterday. He was why she was here now, kneeling on the floor of a mobile cell made filthy with blood and magic. And he was why she allowed the Destroyer—a murderess framed by intractable iron bars, wearing a twisted crown and a cloak of fiery power—to believe that she, and not Nyx, had the upper hand.
Her mouth tasted of copper and salt and agony. She spat onto the floor but a veneer of blood still coated her teeth, so she put it to good use and smiled at the girl in front of her. “Sure,” she said, forcing the word out between labored breaths. “I can probably free up…a few minutes from my schedule to ignore more of your questions.”
The Destroyer’s thin smile didn’t waver. Her hands were shaking, though. She probably thought she was hiding it, but Nyx had always been accomplished at reading people. Nyx was getting to her—which only meant more pain for Nyx, of course, but that suited her purposes just fine.
“Do you care so for Tal, that you would defend him at the cost of your name?” the Destroyer asked.
Nyx shrugged, albeit carefully, since her whole body stung with the echoes of fire as if sparks were clogging her veins. Her tongue and throat stung particularly, though that wasn’t because of the Destroyer’s torture; rather, it was the aftereffects of the foul potion she’d downed last night that still lingered and burned. “My name’s not worth much,” she replied.
One of the Destroyer’s delicate eyebrows arched. “And yet you required torture to give it to me.”
“You’re not worth much either.”
The Destroyer snorted. The sound caught Nyx off guard. It didn’t match, just like the Destroyer’s name didn’t match. The sister of the Iron Empress should have a name that brought to mind vipers and nightshade: something elegant, graceful, deadly. She shouldn’t have a kind name, and she shouldn’t snort like some amused commoner. And she shouldn’t look so small, either—even when she’d gripped Nyx’s arm with a burning hand earlier, Nyx had been struck by how petite and even breakable she looked. She was beginning to worry that the ordeal she had prepared herself for bore little resemblance to the girl who actually stood before her.
Nyx shook herself. Neither the Destroyer’s name nor her habits had any bearing on the situation. Nyx was here to kill the Lady of Mercury and free her brother, and she could do neither if she couldn’t focus. She turned her attention inward, wrapping herself around the core of hate that had been hardening for two years now—ever since she read that goddamned letter Tal left for her the day he pledged himself to a monster. Nyx’s old rage simmered easily back to the surface, and her focus sharpened.
There. That was better.
The Destroyer was watching her. “You have strong feelings toward me,” she observed.
Internally, Nyx cursed. Apparently she wasn’t the only one good at reading people. “You’re not my type,” she retorted. That was certainly true enough. The Destroyer’s cruel, cold beauty couldn’t hold a candle to Helenia: the kind-hearted, no-nonsense girl back in the mountain ward who’d tearfully promised to wait for Nyx in the case of her potential—though unlikely—survival.
“Why did you try to assassinate me?” the Destroyer mused, as if to herself. “To avenge Tal? To free him? That is impossible without my death, which, fortunately for me, you have already proven yourself incapable to achieve.”
Nyx said nothing.
The Destroyer held out her hand, the one with a flame curling just above it. Its fire flickered dull orange. Nyx wondered what the color meant, whether it had to do with her mood or with how much energy or magic she had left. There was so much the Saints didn’t know about the metallurgic class, and about the Destroyer in particular. The handful of non-noble Smiths born each year usually had pitifully small amounts of metal in their blood, far too little to allow for accurate studies, and no prior mercury Smith in any class had ever survived early childhood due to the volatility of incendiary magic. The few brave Saint spies who’d managed to infiltrate the palace had been able to smuggle back a little more intelligence, but not nearly enough to deconstruct the lethal puzzle that was the Destroyer.
The Destroyer allowed the flame to grow until it was a bonfire in miniature, hissing and snarling like a wild animal in her palm. “What exactly is Tal to you?”
Nyx couldn’t help baring her teeth. “What is he to you? Just another guard dog, just another toy for you to break and discard? How dare you call him yours? No person can own another, and you are nowhere near worthy of him in any case.”
The Destroyer’s expression cracked then, straining along fault lines, allowing an incandescent fury to shine through from beneath. Nyx saw it and flinched.
The Destroyer steadied herself. The fury vanished. “He sought me out and pledged his service of his own will,” she said coolly. “I haven’t made him do anything he
