That’s when we reach a set of steps.
They’re steep and I can’t see what they lead down to until we’re nearly at the bottom, and then my footsteps falter again.
Soft growls reach me, floating up through the air like a whisper from my past.
I’m suddenly transported back in time within my mind. The silver throne is once again pressed to my side. I’m desperately trying to hold Tamra and Gallium close, their young bodies trembling with fear as we listen to the approaching growls, the fierce snarls of a beast who would tear us apart and change our lives.
I stop right where I am, unable to descend, even though Thaden has moved ahead of me, and the light is a mere circle at my feet, illuminating the final two steps.
The growls sound again, but this time, they’re even softer, more plaintive somehow.
Thaden’s voice is quiet. Controlled. “How is she doing today?”
A woman’s voice replies. Not a voice I’m familiar with. But it’s equally gentle. “Maybe a little better. Precious thing, she caught a mouse but let it go instead of eating it.”
I find the courage to descend, my focus landing on Thaden first, taking in the tension around his mouth, the terrible vulnerability in his eyes.
Then I focus on the woman sitting on a chair in the far-left corner. She begins rising out of her seat but stops when she sees me. She has kind eyes and hair that might once have been auburn, but it’s mostly gray now.
Then my focus falls on my sister, who has retreated to the wall on the far left and watches me with an intensity that fills me with dread.
Finally, I turn to the right.
To the large cage filled with children’s toys and a soft bed and books that have had the corners chewed off them.
And then to a little girl with ink-black hair and sharp teeth, who watches me with bright green eyes as she slowly, very slowly, extends her black, metal claws.
She can’t be any more than two years old, if that.
I can barely breathe, my heart hammering in my chest and my left hand curling into an unwitting fist, seeking the hammer I didn’t bring with me. “Thaden… who is that?”
He steps between me and the cage, blocking my view of the little girl. “She’s my daughter.”
Chapter 34
The fear in Thaden’s eyes hits me hard.
So hard that the horrified cry that was rising to my lips vanishes instantly.
His chest rises and falls rapidly, and his voice is strained. “Do you remember the question I asked you in the wasteland before you came here?”
“What darkness would I not embrace,” I say, trying to breathe out my own fear and my confusion and my dread.
He nods urgently, and the terrible vulnerability in his expression only gets worse. “Her heart wasn’t working. When she was born. You can’t imagine, Asha. You can’t possibly know… To hold your baby daughter in your arms. To listen to her mother weeping. To have all this power at my fingertips and not be able to do anything—not a damn thing—to save her.”
He swipes at the tear trickling down his cheek, words tumbling from his mouth. “I made a choice. A split-second decision.”
He swallows hard, his throat visibly constricting. “Every other time I helped someone, I had time to plan, to design and then to construct what they needed, but even then, metal doesn’t grow, Asha. That boy out there with the metal foot—he’ll needa new, bigger one soon. Which will be easy enough. Feet and hands and joints must function, but a heart?” The tension in his face only increases. “A heart must live.”
My question is a bare whisper, barely an exhaled breath. “What did you do?”
How did he turn his daughter into a wolf?
“Milena had given me my father’s first prototype,” he says. “The one she stole from him when she fled with me.”
I know about that device. Erik told me about it. Malak had confessed to him the details of his sister’s disappearance. Malak had discovered that his prototype device had been missing—the one he eventually perfected and used on Erik. When he’d gone looking for his sister, believing she had taken it, he’d discovered that she’d fled the city.
Malak never knew that she’d taken his son, too.
