Morning Star (Red Rising, #3)

by Pierce Brown

“Why?” Octavia asks Cassius, shaking from sorrow. “Why?” “Because you lied,” he says. Wordlessly Cassius pulls the small holocube, a thumb-sized triangular prism, from his ammunition belt and sets it in her bloody hands. Images dance across its surfaces before floating into the air above the Sovereign’s hands. The scene of Cassius’s family dying plays, bathing her in blue light. Shadows move through a hall, becoming men in scarabSkin. They cut down his aunt in a hallway and the men move through and appear a moment later dragging children, which they kill with the razors and boots. More bodies are dragged and piled up, then lit on fire so there would be no survivors. More than forty children and non-scarred family members died that night. They thought they could heap the sin upon the shoulders of a fallen man. But it was the Jackal’s work. He finished the war between the Bellona and the Augustuses, and the Sovereign’s cooperation and silence was his price for my Triumph.