“Aria, no,” Sarah pleads, her voice suddenly sharp with fear. “You don’t understand what you’re walking into. That house isn’t a home. It’s a tomb with a beautiful view. A man like DimitriKostas doesn’t have a family; he has a court. And your mother just won the crown. They will devour you.”
“I need a reason to get past the gates,” I say, my voice flat, ignoring her warning. “A reason she can’t refuse.”
I hear her take a shaky breath. She knows she can’t stop me. “When she left, she took everything. Including your grandmother’s jewelry. There was a silver locket, oval-shaped, with a rose etched on the front. It has your baby picture and one of Jade’s. It was yours. She can’t deny you the right to claim it.”
The locket. A piece of my past, a key to my future. A perfect excuse, a righteous claim.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Aria, be careful,” she says, her voice thick with unshed tears. “Remember who you are.”
I hang up the phone.Remember who you are.The advice is twenty years too late. I look at my reflection in the dark screen of the phone. A stranger stares back.
I am the daughter of a queen of ashes. I am the stepdaughter of a monster. I am the obsession of a man who collects ghosts.
I’m no longer the girl who ran from the car crash. I’m the woman who is walking back into the fire.
I pick up the wooden box from the bed. It is my burden and my blade. Cassian thinks I am a ghost, hiding somewhere in his city, clutching my stolen treasures. He is waiting for me to make a mistake. He is waiting for me to run.
He’s looking in the wrong direction.
The wraith doesn’t run from the fire. She walks through it. It’s time to go home.
Forty Five
Aria
Themotelroomisa coffin I have rented for a few hours. I leave it without a backward glance. I take a taxi, a deliberate, calculated risk. A digital breadcrumb. I want him to know I am not hiding. I want him to know I am moving. Let the hunter track his prey. Let him think he knows the direction I am running.
The taxi ascends into the hills, leaving the grit of the city behind for the sterile, manicured perfection of the obscenelywealthy. We arrive at a set of iron gates that look like they were forged to guard the entrance to hell. Beyond them, the Kostas mansion sits on the hillside, a sprawling beast of glass and white stone. It is not a home. It is a monument to power, cold and perfect and dead. A graveyard with a pulse.
I pay the driver, the wooden box clutched in my arm. He looks from the house to me, his eyes wide. He sees a ghost holding a wooden box, arriving at a palace she has no right to be at. He is right.
I walk to the intercom. My heart is not pounding. It is still. A cold, hard stone in my chest. I press the button.
A clipped, professional voice answers. "Yes?"
"My name is Aria Miller," I say, my voice as cold and clear as the winter air. "I'm here to see Caroline Kostas. I'm here to collect what she has stolen."
The silence is a weapon, meant to intimidate. I do not flinch. After a moment a loud buzz echoes, and the gates begin to swing inward. They are letting me in.
The fool, the child, the ghost girl. They think they are granting me an audience. They have no idea I am the one who has called the meeting.
A man in a black suit, with an earpiece and the dead eyes of a loyal soldier meets me at the front door and escorts me inside the house, a cavern of white marble and cold air. The silence is absolute, the kind of quiet that costs millions of dollars. The few staff I see are well-paid ghosts, flitting through the halls without making a sound.
My mother is waiting in the center of a vast, sunken living room with a wall of glass that overlooks the city. She is perfect. Not a blonde hair out of place, dressed in a cream-colored cashmere dress that probably costs more than my entire life's rent. She is a porcelain doll filled with razors.
"Aria," she says, her voice smooth and disappointed, as if I am a stain on her white carpet. "This is not a good time."
"Grief is rarely convenient," I say, stopping twenty feet from her. I do not approach her as a daughter. I approach her as an adversary.
Behind her, a man emerges from the shadows of a hallway. Dimitri Kostas. He is older, his hair a distinguished silver but he has the same brutal frame as his son, wrapped in a perfect, tailored suit. His eyes are not like Cassian's. Cassian's are a storm. Dimitri's are black holes, devoid of all light and warmth.
"I believe you have something of mine," I say to my mother, my voice echoing in the cavernous room. "My grandmother's locket."
Caroline waves a dismissive hand. "Don't be absurd. I'll have someone find it and send it to you."
"No," I say. "I'll take it now."
