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“When you say Fury, do you mean like the primordial goddesses in Greek mythology?” I asked.

“Precisely.” Sabine smiled and took another sip of her soup. “But we are not goddesses. More like vengeful spirits whose purpose in life is to punish men for their wicked deeds.”

She tilted her head, looking disturbingly like Hannibal Lecter. Her gaze sharpened to an unnerving level, and goosebumps rose on my arms.

“In all fairness, you could punish women too. Although it’s mostly men…right?” she asked, her eyebrow arching as if she were joking, but her voice remained eerily steady. Somehow, that made the joke considerably worse.

Her voice was the kind that disturbed one’s dreams, and I think it was intentional.

I trembled, unable to respond. What did one say to that? It all sounded crazy, and I would have believed it were crazy had I not remembered dying.

I remembered every sensation from that night. The smell of lavender from the bath salts. The ice biting into my skin. The terrible numbness spreading through my limbs, creeping deeper until even the pain began to disappear and was replaced with dying cells. Through it all, the Man in Black was calm and unbothered as death slowly seeped into my veins. Limb by limb. Organ by organ. He exulted in my death.

I remembered my last breath of life—the death rattle.

And then I woke up in the morgue.

Still freezing.

It was all real. All of it—and that was the most horrible part.

Sabine ripped a piece of bread off the baguette beside her and dipped it into her soup. “The fainting spells are a side effect of your abilities. The longer you stay in your spirit forms, the more tired you’ll get. The more you switch between invisible, ghostly, and human, the more you will tire yourself out. But the more you use your abilities, the more you’ll get used to it. I rarely pass out now unless I spend hours in my spirit form. Or if salt or iron are involved, but that’s another story altogether.”

“Abilities?” I asked, feeling like I was in a fantasy book during the chapter where the young hero learned about their newfound powers.

It was absurd and horrifying.

“Well, there are really only two—three if we’re being generous.” She smiled and brought her spoon to her lips again.

“And what are they?”

“They’re all death-related,” she said. “We are creatures of death, and much like banshees, we can sense death. Be thankful, though, because you do not have to wail like one. Then there is your spirit form, which you’ve already discovered. And finally, if you touch a corpse, you can see the last moments of their life.”

A shiver ran through my body like mice scrambling up the rigging of a sinking ship.

That was not an “ability” that I ever planned on using. Besides, I didn’t need it. Any dead body I would ever see again would be because I had hunted them down and ended them.

I wouldn’t need to see their last moments because I would be the one inflicting them.

Fury burned through my blood, and my fingernails dug into my palms.

The men’s faces who raped me flashed through my mind—at least the ones who didn’t wear a mask. But I saw them all. Their masks. Their voices. Their hands. Those horrible smells.

Everything.

Even now, I felt them on my skin, and it crawled, phantom fingers running over every inch of my body.

It all hit me like ash from an exploding volcano, and anger churned in my stomach. Hot and wicked. Every last one of them—I would hunt them down, and I would kill them.

I would end their lives slowly and painfully.

"Ah, yes, the rage." Sabine's smile softened. "The rage is another unfortunate side effect of our existence. Sometimes helpful, sometimes not. You may want to keep a watch on it, though, because strong emotions can make our abilities rather unpredictable."

She placed her spoon down, and it clinked against the plate beneath her soup bowl. For the first time since we'd sat down, Sabine abandoned her meal, and the weight of her attention settled fully on me, a knowing smile softening her expression.

If her expression could soften.

“We are Furies, Xeniya. We are all horrifically murdered women who have returned from the dead with unfinished vengeance. We were created to hunt and kill, and unfortunately, fury fuels us. It is our guiding light until we find something else to guide us.”