“Hello, Aurelia of the Sel. I am Warlock Arion Stone, and my voice is the last you shall ever hear.” He plunges a glass sword into my throat. “May your suffering be as great as your sisters’.”
One cut. That’s all it takes.
Sharp pain implodes through my bones, though I hardly feel it as I fall. I do not evencarethat I fall. All I see is the red on his hands. All I feel is sorrow.
My sisters my sisters my sisters.
The world darkens, and—the warlock is wrong.
The last voice I hear before I die is the king’s as he says, “String them up with the rest.”
CHAPTER ONE
ZEPHYRA
This is disgusting.”
“Then perhaps you should eat some ginger or, even better,leave.”
“I didn’t say I was going to puke. I said it’s disgusting—which it is. There are dead bodies in there. Freshly slaughtered. Days ago. Bysirens. Remember? Rumor has it that the gore will stain the palaceforever.”
“Remind me again why you demanded to come?” Vesper asks me with a deepening frown. The sight of it is almost as unnerving as seeing the kingdom splashed behind her, all razor-straight edges and glistening white marble. Ancient and fortified and deadly. Maybe I’ll puke after all. Mortia has never been a welcoming place, least of all for someone like me.
If this goes wrong in any way, that’s it. For all of us.
Vesper moves two steps above me, and the torches outside the temple walls coax her shadow larger and paint her dark skin an even deeper shade of brown. She crosses her arms beneath her navy cloak, and the silver bangles on her wrist clang from the movement. Navy to match her eyes. Silver to match her hair. All things considered, she looks exceptionally beautiful for a midnight grave robbery.
I would tell her this too, if she hadn’t spent the entire walk here searching for excuses to send me back to the streets. No matter how anxious I am, I refuse to let it show. I refuse to leave. The score is too big. It could change my entire life. “I told you. I’m the one with the key.”
Her gaze narrows, and she licks her lips. Obviously, she isn’t finished with me yet.
“Show us.”
“What?” I blink wide turquoise eyes at her and run my hands through my thick honey curls.
“Show us the fucking key.”
“The most important part of teamwork is trust. After three jobs together, I thought you would trust me more—”
Vesper slides up another step, halfway to the temple now. “First job,” she says slowly, “you scorched half our map and we had to fumble our way through the jeweler’s vaults while three soldiers chased us down. Second job, you fell asleep when you were meant to be our lookout. Third job—”
“Third job, you explodedmybabies,” Stavros says gruffly, stroking the gunpowder satchels in his arms with a pallid hand. I half expect him to kiss the rough fabric, but unfortunately, he chooses now to keep his oddities to a minimum. His mustache twitches. The veins twining up his thick neck begin to bulge. I sidle up beside him to pat him on the shoulder. When he growls, however, I think better of coddling the five-foot-tall three-hundred-pound ball of anger and quickly dance away.
Snatching a dagger from the belt strung across my waist, I lean against a massive column. “If you despise me so much, you shouldn’t have invited me.”
“You invited yourself,” Vesper hisses, “because you claim to have thekey.”
“Trustis not just a five-letter word—”
“Guys! Stop fighting,” Eos snaps. “We have three minutes before the guards’ route returns them to the front of the temple.”
She is the only one who doesn’t glare at me, instead directing her ire at her older sister. Vesper meets Eos’s gaze with an eye roll.
“Zephyra is right,” Eos says. “The only way we pull this off is if we worktogether.”
I smile brightly, winking my victory at Stavros, but Eos pulls the dagger from my grasp and stuffs it into her tool belt.
“Excuse me? I stole that. It’s mine.”
