The copper-salt smell of blood filled his nose, every harsh breath saturated his lungs with the scent of pain. His sight was filled with red and all that reached his ears was the crunch of the bones beneath his fists and the meaty tearing of skin as it split.
The high of the violence he was inflicting sang in his blood and the cold in his heart pulsed in time to the blows. Ramsay had long let his arms fall to the sides, unable to fend off the enraged strikes that rained down on him.
Jon could see nothing but the man below him through the haze of savagery and satisfaction that gripped him as he pounded the Bolton bastard further into the muck.
It was the softest voice that finally pierced the frenzy that had griped him.
"Wait."
Fist suspended in the air, stymied mid-swing, Jon glanced up to the face that regarded him serenely.
Sansa was calm as she knelt in the dirt above Ramsay's head, but her eyes pled with him. Begged him to stop.
His madness slowly bled away as he tried foggily to understand what she was asking of him. It was a twitch of the hand concealed in her skirts that gave him an answer. The ice within beat all the stronger for it.
The smile that she gave him as understanding dawned was coy and it held a promise that set his blood aflame. Chill battled heat and he gloried in it.
Sucking his knees from the mud, Jon rose. Hand clenched in Ramsay's shirt, he hauled the beaten man to his knees. The men in the courtyard around them fell silent, the sudden change in the air gripping them.
Gone was the frantic brutality of a man whose only thought was retribution and in its place was a unnatural stillness, a calm malevolence that had those nearby shudder, feeling the creeping touch of the Stranger whisper down their spines.
Jon held the broken man by the back of his jerkin and waited, quiet and expectant. Eager.
Sansa spoke to the yard around them in a clear and regal voice, she spoke to the world and to one man. She spoke to the future, and she spoke to all those she would see brought low.
"Ramsey Snow, I promised you that you would die today. For your crimes against House Stark and against the North, your life is forfeit."
Sansa revealed the dagger that had been hidden in the folds of her skirt. The dagger that Jon had handed her, taken from the cooling corpse of Petyr Baelish. Sansa had been pleased to have the blade alongside the forcibly signed parchment promising her the Vale Knights.
"Our way is the old way and he who passes the sentence should swing the sword…"
Eye met eye met above the bastard's wheezing form, the look exchanged was one that excluded all others, a look that called like to like. Dark and thrilling, it held a sinister pleasure and a deep, twisting adoration. Each could see themselves reflected in the other and they revelled in the wickedness of it.
"Unfortunately, dear husband, I cannot lift a sword."
Sansa's face remained a calm mask and the Northmen around them could not draw their stares from the scene unfolding before them.
Jon gripped Ramsey's hair tightly and jerked his lolling head up sharply, forcing him to see she who he had wronged.
Sansa looked into the dim and rapidly swelling eyes of the man who had caused her so much anguish, the beast who had instructed her so well in the torments that could be visited on a person. Eyes that had haunted her.
She could find nothing in them to cause her fear any longer. This man was small and cruel, his tortures seemed simple and repetitive now, lacking. A child before giants.
He could do nothing now, to touch the cold that entwined her being.
Stepping around the trembling man, Sansa came to a stop next to Jon before she leant forward to her husband's ear. She teased the tip of the knife against the centre of his bobbing throat and lightly whispered the last words he would ever hear.
"Goodbye, nameless bastard. No one will ever know who it was that taught me so much."
It was a graceful motion that took the last Bolton's life. Like the slide of a lover's kiss, steel split skin and red mixed with the mud below their feet as Jon released the dying man to slump downwards. He watched with satisfaction as the last flicker of life left agonised eyes,
It was the heart that sang to his that pulled his attention away from the sweet sight.
Delicate, pale fingers traced across his cheek, the red droplets that adorned his skin banded in their wake, smeared lines like war paint. Her dark stare again met his, power and pleasure humming in their blood, he thrilled in the vicious joy that glinted back at him. It tightened his body and gripped his mind with how he could draw out that look again.
Years of torment had darkened her heart while betrayal and death had blackened his.
But they were home now and their enemies would suffer as Ramsay had suffered.
Those who had crossed them would bare witness to their stained souls.
The wolves had returned to their place in the north and winter followed in their wake.