The woman had forgotten her husband's face.
In its place, she remembered Cassian's voice.
"Do not open the door."
That was what the man in her dream had said.
She heard it as *I love you*.
When she opened her eyes, two black footprints lay beside the bed.
They were not wet.
They had not begun at the window.
They had not begun at the locked door.
They had appeared beside the bed.
One pair led in. No pair led out.
The woman looked at the husband lying beside her.
She did not recognize his face.
"Who are you?"
Her husband could not answer.
Seventeen pairs of black footprints appeared across the capital.
In a noblewoman's bedchamber.
In a laundress's attic.
In the small room of an excommunicated nun.
Beneath the bed of a seamstress who had lost her husband.
The rooms belonged to women who had never met.
Every footprint walked in the same direction.
Toward the bed.
None walked out.
Ria took impressions from the floors of all seventeen rooms with thin sheets of paper. The foot size, the angle of the heel, even the distance the right foot dragged were identical.
They did not match Cassian's feet.
"You drag your left foot," Ria said.
"Because of an old knee injury."
"My right arm is the greater problem now."
"Newspapers do not walk on their arms."
She threw a sheet of paper at Cassian.
It was the best-selling weekly in the capital.
Its name was *Blood Weekly*.
The front page showed an illustration of Cassian leaning against a bed. His shirt hung open below the throat, and a black alignment seam ran far beneath his collarbone. That scar did not exist.
Before him, the silhouettes of seventeen women knelt.
`Seventeen Nights with the Beheaded Lover.`
`Why Did the Women He Saved Forget Their Husbands' Faces?`
`Place a Black Feather Beneath Your Pillow, and the Executioner Will Come.`
Cassian studied the illustration for a long time.
"The jaw is better in this one."
Ria snatched the weekly away.
"This is not a joke."
"It was praise."
"For the lie, I assume. Not your face."
"The lie is more beautiful."
There were no empty seats in the noble salon hosting *Blood Weekly*.
Women wore black feathers in their hair and drew alignment seams around their throats. Someone auctioned off a scrap of bedsheet as proof that Cassian had visited her.
"They say he left a handprint beneath her right collarbone."
"That was last week's article. This time, he only leaves his voice."
"Because if he shows his face, he has to kill you."
"How tender."
Laughter spilled over the wine.
Cassian listened from the balcony above.
The salon's owner showed no surprise when she noticed him.
"The guest of honor is late."
"Does my presence make the article a lie?"
"Quite the opposite. You came in person because the women you love were being slandered."
"What if I came to kill you?"
"Jealousy."
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
"What if I burn down the newspaper?"
"You want to keep them all to yourself."
"And if I do nothing?"
"Your silence is an admission."
The salon owner raised her glass.
"Beautiful, whichever you choose."
Ria opened the balcony door.
Behind her stood three women whose rooms had grown black footprints.
The first was a survivor of the plague village who had forgotten her husband's face.
The second was a maid saving money to escape her noble husband.
The third was a laundress who could not burn her dead lover's letters.
*Blood Weekly* claimed all three had desired Cassian.
Ria asked, "Tell us what you actually wanted."
The survivor spoke.
"I wanted someone to tell me my daughter's death had not been meaningless."
"Did you want Cassian to love you?"
"No."
"Did you wait for him to visit?"
"I was waiting for my daughter."
Ria wrote it down.
The second woman spoke.
"I wanted the key to my husband's safe."
"Did you want Cassian to kill your husband?"
The woman hesitated.
"I have thought life would be easier if he died."
"Did you want Cassian?"
"Never."
The third woman remained silent for a long time.
"I remember someone touching my hair in a dream."
"Was it Cassian?"
"The voice was his."
"The face?"
"I do not remember."
"What about the face of the person you truly loved?"
The woman began to weep.
"I have forgotten that too."
The laughter in the salon quieted.
The reporters from *Blood Weekly* wrote faster.
The next day's articles read:
`Cassian's Touch Makes Her Forget Even Her Dead Lover.`
`The Secret Maid Who Turned a Murder Contract into a Declaration of Love.`
`The Executioner Who Atones Nightly to a Mother Who Lost Her Daughter.`
Ria's questions were nowhere in the articles.
The women's denials had been translated into deeper desire.
"The more they testify, the more it feeds," Ria said.
They returned to the Black Feather Society's underground chamber.
The wax icon was gone.
Only black footprints remained on the floor.
They began where the icon had stood and split in seventeen directions. At the end of each trail lay a scrap of *Blood Weekly* bearing the address of one woman's room.
Toma brought twelve boxes.
"The hair charms we recovered."
Each charm bound Cassian's hair in wax and black thread. They had been sold in salons, inns, distribution houses, and execution-ground souvenir shops.
Twelve boxes.
Three thousand seven hundred and nine charms.
"All of them?"
"All we have confirmed."
"Burn them."
Ria looked at Cassian.
"Wait. Those may be the anchors binding its body."
"That is why we burn them."
"Or they may be its food."
"Then we will find out."
Cassian set the boxes alight.
The smell of his own burning hair was strangely sweet.
Three thousand seven hundred and nine charms curled black. The hairs inside the wax snapped one by one.
Across the capital, the black footprints began to fade.
The first box became ash.
One trail vanished.
The second.
The third.
By the time the eleventh box burned, the black traces were almost gone.
The final box caught fire.
The bell at the *Blood Weekly* press rang.
A special edition flew across the capital.
`Jealous Cassian Burns the Evidence of His Lovers.`
`He Would Not Allow Another Woman to Possess Even One Strand of His Hair.`
People read the special edition.
One.
A hundred.
A thousand.
Black footprints formed again upon the ashes of the charms.
They were deeper than before.
The stone floor sank beneath their shape.
One pair walked toward Cassian.
The footprints did not stop before him.
They passed through his body.
Cassian's shadow dragged backward. Invisible fingers traced the flesh beneath his alignment seam.
The touch did not feel his body.
It searched only the desires people expected of Cassian.
Possession.
Jealousy.
Love that ended in death.
Cassian's shadow swelled into the shape of a man.
Ria drew her sword and pinned the shadow to the floor.
"The destruction was read as denial."
"I can see that."
"The harder you try to erase it, the more they consume it as a love worthy of you."
"Love is convenient."
"It is not love."
"That makes it more convenient."
The black shape turned its head toward Ria.
It had no face.
Yet Ria felt that Cassian was smiling.
The shape melted into the floor and vanished.
The footprints in the seventeen rooms remained.
The names of the women appeared in the preview for the next issue of *Blood Weekly*.
`All Seventeen of Cassian's Lovers Revealed.`
Ria crumpled the notice.
"When they testify, it becomes desire. When they remain silent, it becomes an admission."
"Then they will speak through different mouths."
"Whose?"
"Their own."
"They just did."
"Where the reporters chose to place them."
Cassian held out a hand to Toma.
"Secure the square."
"That requires imperial permission."
"I did not ask what it requires."
Toma bowed his head.
"How many should I summon?"
"All seventeen."
Ria blocked Cassian's path.
"Will you invite them?"
"Summon them."
"Do they have the right to refuse?"
"No."
"Those women could already lose their marriages and livelihoods because of the articles. Put them in the square, and you turn rumor into a state record."
"That is the only way that thing will hear them."
"You are using victims as bait to catch a monster."
"You should be used to it by now."
Ria did not move aside.
Cassian looked past her shoulder at Toma.
"Write the summons."
Toma opened a fresh page in the ration ledger.
He entered seventeen names.
Address.
Marital status.
Occupation.
Intent to refuse.
Three agreed to appear at once.
Five did not answer.
Nine refused.
Toma stamped the names of the nine refusers with the red seal of attendance.
Copies of the ledger went to the guard, the guilds, and the parishes.
At that moment, the women's private lives became not rumor, but public record.
Ria could not take the ledger from him.
Instead, she tore out a blank page.
"I will take their conditions for appearing."
Toma laughed.
"A summons has no conditions."
"If those women do not testify, only their names will stand in your square."
The three who had agreed immediately gave their conditions first.
Cassian would ask no questions.
No *Blood Weekly* reporter would enter the line of testimony.
Anyone who finished speaking could leave the square without Cassian's permission.
Two of the five who had not answered changed their response to conditional attendance.
In place of appearing, each of the nine who refused sent one sentence.
`Do not write my silence as love.`
`Do not put Cassian's name on my forgetting my husband.`
`I wanted revenge, and Cassian was not its object.`
Ria wrote the sentences on a separate sheet, not beside their names in the ledger.
So that the record of summons could not own their words.
Cassian read the conditions.
"Keep the reporters outside."
Toma asked, "And the rest?"
"Do not stop anyone who leaves."
Ria watched him.
"What about the condition that you ask no questions?"
"I will not ask first."
"Why?"
"Because those things will question one another."
Ria understood that he had made no promise about what happened after he failed.
It was not full consent.
The nine were still going to be dragged there.
But Cassian no longer controlled every part of how they would stand in the square.
The three women chose the order in which they would speak.
First, the woman who would reclaim her daughter's name.
Second, the woman who had wanted the key to a safe.
Last, the woman who had chosen to say nothing.
Her silence would remain testimony they had chosen for themselves, not something given to Cassian.
Ria asked, "Will you erase their names after you catch it?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because if I erase them, they will call that love too."
Laughter came from the darkness.
It was Cassian's voice.
Ria raised her sword.
Cassian did not move.
A pair of black footprints climbed the wall and crossed the ceiling.
The voice whispered directly behind Cassian.
"Those women want me, not you."
Cassian smiled.
"That is why you are the fake."
The darkness answered.
"No."
A black hand closed around the alignment seam on Cassian's throat.
"That is why I am more beautiful."