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Even if she sometimes wished she couldn’t.

Even if she wished she could banish the thoughts of him entirely. They hurt more than any cut or slice or mark Malakar inflicted upon her here. Hurt more than the agony that had scored down her back when her wings were cut away.

Her solimaeus was out there somewhere—her very heart walking around outside her body.

The memory of all the things Elyria didn’t say, all the things she failed to tell him in the end, haunted her.

Was he searching for her? Was he coming for her?

She hoped he wasn’t.

She knew better.

Knew he was probably out there at that very moment, searching. Trying to figure out which dark quarter of hell Malakar had dragged her off to. Trying to find his way home to her.

The thought should have brought Elyria comfort.

It brought only fear.

Because while the runes and sanguinagi spells kept her magic dampened to barely more than a whisper, and while it kept her shadows still and silent, it did no such thing to Malakar’s.

The dark sorcerer reincarnate was just as powerful in this life as he had been in the last, save perhaps for that last sliver of shadow still wrapped up in Elyria. But even without that, he was strong enough. That much had been made clear in Seastone, when he sucked her away. And Elyria didn’t care much when he directed that power at her. Didn’t care when he made her bleed. Made her cry out.

But under every cut, every slice, was the whispered promise and spoken threat that he would eventually turn his attention back toward them. The ones she had been willing to sacrifice everything to protect. The fear was paralyzing—the thought that he would find out exactly who they all were and, worse, who they were to her.

That he would make them pay for her failure.

Did he know already? Did he have people out there looking for them? Was that what his legions of cultists were up to outside the walls of this prison?

Every time the door to Malakar’s study swung open, Elyria held her breath, wondering if today would be the day when she would find someone she loved waiting inside.

And she wouldn’t be able to do a stars-damned thing about it.

She was disconnected from the wild magic that normally shook through her veins—utterly cut off from the threads of life that wove through the natural world as long as she remained locked up in this place. And as for her shadows . . . They were little more than a whisper now. She couldn’t conjure a single sparrow, couldn’t sense Sid. Her shadows were like an entity all their own in here—they still lived within Elyria but were beholden to Malakar’s whims over her own.

Occasionally, a few wisps of darkness would leak from her fingertips, winding around her wrists and up her arms like they were trying to apologize.

Like they were sorry Malakar kept them, at best, suppressed and, at worst, under his control.

Like they were sorry that they couldn’t fight back.

But Elyria didn’t care about fighting anymore.

With each day that passed in this gilded prison, she found she cared less and less about anything at all. She’d lie on her mattress and stare up at the canopy of her four-poster bed or sit in the chair by the blacked-out, barred-in window, eyes tracing the patterns on the tapestries that decorated the walls of her bedroom. She’d read and reread the paltry selection of books she had been provided—stupid human fairy tales and thoroughly biased historical accounts of the War of Two Realms—if for no other reason than to stave off the threatening madness she could feel creeping around the edges of her mind.

And she would wait to be called again.

Which was precisely how she found herself standing before a disapproving-looking Malakar once more.

His thin lips pressed together into an even thinner line as the cultist attendant ushered Elyria farther into the study. The same smooth gray stone lined the walls, the same flickering torches dotted them, casting an ominous glow over the long wooden table that stretched across the center of the room.

“Here she is, mi sanguinexos,” said the girl.

Elyria did her best to suppress a snort at the designation. The blood king indeed.

Alas, she had not been particularly adept at hiding her reactions even before weeks of will-weakening experimentation, and she regretted that fact before the huff of breath had even left her nostrils.

Malakar’s dark eyes narrowed. He snapped his fingers, and Elyria lurched forward as though he had grabbed the shadows in her chest by the fistful and yanked.