“I’ll stop calling you ‘it’ if you give us an hour alone.”
Selene grinned as she backed toward the bath, as bare as the day she was born. No longer the slim waif of a girl he’d rescued all those months ago. This was the body of a woman who was encouraged to eat regularly and trained like a warrior. Strong and luscious.
And all his.
The dragon zipped up Augustus’s leg, around and up his back, then stopped to perch on his shoulder. It was surprisingly light.
It—Henuzzled his nose to Augustus’s cheek.
“You have an agreement,” Selene said and held out her hand.
The dragon didn’t return for two hours.
Augustus didn’t waste a single breath.
Dimitrios Gabrea Vidalatos had vowed to himself that he’d never open this door. It was the same near-impenetrable mix of wood and metal as most doors throughout the palace, but what lay beyond it…
He’d been inside this tower’s twin on the palace’s southwest side—the layout was an easy recall. Winding stairs. A room at the top with windows to an unreachable world.
That wasn’t why he hesitated.
A ghost lived in this tower, and he’d chosen to ignore it until now if only to preserve what remained of his peace of mind.
After the day he’d had yesterday, he couldn’t keep turning his back on the truth.
The inquisitor, Stavros Salidis, was only a month into his investigation, having taken his time traveling from the southernmost region of Perean. The old man was thorough. Some might call him intentionally slow. But yesterday, he’d forced Dimitrios to sit through a reading of statements regarding Mihail’s captivity.
More and more men had turned up who had seen the rightful king in his broken, tortured state. Some had claimed responsibility for the beatings. The mutilation.
None had knownwhoMihail had been at the time. Orestis Vidalatos, Dimitrios’s uncle and the previous king of Perean, had been very careful about hiding his twin’s identity. And after decades, there’d been nothing recognizable about the disfigured man.
Yesterday, Dimitrios wanted nothing to do with those particular details about his birth father. Today, he decided it was time to face difficult things. He’d survived the death of his wife and child. He’d been kidnapped and imprisoned on a ship. He’d crossed entire oceans to be here and risked his life by simply speaking his real name to a room full of courtiers and Perean’s council.
He could enter a damn tower.
Dimitrios turned the skeleton key until a click sounded. Selene had given him the key he’d been denied during his first week. Otherwise, he’d still have no access to this space or several others.
These men refused him his crown, title, keys…offering him only silence. And yet, he walked their halls. Opened their locked doors. Stood where kings had died. The Council might not name him king, but the palace already had. Absolutely no one questioned his appearance in rooms he shouldn’t be in.
Dimitrios pushed open the door and nearly choked on the stale, humid air. He coughed into a fist and stared up the winding stairs only feet ahead. He’d half-expected to find blood splatters and gore staining the gray stone, but there was no hint of the true horror that had occurred above.
Relief empowered him forward, though he did so with legs that felt heavier and sandals that scuffed on every step. During the climb, he passedseveral flattened husks of mice and old bits of hay needles. No one had come to clean? Was this on the Council’s order or the Inquisitor’s? Or was the idea of ghosts too much for the palace staff to stomach? Maybe it was simply a habit at this point to ignore the entire section.
In the main room above, the yellow glow of early sunlight battled the gray gloom through several slim windows. None of them were large enough to allow for an escape, and they were barely wide enough to see down into the executioner’s courtyard.
There was a bed beneath the windows—if you could call it that. It was no more than a pallet of dry hay stained with various colors: yellow, brown, and a deep red. He knelt and lifted a rust-colored piece.
Blood.
Dimitrios clenched his teeth, and for the first time since meeting Augustus and Selene, he envied them. He should have been the one to kill Orestis. How could he have done this to his own brother? Mihail had been six and ten when he was deposited here. Five and fifty when he’d been executed. “Cruel” wasn’t a strong enough word for what happened here. All to learn the name of the woman Mihail had married in secret. All to locate and murder Dimitrios before he could claim a throne.
Fingers curled into fists, Dimitrios acknowledged the rest of the space. Shackles lay open at the end of chains that were attached to the wall. Mihail couldn’t have possibly escaped, with or without chains. Orestis kept his broken twin shackled, even in the end.
Temples throbbing, Dimitrios turned his back on the cot only to face a door on the far side of the chamber. Had he not heard the detailed testimony, he might have naively thought it led to a bathing chamber. It was made of the same thick wood and metal as the door below. Accessible only with the key clenched in his palm.
He wasn’t naive to what happened in this tower and why they needed that door. He knew what he’d find inside the locked room, and still, he’d dared to walk these godforsaken halls thinking the past was buried. Thinking he could be king without first crawling through the grave that made him.
His feet took those steps that his mind fought against. As if in a world beyond his own, the key entered the lock and turned. His fingers wrapped around the handle, and he pulled.
