I turn around and stare at her.
I know that sweet scent.
Blood thunders in my ears. It’s one thing to hallucinate my former ward’s fragrance on the wind, a ghost who is tormenting me from beyond death. It’s another thing to perceive it on another person. Slowly, I approach Isavelle. Her bodyguards are distracted while she drinks from a fountain. In a trance, I reach out and lift a tress of her hair to my nose.
There’s a roar and a thunder of footsteps behind me. Zabriel seizes me and pulls me around to face him, fury blazing in his red eyes. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Does he really suppose that I have designs on his Omega? The idea is so preposterous that I want to laugh, but nothing about this is funny. I’ve touched the king’s Omega. Me, who believes in stringent protocol at all times. Except when I gathered a distraught Queen Magritte into my arms and carried her up to the castle. Except when I spent my rut with Zenevieve under the shelter of my dragon’s wing while a storm raged outside. Acting without thinking is a trap I keep falling into.
I snarl something at Zabriel, and he punches me in the face. He demands I fight him. He threatens to take Nilak from me if I don’t, and I see his hateful father looking at me through his eyes.
We fight, and the first time in our lives, Zabriel is able to best me. I have been neglecting my training. I haven’t sparred in weeks. As I pick myself up out of the dust, he demands to know if I covet his mate’s scent.
His mate? He thinks I want his mate? My insides contort with disgust. “Her scent isnothingto me. I thought—I thought I could smell—”
“What? What did you think you could smell onmy mate?”
She was here.
She washere.
My heart is beating so fast that I think it’s going to burst out of my chest. Sweat is pouring down my back. Zenevieve is so close I can taste her. Isavelle is staring at me in shock and a little fear. The suggestion that I could covet her or another woman is preposterous. There is no other woman.
I grip my head with both hands, my fingers digging into my scalp.There is no other woman but Zenevieve.This is what I have been wanting to believe for so long, but why only now, five hundred years later, can I believe it? Now that it’s too late. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
Zabriel has no sympathy for me. I pull myself together, apologize, and stagger away from him.
It’s a cold winter in Lenhale. Every snowflake that lands on Nilak’s back is a memory of Zenevieve and the day up on that mountain when she was so briefly mine. Every snowflake is painful. As the days pass, there are strange happenings afoot, reminding me again that this is not the Maledin of old.
Half of Lady Isavelle’s village is slaughtered, impaled on magical vines. A city woman called Odanna stole a wyvern and lured her there, which means she’s not a city woman at all, but a Brethren spy. We search for the girl, but we find no sign of her. Or rather, I don’t. The wingrunners catch Odanna first.
The first I know that something’s gravely wrong is when I pass a wingrunner and he is covered in Zenevieve’s scent. It’s unmistakable this time. Not a dream. Not a ghost. It’sher.
I seize the Beta by the lapels of his uniform and yank him to me. “Where is she? I know you have been near her. I know you have touched her. Tell me where Zenevieve is. Tell me why you’ve touched her.”
“Are y-you talking about the s-spy, dragonmaster?” he asks, shocked that my enraged face is suddenly an inch from his.
“The spy? Don’t be fucking stupid.Where is Zenevieve?” My Alpha roar erupts up my throat and shakes the air around us.
“The prisoner was taken to the Great Hall, dragonmaster,” he gasps, because I have given him no choice but to answer.
Prisoner. She’s a prisoner? I release the man and run. I don’t understand how this can be happening, but that is Zenevieve’s scent I can smell. She’s alive. She’shere. Perhaps the gods have not forsaken us after all.
As I fight my way through the crowd, I hear her voice and nearly fall to my knees in relief and happiness, but she’s speaking in a strange monotone.
“…didn’t like Lady Isavelle. She told me she was having visions, and so I waited until she was alone with her dragon and gave her a happy vision of her family returning home.”
Zenevieve is unemotional and she’s saying impossible things. She can’t give visions to anyone. She never practiced dragon magic, and she’s not a witch.
I can’t see her, but I can see Zabriel on his throne, gripping the golden arms of the chair, and his red eyes are bright with fury as he glares at a kneeling figure just out of sight. Lady Isavelle is at his side, and his rutting scent fills the Great Hall.
“You have been working with the Brethren, and you will be punished as a traitor to Maledin,” he snarls.
“No!” I shout, pushing forward. I break through the crowd and finally see her, but it’s not Zenevieve as I knew her. She has not looked this way since she was fifteen. Her caramel hair hangs in strings and her hazel eyes are dull. Gone is any sign that she once bonded with Minta. Gone is any sign that she knows my voice. She doesn’t look up at me. She doesn’t seem to recognize anyone around her.
I turn to the king. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Please don’t hurt her.”
But Zabriel’s rut and his fear for his mate make him crave vengeance. He questions Zenevieve while she answers him in monosyllables, clearly out of her mind from some unknown trauma, but Zabriel doesn’t seem to see it, and the king is on the verge of ordering her execution.
