“Come,” he rasps, wrapping his hand around my wrist and pulling me up, dragging me past cell after cell after cell.
Too many.
His steps thud with conviction. Mine do the opposite, stumbling along the floor in his wake.
I force myself to look into every cell. Force myself to see what I know will be branded upon my soul for the rest of eternity. Because whoever lorded over this burrow …
They favored children.
“Some grew an appetite for the sweet nectar of young blood,” Cainon mumbles, perhaps sensing the crevice of my thoughts.
More tears bud, stinging the backs of my eyes.
“And then the Unseelie discoveredAeshlianblood.” The words rip my stare forward. “So potent and packed full of light,” he continues, “that it brought forth a swell of power more catastrophic than anyone could have ever imagined.”
He stops before a small, circular arena scattered with moth-eaten pillows and blankets. A shaft of light pierces its center, illuminating a woman.
No clothes to maintain her dignity, even in death.
The line of fine thorns decorating her tapered ear glimmer in the stretch of sun like diamonds, casting the space in a confetti of color and light that does nothing to brighten the scene.
My thoughts shudder to a stop, knees give way, and I’m left hanging off the mast of Cainon’s arm like a spent sail, an itch flaring across the skin on my right shoulder.
The woman is held in place by a pronged, metal cuff that bites into the chewed flesh of her neck. A vision of Baze’s throat cuts into me—the gnarly twist of scars that looked as though the skin had shredded, then healed. Shredded, then healed.
I drag a shuddered breath, picturinghimin that heap on the ground.
Broken.
Lonely.
Naked.
Dead.
“They were hunted,” Cainon continues. “Kept as prized possessions. Fed their daily dose of daylight to keep their blood from blackening.”
My heart shatters into a million broken, bloody pieces.
You don’t know what it’s like out there, Orlaith ...
The words attack me over and over, and a small sound bubbles forth—blunt and hollow. My hand whips up, cupping my mouth, preventing it from morphing into the scream threatening to punch out of my chest.
I squeeze my eyes shut, tears slipping down my cheeks. “Why are you showing me this?”
I hear Cainon shift and open my eyes to see him crouched before me. I catch his icy stare as he grips me by the shoulders, shifting us both, blocking my sight of the corpse in a small act of mercy. “Because some believe not all the full-blooded Unseelie were wiped out in The Great Purge. That some survived.” His gaze narrows, eyes becoming hard flints. “Hiding in plain sight. Perhaps even in seats ofpower.”
I flinch from his daggered words, their fierce implication carving a jagged path to my soul.
“You think Rhordyn’s Unseelie.” My voice is a whisper, yet it thunders in my ears, battling with the sound of my blood—a pounding torrent through my veins.
The small stretch of silence that follows tells me everything I need to know.
“In all the years I’ve known him,” he says, voice dropping an octave, “yourHigh Masterhasn’t aged a day. If anything, he’s gotten bigger over the last two decades.Stronger.”
Like a shadowed ghost from my past, I seehimthrough my two-year-old eyes that night so many years ago. His face illuminated by the lick of writhing flames. His eyes wide as he looked upon me, perhaps seeing me for the open wound I was.
Am.
