His loud laugh turns into a wheezing fit. Clapping a hand over his chest, he regains his breath.
“You’ve got that right.” He gestures around the one-room apartment. “Well, whoever she is, she must be a very special girl. To have you both risking your lives for her.”
“She is.” Zadyn stares at the table. “She really is.”
8
SERENA
“Get up.”
I blink to find Mal standing above me, holding a small lantern. I scowl up at his ethereal face, those haunting jade irises and that ivory skin. The soulless stare of a traitor.
It took me longer than I’m proud of to figure out that it was Mal who tried to kidnap me at the tavern in Iaspus. I knew that silk-lined cloak of his looked familiar—and if I had checked, I would have found three inches missing from the bottom, where it tore beneath my heel that night.
“Get out,” I retort, my voice like sandpaper. It takes effort to sit up and prop myself against the cell wall.
He lowers himself to a crouch, his vacant eyes traveling over me.
“If you’ve come to torture me at last, then at least spare me the dramatic looks and be done with it.”
I cry out as he yanks me to my feet by my hair and starts to drag me down the corridor.
“Get your hands off me, you fucking traitor.”
“There has been no betrayal. My loyalty is and always has been to my queen.”
“And who is her loyalty to? You don’t actually think it’s to you, do you? All she cares about is herself, that horrid bitch.”
Crack.
My head slams into the jagged stone wall so hard my eardrum pops. I grunt as stars explode across my vision, the entire right side of my face vibrating with the impact. He leans in close, his fist tightening in my hair as I sag against the wall.
“You will mind your tongue when speaking of her majesty. Or I will have it removed.”
“Kylian ripped out a girl’s heart for touching me,” I mumble through the wave of dizziness. “I think he likes my tongue where it is.”
Snarling, he rips me from the wall and tows me from the bowels of the keep. Minutes later, he tosses me onto the floor of a damask room with walls the color of dried blood.
The door slams shut behind me as I sit up and look around at the glossy black furniture and massive silk-covered, four-post bed. A flash of gold catches my eye on the dressing table.
A crown inset with rubies.
Kylian’scrown.
I’m in his fucking room.
A pit forms in my stomach. I shove to my feet—on high alert—and freeze when I see movement in the gilded mirror leaning against the dark wall.
I look haunted.
My face is a pale sheet between a curtain of dark hair—my cheeks sunken in from starvation, my eyes hollow. All that beautiful, strong muscle I spent months carving with Jace in the training ring has fallen off my bones, leaving behind a skeletal, emaciated shell. My skin is no longer luminescent. As if the blood ore has dulled me from the inside out.
My hand smooths over a bony cheek, and that’s when I feel it.
The slight buzz of energy rolling off the mirror.
Its arched frame is smooth and polished, with whimsical curving lines and dips. I step closer, enthralled.
