In the study, when she’d turned that gaze on him — two full breaths, maybe three, her dark eyes moving over his face with the focused, unhurried attention of someone who wasn’t afraid, but was trying to understand — he’d felt it. The want. Not the beast’s want, which was simple and could be starved. Something quieter and more dangerous: the need to be known. To stand in front of another person without the mask and let them find what was underneath.
She had been looking for it. He’d seen her looking. And some traitorous part of him had wanted her to find it.
That was why she had to go.
The need to be known — to stand in front of another person without armor and let them see what was there — was a crack in the foundation of everything he’d built. Cracks spread. Foundations fell. And when they fell, people died. Eight hundred and twenty-three people who were free because he was not.
He watched the light in her window and made his decision.
She had to be hunted. Tomorrow. He would announce her failure to meet his standards, stage her pursuit, intercept her through the network’s extraction protocol, and route her to safety before the beast or the man had the chance to do something irreversible. Faster than standard. Fast enough to outrun whatever it was that had settled behind his ribs when she’d searched his face.
Her silhouette moved across the light spilling from the window — standing, stretching — alive and present and three stories above him.
He turned away and walked back toward the house in the dark.
FIVE
The lock surrendered on the third try.
I can't believe that worked. First attempt at unlocking a door with a hairpin. Beginner's luck. Hope it lasts.
Octavia stood in the doorway of her prison, her heart hammering against her ribs. She withdrew the hairpin and held her breath, waiting for alarms, for footsteps, for anything. Nothing came. The door swung inward on silent hinges. She stepped into the corridor and listened.
Silence echoed off the twelve-foot vaulted ceilings. Walls of dark stone, polished to a mirror-like sheen, threw her reflection back at her: her locs hanging loose down her back, shoes in hand, and bare feet on the floor so she wouldn’t make a sound.
She made her way down the hallway, noting how the sconces along the walls were sculptures in their own right. Each one was probably worth more than her last gallery show had earned. She continued on toward the north wing. She needed to find an exit more private than the front door.
She moved left, and the corridor split. She chose the wider branch, her bare feet silent on the stone. There was more art. Everywhere, more art. As if it had been placed there purposely to distract her.
It was working.
A painting on the north wall stopped her mid-step. Oil on canvas, massive—six feet tall, four feet wide. A Thessari landscape rendered in colors that shouldn't exist together but did, singing against each other in harmonics that made her chest ache. The brushwork was confident. Fearless. She didn't recognize the artist, couldn't read the alien script of the signature, but her hands curled at her sides with the phantom weight of her brushes.
She forced herself to keep moving.
The next corridor held sculptures on pedestals. Carved stone, blown glass, even one that looked like frozen light given form. Museum-quality pieces displayed with perfect spacing, perfect illumination. Curation that spoke to a genuine eye rather than purchased taste. Whoever had arranged this collection understood composition. Understood that art needed room to breathe. She wondered if Skarreth had taken the time to place it himself, then quickly pushed the thought aside as she reminded herself to get moving.
The corridor split again. She chose left.
The same dark stone, the same golden veining, the same sconces, but different art—a series of small portraits, alien faces she didn't recognize, each painted with a tenderness that slowed her pace despite herself.
She shook off the observation. Right now, she needed to find the exit.
She counted doors. Fourteen in the last three corridors, all closed, all locked when she tested the handles. The architecture repeated with deliberate confusion—hallways that curved when they should have been straight, intersections that offered three choices when she expected two. A labyrinth designed to swallow anyone who didn't already know the path.
A prison wearing a palace's clothes.
She turned a corner and found a vast library. Two stories of shelves climbed toward a domed ceiling painted with constellations she didn't recognize. Books, data crystals, scrolls in cases, tablets of carved stone. Reading chairs upholstered in deep blue fabric. A fireplace that burned with a pale, heatless flame.
And Lord Skarreth, seated in one of those chairs with a book open across his knee, dressed in black from collar to boot, his ice-blue eyes already fixed on the doorway where she stood. He’d been waiting for her.
"Leaving so soon, Octavia?"
His voice was the same as at the auction—cultured, resonant, filling the room without effort. His elongated fangs caught the firelight when he smiled.
Every nerve in her body screamed danger. She took a step back. Then another.
She ran.
