I glanced over my shoulder, back into the castle’s long corridor. Quiet. Still. Nowhere to go but forward. So I pressed on. Across the small candle-strewn cave. Into the rocky tunnel.
Stalagmites grew up from the floor like stone flowers, and it smelled of loam and fungus. I took three steps. Four. One more. The tunnel turned sharply left. Around the tight corner, pale fingers of light traced the rocky tunnel walls. And as I crept forward, I emerged inside a second cavern.
A massive one.
If the cave behind me was an antechamber, this was the ballroom, dimly lit by a dozen candles. But instead of twirling dancers in its center, there was a black lake.
I’d never seen anything like it: dark, still water... and a viscous black substance dripping from the ceiling above. A stone bridge crossed the dark pool, and on the far side—sitting upon an isolated rocky terrace at the back of the cavern—was a towering statue, carved into a massive chunk of stone.
A great winged beast. Dragon’s lair.
Ancient temple. The stuff of local fairy tales to scare children.
Only, it was real.
A steady flame flared from the statue’s mouth, casting its twisted shape in shadowed relief while illuminating the cavern ceiling above. The serpentlike body of the mythic monster was wrapped around a massive cross.
The Order of the Dragon’s symbol.
To the left of the statue, a natural shaft in the cavern wall let in a diagonal column of pale moonlight. It shone over the black lake’s oily surface, iridescent and still. A sludgy naphtha-like scent tainted the air.
I took a cautious step. No sign of people. No sounds. Only the drip of the black liquid into the dark lake. I fanned my flashlight to the rightmost wall of the cavern. There, cut into the rock, were three arched gates.
Not gates: prison cells. Three barred medieval dungeons.
My pulse rocketed. I raced to the first cell, footfalls echoing around the cavern walls, and peered into darkness. Empty. The bars were rusting badly, and the door to the cell was falling apart.
I tried the second cell. Rubble. A pile of skulls and a tangle of old bones. I couldn’t tell if they were human or animal. I didn’t want to know.
Last cell. I raced there and found more rubble. The back half was cloaked in darkness. But the bars on the gate were made from a different metal.
This dungeon door had been repaired.
“Hello?” I called out, shaking the door to test it. Locked.
A scrabbling noise made me jump. I gripped my flashlight harder, ready to fight or flee. There was something spread out on the floor. A coat? Someone was sleeping here.
A shadow moved. Then it stepped into moonlight, big and broad as a bear, only wearing khaki pants and rolled-up shirtsleeves.
Father.
24
RICHARD DAMN FOX.
Somehow he seemed bigger than he was the last time I’d seen him, weeks ago, when he’d abandoned me in the Pera Palace in Istanbul. Looked older, too. His overlong dark hair was streaked with a little more silver above his temples. And his big, bushy beard was grayer than I remembered. Was that possible? It matched the steely eyes that blinked at me now.
All this time. Everything I’d been through... Here he was now. It felt like a mirage. Like I’d wake up from this nightmare any second and I’d be back at the Pera Palace Hotel, wrapped up in fine linens and Turkish coffee wafting next to my bed.
“Daddy?” I said, my eyes welling with tears.
“Empress?” he answered in his deep, bottomless voice.
Images flooded my head. Of him teaching me how to write ciphers. How to ride a camel in the Egyptian desert. Him giving me a polished Corinthian helmet when I was eight and his big, happy laugh when it slipped down over my eyes. Him holding me in his lap and quieting my crying when Mother died, night after night after night...
My father. Easy to love, difficult to like. That’s what Mother always said.
I just hadn’t realized howmuchI loved him until that moment.
