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That had seized my heart.

We might have stayed out there the whole morning had her stomach not chosen that moment to growl, loud and entirely without shame, into the quiet.

Alexandra pressed a hand to it, mortified, and I laughed outright.

“Come,” I said, taking her hand and tucking it into the crook of my arm. “Before you waste away on my watch and start an entirely new war. Let us find you something to eat.”

She fell into step beside me easily, flushed, happy and warm against my side. I led her back in through the eastern doors and into the cool of the castle, toward the kitchens. Entirely content in a way I had not been in longer than I could remember.

Which was, of course, precisely when she stopped.

We had reached a narrow stretch of corridor where a single plain door was set into the stone, unremarkable in every way, iron-banded and old. And Alexandra had simply…

Halted in front of it.

Her hand had slipped from my arm as she stood there, head tilted, staring at the thing with an expression I couldn’t read at all. As though some sound only she could hear was drifting up through the wood.

“What’s down there?” she asked. Quietly. Distantly.

“The cellars,” I replied with a slight frown marring my features.

It was true, but it wasn’t all that was down there. Which is why I didn’t tell her that those same worn stairs wound far deeper than any wine store. Down past the very foundations of the castle and to the old prison cells hewn into the bedrock where, for a thousand years, my house had kept the things it most wished the world to forget.

She blinked, and whatever had held her seemed to let go of her all at once. She gave a small, self-conscious laugh and shook her head, as if at her own foolishness.

“Ignore me,” she said. “I’m just hungry. Come on, feed me before I gnaw my own arm off.” And she walked on, tugging me with her toward the warm bread and wood-smoke smell drifting up the corridor, already laughing again at something else entirely.

But I didn’t move.

Not straight away.

Because I had been watching her face when she stilled before that door. And whatever had caught hold of her there, whatever had reached up out of the dark and quietly snagged her attention, it hadn’t looked to me like idle curiosity at all.

It had looked like something was calling her.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t work out what, so very far beneath my castle…

Might possibly need answering.

Alex

Avoice echoed somewhere in my mind, soft and far away, and I reluctantly surfaced from sleep, certain it couldn’t yet be morning.

My eyelids flickered. The tiredness sat behind them like an itch I couldn’t scratch, that bone-deep weariness that came of a day well spent and a night spent better still. So I knew without opening my eyes that it wasn’t yet time to rise. I couldn’t even be sure the voice had been real, or only the last echo of some dream already dissolving, gone the instant I tried to catch hold of it.

I rubbed my eyes and arched my back, chasing comfort, trying to sink back down into the land of nod. The movement pressed my bare skin flush against Atlas’s, and my body, the traitor, woke instantly and entirely, yearning toward him before my mind had finished the thought. I turned onto my side to face him, propped up on one elbow, and let myself watch him sleep.

It had been, by every measure, a perfect day.

I’d hit a bullseye. An actual, genuine bullseye, with Atlas’s arms wrapped around me and his voice low in my ear. I had been so absurdly proud of myself that I’d very nearly cried about it. There had been sunlight and laughter and Lazaros’s terrible jokes, and then there had been the evening, which had been better still.

Atlas had barely let me finish my supper.

I’d caught the look in his eye somewhere around the second course, that dark, patient, devastating heat, and the moment the meal was done he’d taken my hand and all but carried me back to our room. And what had followed had left me boneless and aching in all the very best ways. The pleasant soreness of it still hummed through me now, and I couldn’t help the small, smug smile that curved my mouth at the memory.

But it was what had come after that I kept turning over in my mind.

Because after, when we lay tangled and breathless in the dark, the candles guttering low, Atlas had done something rarer than any of it.