Lover, Assassin, Witch....

It was hard won, and bittersweet, and there were more losses than I think any of us had reckoned on. Dorothea was dead, painfully so, and Hekatah thrown into the Darkness as well. The Blood were purged of their taint, and only a few remained in Terreille at all. In Kaeleer, even, there were fewer left than we might have wished, more tainted by the immigration than we realized, I think.

Daemon and Lucivar were strained, separate, the vision of what he had done to Marian and Daemonar's shadows lingering between them. Saetan, I think, understood more, but still, the words had hurt and his torture had taken a toll, and what they were forced to later, even now I do not know. My own body was bruised, by my own insistence, and I think for a long time Daemon was broken. But more than that, he came home expecting Jaenelle. He came home expecting a wedding band.

I came home expecting my mother still to be there.

We were both perhaps too hopeful in what we expected.

Everything has a price, you see. Even triumph. It's a lesson we Blood learn young, and the price of forgetting that there will be a price is often far higher than what we reckoned on paying.

What part of "assassin" don't you understand, sugar?

I've killed countless members of my own species. Mostly males, but a few females as well, and sugar, believe me, I'd do it again if it all comes 'round again.

I like to think I never killed anyone who didn't deserve it, at least, but honestly wondering that is not something that keeps me up at night. People who knew to hire me, knew that I went for honest kills. No rivalries. No wanting to get someone out of the way who had slighted you. I killed males who hurt little girls. Males who raped and broke witches. Males who left children bleeding in the streets when they were done taking their pleasure with them. Males like my father, and males like the man who raped me, and all those clients who preyed on me when I was on the streets. Who hit me. Who tried to get away without paying for the things I let them do to me.

I killed the first one while he was still inside me, after he'd beaten me beforehand. I killed him, and I took his money, and I ran. It was instinct, pure and wild and broken, and it earned me a reputation that at least stopped them from hitting me most of the time before they took me, and made sure they paid for the "pleasure." Then Daemon honed it. He had me trained. He found me contacts. Finally, there were clients who paid more for one flick of my knife than I made in a month on my back.

I'm retired, now. I don't hire myself out for pleasure or death. That doesn't mean I won't kill again. "Murder" is not a crime among the Blood, and I always have my blade at the ready.

She's so tiny. The thought keeps flying around in my brain, when I touch her. She's learning to grasp hold of things, but slowly, still catching up from her early birth, and her fingers are so very small. The skin over them feels as thin as paper some days. Morghann keeps telling me she's healthy. She's fine. She's eating, and she's growing, and just the other day she smiled at me for the first time.

The smile, that small gesture of recognition, felt like a knife through my heart. It was so sweet. So...innocent, and innocence is not something I've any experience with. There is so much out there in the world ready and willing to harm her, and she has no defenses of her own. Just me and Samael standing between her and the world.

I know too well what the world is capable of. I know the darkness that lurks in the hearts of too many men. I know how easily a blade can pierce flesh. I know the color of blood, the stains it makes inside and out, the ones that will never come out. I know pain from both sides.

And there she lies, perfect, but so fragile. So easily harmed, so easily lost in just a moment, a fragment of time.

I am not one to give in to fear, to let it take control for more than second. I've fought it all my life until I became the thing to fear in the night.

But when I look at her, when she smiles at me, I am terrified.

"Mother Night, that hurts," Surreal gritted out between clenched teeth. Women did not do this every day. It was impossible to think that anyone went through this much pain for something that was supposed to be a joyous event.

Of course, said joyous event was weeks early, which had to mean it wasn't even the actual pain she would have later. She squeezed her eyes shut, fingernails biting into her palm until she drew blood, trying to deflect the pain from her abdomen and the tightening there. She had held off her moontime before, and knew how horrid it would be the month she let it come, and somehow she had expected it to be like that, not this.

She had fought. She had been beaten. She had been raped. And, possibly, if she really cast her memory back to the latter she would admit that pain was far worse than this, but that wasn't somewhere she liked for her memory to go, and so right now she clung tightly to the thought that this was possibly the worst pain she had ever felt. Making it worse was that laced over the pain was fear, cold and clutching at her in a way nothing had since possibly that night at Briarwood.

It was too soon. She didn't know nearly enough about babies and how they were supposed to come, but Morghann had said not until the beginning of March, at least, possibly the middle of the month, and it was not anywhere near that yet.

Another contraction clutched at her, and she felt tears seep out from under her squeezed tight eyelids.

Scared, and hoping he could somehow stop this betrayal of her body of her and the baby it carried, she sent for Samael, and then she did something else she never thought she would do.

She prayed.

The grass crunched under her feet, brittle with frost not yet thick enough to be visible unless you looked closely to see the sheen on each blade. Still it wasn't the silence she was craving, but instead an audible indicator of her presence. The silent curse to the Darkness that slid through her mind coincided with the heat in her face with a rush of annoyance at both the sound of her footsteps and the exhalation of breath she hadn't caught soon enough.

It wasn't like her to be so sloppy.

The sounds the man in the tunnel made seemed to leave him oblivious to those she'd allowed to escape, however. He was too lost in his panting thrusts and the almost inaudible whimpers of the girl under him. The child saw her standing there, but she gave no sign of it, her face scrunched in pain and her eyes dull over the man's large shoulder.

Surreal's right hand twitched and the familiar comfort of the stiletto settled there. It was fast. It was brutal. His screams echoed off the bricks, then died, choked off abruptly. The girl fell silent as well, not making even a sound when Surreal hauled the man off of her. Her eyes reflected nothing back but a shattered web, and Surreal knew she'd been too late.