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“I am rarely anything else where a bargain is concerned.” He folded his arms across his enormous chest and simply waited, the very picture of patience. It was only the tightness around his eyes that betrayed him, showing that this mattered to him more than he wished to say.

“My price for saving Alexandra is the girl. She is to come to me, to my fortress, to work in my household. Tell me you understand me, young king, and tell me that we have a deal. As time is ticking and not for me.” His eyes darted to Alexandra as if I were stupid enough not to know who he was referring to. I gritted my teeth.

“I can’t simply give her to you.” Anger boiled up the back of my throat, hot and grateful for somewhere to go. “She’s not a slave, Theron. She is not mine to hand over like coin across a table. She is a person, a free woman of my household and…” At this, he took a threatening step towards me, happy to go toe-to-toe with me to get his point across.

“I don’t care how you do it, nor what command you dress it in, King of Theïkós.” His voice never rose, and that was somehow worse than if he’d roared this dark command. “I don’t care what gold you offer her or what tale you tell her family. The girl is to be within my walls by the next moon cycle. That is my price. There is no other.”

“Why?” The question was out before I could stop it, and again, it almost seemed pointless, but I had to be sure.

“You don’t need to know why.” His head tilted. “Though you’d be a fool to ask, after what you just witnessed in this room, and you are no fool, Atlas.” Well, the use of my name was a nice touch, I would give him that, I thought dryly.

“Now. Do we have a deal, or do I turn on my heel and leave your queen to rot from the heart outward?” I flinched at that, the threat hanging between us.

I turned back toward the love of my life. The black creeping toward her throat, the thread between us guttering. And I thought of that girl’s terror, the way she’d sobbed, ‘please don’t hurt me,’ and how the part of me that was a king and not only a man recoiled.

I released a resounding sigh before asking, “Can you at least assure me that she’ll come to no harm?” This turned out to be the wrong thing to say to the Gorgon King, who I suspected had just found his own Anchor.

Theron snarled, his lip lifting, and his eyes flaring. “Careful, young king. You should know better than to insult one such as I.”

“Insult or not,” I said, holding his stare, “it is a word I will need to hear you give before I give you mine.”

For a long moment, I thought he might refuse. Then the fight went out of his shoulders, and when he spoke, it was quieter, and there was something underneath it I would likely think about for a long time afterwards.

“No harm will ever come to her by my hand, of that you can be certain.”

By his hand. I marked the shape of it, the careful edges of the vow. But I had no time to chase what was left unsaid, and we both knew it.

“I thought as much,” I said and looked past him to the bed. To the small, unmoving shape of her, and let out a long breath, and with it, the last of my resistance.

“Then you have my word. I’ll get you the maid.”

I watched the tension bleed visibly out of him, his shoulders dropping a fraction, as though he’d been braced for a blow that hadn’t landed.

“Good,” he said, the careless mask sliding neatly back into place. “Because had you said no, you’d have found yourself with another war on your hands. Instead, you’ve acquired an ally.” His gaze dropped once more to Alexandra. “Now. Take me to where she was found.”

I didn’t want to leave her again. Every instinct I owned screamed against it. Against putting even a single corridor between myself and that failing thread strung from her heart to mine. But the thread would gutter out entirely if I sat here, held her hand and let her die. So, I pressed my mouth to her forehead, settled the sheets back over her with hands that were not quite steady.

“Stay with her,” I told the two servants stationed at the door, and the weight in my voice sent them both rigid. “If anything changes. Fucking anything… You send for me before you so much as draw your next breath. Am I understood?” They both addressed me with a firm nod and a formal,

“Yes, my king.”

I turned and led the Gorgon King out of my chambers, Atlas and Lazaros stepping in behind us as we walked toward the cause of this fucking nightmare… down toward the darkness.

Once at the door, one I would soon seal up for good, the descent was as endless as it had been the first time. No one spoke. The only sound was the scrape of our boots on stone worn smooth by long-dead feet. And with every step, the dread coiled tighter in my gut. I stole a glance at Theron as we went, but whatever had stirred in him back in my bedchamber was gone now, sealed away without a trace. His expression had closed like a door, and I could read nothing in it at all.

At the bottom, the chamber waited exactly as we’d left it. The stone pedestal. The dark stain where her head had bled against the floor.

And the box.

That plain, dark, polished box lying open upon the pedestal, with nothing but an empty bed of velvet within.

I crossed the room out of old habit and stopped where she had lain, my hands curling into useless fists. It was worse, somehow, to stand in the place she’d been and find it empty. To know she was up above me in our bed, fading, while I stood in the darkness that had done this to her.

The others filed in behind me, silent. The weight of the room pressed against my chest until I could barely draw breath.

Theron, for his part, did not react at all. He stood just inside the doorway, surveying the chamber with narrowed eyes. In no hurry whatsoever to approach anything. Instead, he began to circle the room slowly, his gaze lingering on bare walls as though they were covered in writing only he could read.

His expression was unreadable, and it infuriated me all over again.