The dungeons smell of rot and damp earth. Emmett is so tall, he must duck as we navigate the dark, narrow passages.
His breathing is ragged, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides. I run a finger over his white knuckles and realize he probably hasn’t been down here since he himself was a prisoner.
“Are you all right?” I ask him. “I can do this on my own if you need me to.”
He grits his teeth and shakes his head. “I’ll be fine.” Then he glances back to the sliver of light behind us, marking the entrance. “Did you know they threw me down those stairs?” he asks softly.
“I’ll kill them all for you,” I whisper, surprised to find I mean it. Bram coming to my room in a glamour, touching me like his right to my body was inherent, has filled me with an inferno’s worth of rage. My anger is no longer some simmering thing I can live with.
Emmett shakes his head. “No. You don’t need to kill them all, you only need to deal with the one.”
Our footsteps squelch through the damp earth until we finally reach the last cell. In the deepest, darkest bowels of the prison, she is illuminated by only a single, dim faerielight.
“Ivy Benton.” Her voice is croaky with disuse. She looks to my left and laughs. “And Emmett De Vere. My, you two are predictable.”
I have no time for small talk or her tricks. “This ends tonight. You need to take us back to England.”
“That sounds rather difficult given my current predicament.” She arches a perfect brow and waves her thin hand toward the bars of her cell. Without the trappings of her court gowns or bejeweled tiaras, she looks even younger than usual. Her flawless skin is wan and her dark hair hangs limp around her shoulders. Her doe eyes might read as childlike if not for the fathomless darkness within them.
“No more talking in circles,” I declare. “We don’t have the time.”
I pull Ferrinus from my cloak and hold it up to the dim faerielight. She squints her eyes and then goes still. “Where did you get that?” she asks, a quiver in her voice betraying a crack in her armor.
“I will use it to kill you if you don’t take me and Emmett back to England this very moment and lock the door behind you. You locked it four hundred years ago. I know you know how.”
“Those are my options?” she asks, her voice steady. “Take you and the boy home or die?”
“And lock the door. But yes.”
She sizes me up with her fathomless, dark eyes. “What about your sister? Your friends? Weren’t you all thick as thieves?”
I place my hands on my hips and swallow the rising nausea. “You know nothing of love, so I won’t waste time speaking of it to you.”
Mor tilts her face, like a bird of prey examining a mouse. “Is that what you think? You know, you never asked me why I sent Lydia here the first time. I kept waiting for you to question me, but perhaps you’re less clever than I’d hoped.”
I can’t help myself; I take her bait. “Why, then? If you’re so eager to tell me.”
“I may have shut the door between our worlds, but I never lost sight of who I was, or where I truly belonged. I might have found the mass torture of humans distasteful during my reign, but I understood that it served an important function in keeping the court sated. Do you think Lydia is the only misguided youth I sent to the Otherworld? There were hundreds just like her, begging for escape, and to some of them, I granted it. Every few years, I would pass a human through the door as a show of goodwill to the fae court. I believed my former husband was still ruling and I thought it a gesture of diplomacy. I didn’t realize Bram had killed him long ago.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Queen Mor takes a sharp breath. “So that you understand where my loyalties will always lie.”
I’m counting on that.
“Only Lydia wasn’t supposed to come back to England. You Benton sisters ruined everything.”
“Shouldn’t you have known then that something was wrong?”
“I thought my ex-husband had sent her home. He did that from time to time, back when he was still living. As always, my love for my son blinded me to his true nature,” she says.
At the thought of Lydia, a stab of pain shoots through my chest. We’ve failed each other in so many ways, but I have to believe I’m doing right by her now.
“Bram has gone mad, or maybe he was mad to begin with. But he’s found Emmett and me out and he’s going to kill at least one of us. We need to go, quickly, before we are discovered.”
Queen Mor pushes herself up off the ground. In her dirty white chemise, threadbare blanket over her shoulders, she looks like a phantom.
Her black eyes rake over Emmett. “I always told you your soft heart was going to be the death of you, Emmett De Vere. You’re so like your father.”
