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I wanted to shout back at him, yell at him, and start a fight so that I could hold what was coming at bay, but that wouldn’t work. The only thing to do now was to just survive it.

The woman who joined me was not a daoire—or at least she hadn’t been altered as heavily as the rest of us in the warrens. Only the tips of her ears and her eyes gave anything away. Her eyes were moons in a sea of white, pockmarked and glowing like a silver moon hanging amid the clouds. I watched her as she moved around the room, graceful as a cat on grass.

“You should come out of that before the water gets cold.”

Her voice was a soft mist creeping along a deep winter’s night-swallowed garden.

When she began to dress me, she hummed softly, her touch cool and refreshing after the heat of the bath. “I’m Luna.”

“Of course you are.” Creativity in naming their daora was not the strong suit of the Fae. “I’m Cricket.”

“Like the bug?”

I chuckled. “Yes, like the bug.”

She scrunched up her nose as she did up the laces of the bodice of a green gown. “Are you going to ask His Majesty for a new name?”

I tilted my head to catch her moonlit gaze. “I didn’t know that was an option. Wouldn’t that get confusing?”

She shrugged, a simple roll of her shoulder. “Names we share with others are like underclothes here. Today, I am Luna. Tomorrow, I might be Star. The day after that, I could be Frost. Names matter little if they are just what you are called.”

I hummed in thought as I considered her words. “No. I don’t think I will. It has meaning to me.”

“Then, hold on to it tight. Don’t let them take it away from you. They’ll take everything else.”

When she finished braiding my hair, we both sighed, and I squared my shoulders.

“Before you go, Cricket, you should know that the King enjoys the hunt. If you can engage him in a game, do it.”

She was shooing me away before I could ask her what she meant. And I didn’t have a chance to consider it further, as I was being marched down another hallway, this one lavishly adorned.

The kin’tha followed at my ankle, long tail swishing with annoyance at having to dodge the long skirt of the gown. The Raven was at my other side, his palm resting on the pommel of his sword and his eyes locked ahead of us. He said nothing, and I felt like I was marching in my own funeral procession.

I secretly pressed my thumb into the aching wound at my thigh, trying to keep my heart from racing out of my throat.

When we stopped before an intricately carved set of double doors, he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. It was the same soft exhale he had made with the Laundress, not a breath of resignation so much as one of preparation but one to settle his body. I could imagine him with a gun pressed to his shoulder making the same exhale.

It was one I had made throughout my life. It was what calmed me whenever I walked into one of the foster homes I lived in. I knew that, no matter where I was, it would always be the same. It would be the feeling of needing to wash away my expectations and hope to return to an empty state, devoid of any emotion. There was no other way to survive a foster home but to be completely without any sort of need or desire. Foster homes were not the places you went to be held, nurtured, or to flourish. It was where you went when there was no other sanctuary for you, and it was your last chance at survival.

Many kids I had brushed with turned to the streets instead of the revolving door of deprivation. There were some homes out there that were not like that, where some foster parents were in it for all the right reasons. I had encountered only two of them in eighteen years, but I am sure there had to be more. If my shit luck let me encounter a pair of them, then there had to be more than that.

But those types of foster parents were the fairy tales we foster kids told ourselves at night to help us sleep. They were the fairy godmother that swept in to kiss your scraped knee when the cut was bone deep and resided somewhere between your stomach and that hunk of stone you’d let collect in your chest.

I imagined they were the El Dorado of parents. Instead of throwing yourself against the brick wall every few months to crack your skull open against the hopelessness, it was easier to make your own family on the streets. I understood them. I understood on a cellular level what it was like to need to find something stable. We all craved that, especially those of us who were in and out of the foster system.

I felt bad for the kids yanked between hope and the system to stay with family members. I had never had the same experience. According to my file, I had been abandoned at birth, but I had seen the haunted, wide-eyed stares of the kids who were back in the system when they had just spent two weeks at a family member’s house. The shell shock was one that I didn’t wish even on the prick standing next to me. To have that ripped away from you was true evil.

I had brushed with true evil, so whatever was behind the carved oak doors, I could deal with, too.

We were both stalling, staring at the intricate woodland scene that had been painstakingly etched into the doors. We had to move forward eventually, though. We couldn’t stand here and hope to grow moss before someone noticed us.

I looked up to him and watched as the muscle at the back of his jaw ticked in time to the slamming of my heartbeat. We both took two more deep breaths and then he slapped his massive hand against the wood and pushed it open.

Chapter 10

Beyond the doors was an entire world of its own. We entered a sitting room of sorts that split the space down the center. On the far wall was another massive stained-glass window. A lavish rug bisected the space, keeping the chill of the bare stone floors off the feet of anyone who had the pleasure of curling up in one of the brocade-covered sofas and settees. On either side of the room was another enormous door carved as lavishly as the one The Raven was quietly shutting behind me.

We were alone save for a massive shaggy dog lying in a pool of brilliant cobalt light piercing the window. The kin’tha made a sound I could only interpret as disappointment and, with a swish of its tail, found a spot next to the dog.