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“Ah…I’m sorry, what was the question?”

Saxton smiled gently. “Does your father have a will? Are you in it?”

“No…no, he doesn’t. We don’t have any assets anymore.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No. It’s just me. Well, him and me since Mahmen died.”

“How would you like me to draw up a will for him in your favor? If your father dies intestate, it will all go to you anyway, but if we have that in place, it makes things easier for whatever solicitor you use, because you won’t have to get the king’s signature on the transfer of assets.”

“That would be…Wait, you’re expensive, right? I don’t think we can—”

“You can afford me.” He tapped the spreadsheet with his pen again. “Trust me.”

In the long, dark hours after Wrath had lost his vision, he fell down the stairs—in front of everyone who had gathered in the dining room for Last Meal. The banana-peel move took him ass-over-headache all the way down to the mosaic floor of the foyer.

The only way it could have been more of a loser move was if he bled all over himself.

Oh…wait. As he put his hand up to his hair to push the shit back, he felt something wet and knew it wasn’t because he was drooling.

“Wrath!”

“My brother—”

“What the fuck—”

“Holy—”

Beth was the first of the cast of thousands to get to him, her hands going to his shoulders as warm blood dripped down his nose.

Other hands reached him through the darkness, the hands of his brothers, the hands of the shellans in the house, all gentle, worried, compassionate hands.

In a furious punch, he shoved them all away and tried to get to his feet. Without any orientation to ground him, though, he ended up with one shitkicker up on the last stair—which pitched him wildly off balance. Grabbing for the handrail, he somehow managed to get his boots level and shuffled backward, unsure whether he was heading toward the front door or the billiards room or the library or the dining room. He was utterly lost in a space he knew very well.

“I’m okay,” he barked. “I’m all right.”

Everyone went silent around him, his commanding voice unmitigated by his blindness, his authority as king unassailable even though he couldn’t see a fucking thing—

His back slammed against a wall and a crystal sconce above him twinkled from the impact, the delicate noise rising up into all the quiet.

Jesus…Christ. He couldn’t go on like this, bumper-car-ing around, slamming into things, falling down. But it wasn’t like he got a vote.

Ever since his lights had gone out, he’d been waiting for his eyes to start working again. As time passed, though, and Havers had no concrete answers, and Doc Jane was mystified, what he knew to be the truth in his heart started to make its way up to his brain: This darkness he found himself in was the new earth upon which he strode.

Or fell all over, as the case was.

As the sconce stilled above his head, every part of him was screaming, and he prayed that no one, even Beth, tried to touch him or talk to him or tell him everything was going to be all right.

It wasn’t going to be all right ever again. He wasn’t getting his vision back, no matter what the doctors might try to do to him, no matter how many times he fed, no matter how often he rested or how well he looked after himself. For shit’s sake, even before V had laid out what he had foreseen, Wrath knew this was coming: His sight had been declining over the centuries, the acuity washing out gradually over time. And he’d been getting the headaches for years, with increasing severity over the last twelve months.

He’d known this was going to be where he ended up. His whole life, he’d known and ignored it, but the reality was here.

“Wrath.” Mary, Rhage’s shellan, was the one who broke the silence, her voice even and quiet and not at all frustrated or flustered. The contrast with the chaos in his mind had him turning toward the sound even though he couldn’t say anything back to her because he had no voice. “Wrath, I want you to reach out your left hand. You’ll find the doorjamb to the library. Move yourself