Jesus. Now I feel the pain. It only makes me more aggressive. I grind my knee into her back and pull her wrists more tightly together. My blood slips down the hilt of the dagger protruding from me and drips onto her.

“Nice try,” I whisper in her ear.

“Guards!” Montes yells.

The people in the hallway stand frozen as guards run to our side, a few gasp as they catch sight of me. Here in their world, nothing bad happens.

The guards gently push me away as they take over restraining the woman.

I rise to my feet slowly, careful not to cut more of myself. Montes helps me up the rest of the way.

“We need a medic!” he shouts.

He’s staring at the line of blood blooming across my abdomen, his face shell-shocked.

Two attempts on my life within a single week. Someone wants me dead. “You really should give me back my gun.”

IT’S ONLY ONCE I’m standing that I realize the woman inflicted more than just a flesh wound. My hands move to my stomach as I sway.

“Serenity?” Montes’s eyes are wider than usual. He turns to the guards not dispensing with the hit woman. “We need a doctor! Now!”

I place a hand on him to steady myself and stare down at the woman who’s now being jerked to her feet by several of his men. That was bold of her, trying to kill me in the king’s headquarters. She had to know she’d get caught. That she would be killed.

Montes holds my sides like he wants to draw me into him, but he’s afraid of jostling me. His eyes follow mine to my attacker.

“Make her talk by whatever means necessary,” he says. “Then make an example of her.”

The woman hasn’t said a word this entire time, and really what is there to say? She catches my eye as the guards drag her away. There’s nothing there. No remorse, no anger, no fear. That’s something else I’ve learned from war. Sometimes, violence isn’t personal. Sometimes it’s cold and passionless. And sometimes, you’ll never know a person’s motives.

As she’s taken away, several sets of feet sprint down the hall. A handful of medics move towards us, pushing a stretcher between them.

Now I’m half considering removing this knife from my belly and attacking my attacker for making me face more doctors.

Once the medical crew reaches us, they make quick work of laying me onto the stretcher. I reach for Montes’s hand and grip it in my own bloody one.

“Stay with me,” I whisper.

His nostrils flare as he breathes through his nose. That perfect suit of his is now rumpled. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I’ve heard that love was messy, but ours is downright bloody. It turns men into monsters, and monsters into men.

I don’t care that soldiers, medics, staff, and politicians are watching. I bring his bloody hand to my lips and kiss his knuckles. And the entire time they wheel me away, I hold my monster tightly to me.

The King

THEY PUT HER in the Sleeper again.

She fought it. Again.

Her pain almost broke me.

Again.

I’ve never bloodied my own hands, but I’m honestly giving it thought at the moment. Someone’s targeting my wife, someone wants her dead.

The Resistance had been the likeliest suspect. Serenity herself warned me that they had eyes everywhere. But Serenity’s attacker never fully broke under interrogation, which in and of itself means that she wasn’t just some crazed vigilante. What she did say was that someone paid her off. That’s not how the Resistance does their dirty work.

But if not them, then who?

I sit outside Serenity’s Sleeper, my elbows braced on my thighs and my hands shoved through my hair. I’ve taken to coming here between my meetings. This time, the doctor joins me.

“You had some information for me?” I say to Dr. Goldstein, staring at the Sleeper as it hums away.

“Yes.”

My heart’s thundering, though I don’t let on that it is. I’m afraid, I’m desperately afraid of what this man is going to tell me about Serenity. Special news from Goldstein is almost always unwelcome.

“What is it?”

“Her injury’s fully healed. The Sleeper is removing the malignant tissue it has detected. It should be done in another two hours, then she’ll be out.”

I already know this.

“If nothing is done for her … the cancer will eventually overtake her system. It’s only a matter of time. If you want her to live, not just for the next year, but for as long as you intend to, then I’d advise you to consider leaving Serenity in there for … a longer stretch of time.”

He wants me to leave her in there like some sort of vegetable until we find a cure for her cancer. Marco advised the same thing while he was still alive. And if we were talking about anyone other than Serenity, I might. But now that my oldest friend’s gone, my wife is my closest companion, and she’s swiftly becoming something more.

She could be in there for years, imprisoned in a box. A coffin, really. All that ferocity of hers forced to lay dormant. For Goldstein to even suggest that has my blood pressure rising.

I rub my knuckles. “No.” I feel selfish, even as I say it. “We’ll continue with treatment as we have been. Is that all?”

He lingers. “That … wasn’t what I came here to talk to you about.”

My cheeks suck in. “Then get it out already.” If he gives me one more piece of bad news …

“Your Majesty, when I was looking at the imaging of the queen’s cancer, the machine captured something else as well.” He takes a breath. “Congratulations, my king, the queen is pregnant.”