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“I have no use for gold, little king. I have outlasted every hoard ever counted, and every king who died counting it.” The light in his eyes flickered like something feeding. “What I take is a simple debt. A thing owed, held, and kept, and called due at the hour of my choosing, and not a moment before. And the debt of a king, paid at the moment I have need of it, is worth more than all the treasure in either your world or mine.” He let that hang in the cold. “You will owe me. The when, and the what, shall be mine to name.”

I didn’t hesitate, even if it meant selling my soul, I would.

“Anything,” I said, as I didn’t even have to think for a single second. I looked at her, gray and fading on his monstrous bed, and there was no price in any world I would not have paid. “Name it, whenever you choose whatever it may be. Just save her.”

“Oh,” he said, his voice thick, and turned his glowing eyes back down to the dying woman between us. “Saving her will be the easy part.” He reached out and laid two cold fingers against her brow before adding,

“Finding her in her nightmares, will not.”

When I came to, I questioned what had happened. Because one second, I had been with Riley, and the next, I was being ripped away from him. Small elements of it all started to snake its way back into my consciousness. I was now on my knees, the cold dirt digging into my flesh. But more than that, my arms were dragged and stretched out at my sides, held there with chains at my wrists.

My first instincts kicked in at this as I yanked at them, making them rattle mockingly. I didn’t remember being put here. But then again, I didn’t remember much of anything after being snatched away from Riley. Only the foolish belief that Atlas had saved me before the truth hit me like I had been struck with a fist.

Because it had never been Atlas.

I knew that the moment that shared face had melted into something cruel and villainous. And now this… the cold stone beneath me and the iron biting into my wrists. My arms stretched out and pinned to the ground, keeping me stretched out like some kind of sacrifice. The chains kept me kneeling half-bowed, like a prisoner at a block, ready for beheading.

And then there was the burning.

It started as a prickle, then quickly became an inferno. Fire racing up my arms, blazing along every scar I carried. I screamed as the twin marks at my wrists, the one behind my ear, the ones high on the insides of my thighs all lit up, the glow seen beneath the white silk of my robe. But then there was indescribable agony as it felt like my skin was melting from my body. And worst of all, worst by far, was the great ruined scar across my back, where the blowtorch had once burned clean through the marking. The one no healing had ever quite been able to smooth away. It burned hottest of all. It burned like it was happening all over again.

They were a curse lashed down from some infernal place that had chosen me to bear them above all others. Every place the Rift had ever written itself into my skin, every key it had carved into me the day it tore the world open, lit up at once like coals being breathed back to life.

“Wh…what’s… happen…ing?” I slurred, to no one but the dark. My head hung too heavily on my neck. “What… what is this…”

And then I heard the laughter.

It came from somewhere ahead of me, low, dark, and edged with nothing but malice. A sound void of even a shred of humanity. A threat heavy enough that I dragged my chin up off my chest by sheer cold dread alone.

And that’s when I saw it…

The Rift.

It rose before me, endless and as startling as the first time I ever saw it up this close. The time with Atlas at my back, forcing me to make the connection, to finally seek the answer he had been searching for… His one and only way home.

But now it was different. The near-translucent wave of it, tall and shimmering and impossible, standing exactly as it had stood the day Aster and I forced our way through it. On a quiet forest trail, a whole world away.

The buzz of it in the air. The static that had wanted to cling to my skin. This was the place… the exact place where we had crossed through.

Except it wasn’t.

Not truly.

Because the Rift I remembered had been a thing of pale, near-translucent light, and this was its dark mirror. A shadowed surface, the shimmer now murky and wrong. Its rippling veil, like black water. And through it, faint and gray and impossibly far, I could see the other side.

My side.

My world.

A forest, the quiet trail winding away between the dark trees, the very path Aster and I had taken to reach the Rift. Now still and empty, but anything but ordinary. Not when seen from the other side like this.

I was still staring at it, that small, impossible piece of home. It was so near and yet so far out of reach.

Something moved at the edge of my vision. A shadow peeled itself away from the dark. It stepped between me and the veil, blotting out the trees, the trail, the whole of my world, before lowering slowly into a crouch in front of me.

Demetrios.

I had seen his face before, in the visions, twisted and far away, but never like this. Never an arm’s length from my own. And now that he was close, now that I had no choice but to look, I could see all the small and terrible ways he was wrong.