Prologue
EIGHT YEARS BEFORE
Ray crashed into the dusty packed ground, pain searing into his gut. He groped for his stomach. Hot blood and a gaping, aching softness met his hand where his tunic had been completely cut through. The wrongness of it, deep in his core, scared him the most.
He coughed and it ripped that aching horrible feeling deeper into his core.Blood splattered the dirt.
“You’re nothing but a rat,” the boy standing over him said. “Vermin that never should have been allowed to enlist. The Royal Guard is for warriors, not servant pests.”
Ray tried to stand, but he couldn’t make the muscles in his abdomen contract enough to lift his shoulders. Couldn’t make his sliced and torn up arms press against the dirt. This was it? How could this be it?
“Rahiid,” another boy said—no, this one Ray’s asshole of a stepbrother. The boy who nearly got Aubrey killed. Who got her burned to within an inch of her life. Who got Aubrey’s father killed. Who took everything from Ray. “What a stupid name. Where’d you even come up with something like that?”
Ray vomited blood onto the dirt. Rahiid. His mother’s maiden name. Before she took a false one to come here. Just before he’d joined the guard, when she’d been begging him not to risk it, she’d told him about her world. About her surname. The one that mattered. The one he never knew. The name of her people, who she’d left to run away for romance and the promise of a bigger future than living as outcasts in the Scarland.
Rahiid. It’d been the name he’d chosen when he enlisted. Rahiid Venon.The first name for his mother’s people and the last of his rapist father—because no one would deny a Founder’s son entry to the Guard. Not even a bastard son. Not even if he was missing a finger.
The first boy grabbed Maurus’s arm. “He’s finished. Let’s get out of here before the Commander gets here.”
A third boy stepped forward and threw a handful of gold coins at Ray—no, Rahiid, damnit. “For your slut mother, to pay for your funeral.”
The sensation of the coins striking him felt far away, the sound of them plopping on the dirt distant.Too distant.He closed his fist around one nearest him, trying to grasp onto this world, even as the darkness at the edges of his vision grew.
As soon as his fist closed around the coin something changed.A spark ignited in his fist. He lacked the reflexes to release his grip—or, maybe he simply couldn’t. He let out something between a groan and a gasp as an intense sensation shot up his palm. Almost as if the coin had stabbed directly into his palm, up into his wrist, aching, burning, searing, soaring up his arm, into his chest, and pooling at his gut like a swallow of cold river water on a sweltering day.
“Filth,” Maurus said. That slimy asshole of a stepbrother, spat. The saliva slapped against Ray’s—No, Rahiid’s—forehead. He was Rahiid and he would die Rahiid.
The boys turned away.
But something was changing in Rahiid’s gut. And when he finally peeled opened his palm, the gold coin was gone. Vanished.
He reached for another and, again, a mix of pain and fire and exhilaration rushed up from his palm and into his body.With his other hand he pressed harder against his stomach and that soft, sickness that was definitely his bowels receded.
Fight sparked in his body and somehow he managed to push up onto his knees. Managed to scoop up three more coins from the dusty ground and, with a hand still pressed to the wound in his gut, push up to standing.
It wasn’t a proud stand. Nor was it upright. He couldn’t quite make himself straighten, as he staggered on two feet.
“Holy shit,” one of the boys breathed—Rahiid couldn’t tell which, his vision still swam and wove with darkness and the blur of dirt and sweat.
“How?” Maurus’s voice.
Rahiid crouched just enough to grip his sword, lift it from the ground, and raise it in front of him. He didn’t know how it was possible. How a few gold coins could do this. What it meant for such a thing to happen. All he knew was that he had fight left in him.
Rahiid Venon would not die in the dirt behind the Guard trainee camp like a dog put down.
Rahiid Venon would fight until he could not fight anymore.
He raised his sword, one hand still pressed against the wound in his belly that no longer felt soft, but more like muscle and raw flesh between his fingers. Impossible, unfathomable.
Rahiid Venon bared his bloody teeth. “Fight me!”
The boys stumbled back.
“But… his intestines were just out. How can he stand?”
The first boy gripped Maurus’s arm. “He can’t survive that. Let’s get out of here.”
And they ran. Like cowards.
Rahiid Venon did survive.
He never fought again without a gold coin or trinket in his pocket.
There was no injury he could not sustain. No battle he could not win. No torture he could not endure.
Rahiid Venon never lost again.
