Page 156 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

“She’s a clever girl, isn’t she? Realizing so quickly that helping me means her mother won’t suffer any longer.” The Lady of Shadows runs her hand over the metal instruments on the table. The sound she makes between her teeth sets every sense on edge.“Honesty should be so simple. Yet it’s the one thing no one ever wants to give me.”

She selects a tool that looks like something a normal person would use to crack nuts.

My muscles lock, trying desperately to fight back from her reach, but my knives are laid out on the table beside the savage metal tools. I can’t get to them.

I can’t doanything.

I’m trapped.

Her fingers, impossibly strong, unclench my fist. “Right one or left one first?” She studies my hands, voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “You choose.”

I can’t answer her. It takes everything in me not to vomit.

You’re not trained to hold up under torture,Talon said to me the morning of the Test of Wisdom. The morning I was poisoned.That’s exactly what will happen if the Lady of Shadows ever sets her sights on you.

And I know—this is her.

The High Queen’s spymaster. The woman who slit the young girl Caitria’s throat in the Test of Cunning. The same one whose very name haunts the streets of this city. And I can’t keep from wondering whether this woman is the one who killed the first woman Cash loved, the one Wolf said had eyes just like mine. Whether she got the poison that killed her from Keeva—if Cash’s life has been intertwined with mine for far longer than I ever realized.

Even if Cash is on the throne now… who will hear me scream here?

Damp drips off the hewn rock of the walls, deeper and colderthan the dungeon cell I was in when the Whisperers first brought me to Castle Mount.

I hear no one—not even gardai—outside the iron bars.

“Who brought you to the castle?” The Lady of Shadows tightens the pincer over the first knuckle of my right pointer finger. “Because I know you aren’t the peasant we brought here for the Assay.” Her other hand strokes my hair, exactly where that girl in the dungeon had a streak of blond.

Terror surges through every part of me.

My jaw strains, but I won’t let the words out.

I won’t give them to her, no matter what it takes. I won’t betray Wolf, or the Whisperers.

Whatever magic is left in the Seven Wells belongs tous.

The spymaster’s purr crackles with barely contained glee as the pincer crunches down on my knuckle.

Agony bursts up my arm. I hear the crack inside my head, and taste vomit before she moves to the next knuckle and crushes that one too.

Aoife watches without a single word.

Betrayal cuts deep. Time becomes nothing but heartbeats, and my own screams.

The Lady of Shadows alternates her methods. She works in blows that whip my head back and send blood bursting across my tongue, sliding in questions just as my resolve starts to crack.

Where are the Whisperers hiding? How did I get out of the castle?

Who is leading the caoranachs?

Is the Martyr still alive?

Not one of the questions is about the High King lying dead in his bed.

My cheek splits open. My lips, too. The skin all down my hands and wrists mottles with deep purple and crimson where the pincers split my flesh. But I don’t give in. I don’t break.

Hope is the cruel edge of a blade on my heart.

It cuts again and again, each time deeper than the last.