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My mouth flopped open, trying to make excuses, trying to tell them what had happened, trying to explain the situation. But nothing came out. Not even a peep slid past my lips as two strangers picked me up from the floor and clamped me in bruising grips.

“Call the Bandrui!” someone shouted from the antechamber.

My eyes never left The Raven. I pleaded with him. I begged him silently to save me. To listen to me. To help me. I begged him with every bit of my soul to do something.

I wasn’t responsible for this.

I need him to know. It broke me that the coldness I had seen in him was frosting over his face and shutting me out. No longer were there soft, teasing, dangerous smiles. No longer were there any innuendos and sly words. There was no more brushing of black leather gloves against my hand. There was only ice.

The evergreens in his eyes had claimed winter as their companion, and as I was dragged past him, his head followed me, but no kindness could be found within the depths of his green gaze.

“Take her to the Maw,” he ordered. The two men holding me paused and looked from me to him as if asking him if he was sure. “Do as I say. I will secure the King, and when the Bandrui is here and tending to him, I will relieve you of your watch. No one speaks to her. No one sees her. No one goes in. Only me. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain. Take her to the Maw, secure the prisoner, and guard her. No in, no out,” snapped the one to my right.

He nodded crisply to them, and as the last three beads of brass stars tumbled from my bloody palm, his gaze finally broke from mine, and he followed them down to the floor.

The guards tried to be gentle as they dragged me out, I could tell. They could have easily whipped my legs about as they pulled me bodily through the castle in full view of every courtier and human present. They could have dropped me a few times. They could have accidentally let me fall down the stairs. They did not, though. And as we took corridor after corridor in silence, into the belly of the palace I had never seen before, I knew that this was the last time I would see any of it.

I had been a fool. The Oaken Rose had played me as well as I had played anyone else in my life outside of this place. She had known my weakness, and she had known that I needed help. She had banked on the fact I wouldn’t remember her from the throne room. She had noted that I was too distracted by The Raven. Add that to having my brain beaten in by her brother-lover, and it was all but certain that I’d have forgotten her. She had played on it all along.

Was she involved with the assassination? Had she planned it all from the very start?

I tried to focus on unpicking the webs around me, tried to see where each little string led off to, but I couldn’t. All I could focus on was the memory of the light dulling from green eyes as cold, uncaring detachment took them away from me. I could only see the way the relief at seeing me whole and unharmed fled his face and was replaced with the venom of a thousand spiders scurrying over him.

Had I guessed wrong? In the throne room that day, I could have sworn that there was an old animosity between them. Had I seen it wrong? Was it just a strange male friendship that I didn’t really have the map of? No. I had seen it true. I had seen it. And yet he had gone icy and hateful when he saw the Ard Rí dying. Perhaps that had been the edge of his soft spot for me and the limits of his hate for the bastard.

Would he even care that it hadn’t been me?

The warmth of the palace melted away to bare, damp rock as I was taken down below. This staircase was different from the one to the warrens. Unlike that, this was lit only by spitting torches every twenty feet, the darkness so complete that between the flames was a void, where I could see nothing but the faint orange flicker in the distance. The air was cold, stagnant and left a film on my tongue that tasted like rot and something slightly metallic. The pitch of the stairs was wrong, too. This one was sharp, angling into the dark and spiraling toward a destination that, if the entrance was any indication, would be just as dreadful as I had thought the warrens were. We pitched into the black far longer, too, and would have passed the warrens four times over had we taken those stairs.

I did not want to know what lurked in the deep dark places of a Fae palace, yet I had no choice. I was going to find out whether I liked it or not. And if the silence of my two escorts were any indication, they didn’t either. They had been chatting quietly, as if to push away thoughts of what they had seen before we turned down into the darkness, but they were silent as the grave.

The only thing that shattered that silence was old, rusted keys clanking against each other, the screaming whine of a lock and hinge giving way, then a stomach-churning, grinding of rock breaking itself against another. The air around me crackled with something electric and then it was gone as I was tossed into the black.

Hands, knees, and one shoulder scraped painfully as I tumbled across something wet, sticky, and putrid. No light was struck, no illumination breaking the ink around me, even after the rocks ground against themselves and the lock was slammed shut on the door.

There I sat, panic flowing over me, in the dark. I could make out nothing around me, not even vague shapes in the endless umbra. It was as if this was where light went to die and left no corpse behind to free the prisoners from its death throes.

I wanted to rise, wanted to push up and feel around for the edges of my new cage, but I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t want to know what lurked in the caliginous gloom. I had seen spiders burst from a wound as if from their mother’s egg sack, their venom leaking into the King’s back. If that was a death worthy of a King, I didn’t want to know what horrors they would deem worthy of the one who had assassinated him.

With nothing to look at, nothing to mark the passage of time at all, it felt like weeks had gone by before I heard someone coming. How long had it been? Had they left me in the dark? The Raven had shown me he could be cruel, but was he truly this cruel?

“Rise.”

It sounded like him. But with no visual aid to tell me if it was or not, my heart began racing like I swam deep in the ocean and a shark was hurtling toward me.

I obeyed, on shaky legs, my breath catching in my throat as fear washed through me. “I didn’t—”

“Silence.” This voice was sharp, commanding. It was a fist around my throat, squeezing until it decided I could breathe, and I could do nothing more than yield to its authority. “Turn around and raise your arms above your head.”

“Plea—”

Pain exploded across my back, licked across one hip, and washed any thoughts of disagreement or even trying to talk sense into whomever it was that was in the dark with me.

I jumped to fall in line, turning so sharp that my head spun and raised my arms.

Time stretched out between us as I stood there, arms extended, shivering with fear. I didn’t hear them enter, didn’t hear any footfalls on the floor nor feel the vibrations of it. Yet, the next moment, I felt cold metal slide and click around first one and then the other wrist.