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From out in the corridor came the sound of her meeting two larger shapes. A startled male grunt, a low word of apology that was not hers, and then Aster and Lazaros stepped into the open doorway. Both of them turned to look back the way the girl had bolted.

“What in all the gods’ names was wrong with her?” Aster asked, staring down the corridor.

Lazaros frowned after her, too. “That was the new girl, Thalia.”

The name landed in the room like a bolt of lightning, and I watched it reach Theron.

“Thalia,” he repeated, almost too quietly to hear. And then, softer still, like something said in a language he’d only just remembered he knew, “Little flower.”

I turned to him. “What did you say?” I hissed the second I heard the same endearment our father had for our mother, spoken by a very different king.

Of course, he didn’t answer me because why would he? He was a law unto himself.

“Show me,” he said instead, now granting me his focus once more. And just like that, the strange charge in the air was gone, and the only thing left in the room was her.

My girl.

She lay on the bed where I had settled her, small and wrong against the dark sheets. This was the bed she’d cursed me in, laughed with me in, and slept in, with one cold foot deliberately pressed to my shin. And in it, she had never once looked like this.

Diminished.

Grayed out at the edges. Like a fire banked down so low you had to lean close to be sure it still burned. My fierce, impossible woman, who I knew would make a formidable queen. Who knew how to cut me down with her tongue, used like a weapon of steel. Yet now the only sound she made was the thin, struggling rasp of her breathing. I would have given ten years of my life for her to open her eyes, and another ten for her to tell me I was fussing.

I would have given them all to save her from this curse.

Theron approached the bed with a stillness I didn’t like, and I forced myself not to step between them. I drew back the fabric at her chest, trying to save enough of her modesty as I could, and the breath went out of all of us at once.

The black veins were now worse. Far worse than they had been in the dark below. They spread outward from her heart like cracks splintering through ice, dark and branching out. Unnatural beneath her skin, reaching now toward her collarbone, her shoulder, the soft hollow of her throat. Her flesh was cold to look at and colder to touch yet sweat ran from her in a steady sheen. It was as if her body were burning and freezing in the same breath.

“Fuck,” I growled, and Aster and Lazaros echoed it under their breath behind me.

Theron’s expression hardened to something I had never expected to witness on a man like him when faced with another king’s problem. A curse left him on barely a whisper, in a tongue I didn’t know, and for a moment, the careless mask slipped, and I saw something older underneath.

Then it was gone.

“This was not done by any hand,” he said. “Whatever took root in her was put there to spread… Slowly… Cruelly.” His jaw tightened before he turned to me and said, “We need to know what came out of that box, and we need to know where it has gone. The chamber she was found in will remember more than what we can work out here. I will help, but…” he paused and looked back at the door.

And there it was.

The reckoning, circling back around the way it always did with him. I straightened, my jaw tight, every word of my own suspicions rising up to meet the moment. Because I had been right, it was now time to bargain with the Gorgon King.

“Both of you, wait outside for us,” I said, nodding to my brother and Aster, letting them know that this was one conversation that needed no interference.

“Nothing you do comes without a price, Theron. So don’t waste my time and just name it.” My voice came out hard as soon as the door had closed. “What is it you want, to save her?”

Something shifted in his face. The same thing I’d seen when he tasted the girl’s blood. He glanced, just once more, toward the open door where the girl named Thalia had fled.

He said the words I dreaded to hear.

“Her,” he stated firmly.

His gaze firmly set on the door, eyes glowing with intensity before snaking back to mine and telling me, once and for all, what the life of my Queen would cost me…

“I want the maid.”

Istared at him before closing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose in frustration.

“You can’t be serious,” I muttered, although I wasn’t sure, as his request didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Not after the scene I had witnessed between them.