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Dark eyes glower behind his glasses. “Fine. Just near certain there’s a ceremonial poleaxe lodged in my spine.”

I stand and help him to his feet, instantly realizing that it is still very dangerous business to touch him. My skin tingles from the contact of his hand in mine, and as he performs the very mundane act of rubbing his back and adjusting his glasses, I seriously contemplate eating him alive.

I look back at the bust of Sir Egbert to see the old headmaster frozen in bronze again, but now with his eyes wide, mouth open, tongue extended. The shiny spot on his forehead glistens in the Light of our anchors.

“Lonan,” I croak. His name is both a plea and an accusation. Did he know? Did my godfather share this secret with him?

Two princes. Both with ambiguous parentage.

“What happened?” Lonan asks. “You were consumed in Darkness.”

I look back at him, and when I see the question in his expression, I realize that Sir Egbert revealed this memory to me, and only to me.

“What did you see?” Lonan asks.

Too much.

Too much.

Chapter Forty-One

I see the Darkness in his eyes now, stronger than ever. The same shadows that line my godfather’s face. Son of his father. The Great Nightmare.

Even if King Marcel and Lord Van Asten were uncertain, I am not. The similarities are so unmistakable that I can’t believe I didn’t recognize them sooner.

How easy it was to put it together, how well he hid it. His father, my godfather, both of them sneaking their connection under my nose while I did their bidding. Years and years of it. Treachery to the Light.

I hate being made to look like an idiot. And here is Lonan, concern in his onyx eyes, like he wasn’t the one to pull me down this path. “You’re his son,” I breathe.

His expression is unapologetic. “Whose son?”

“Oh please.”

He cocks his hip and rests his hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword. “Vesper, I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

Liar.

He would fool anyone else, but I’ve been around his lies for too long. I know how slippery he is, how charming, how well he wears a false face.

“This is why you never talk about your childhood.” I shake my head as the pieces fall more into place.

Lonan makes a sound between a laugh and a scoff. “I don’t talk about my childhood because it was fucking terrible.”

I narrow my gaze, unconvinced.

“You want to know? I don’t avoid it because I’m hiding, Vesper. I don’t mention it because there is nothing in the past worth mentioning. You want to hear how I slept on the floor because the other children in the orphanage stole my bedding every night? It isn’t an exciting story.”

His jaw tics as he stares unblinking, hard, into my eyes. “You want to hear how the nurses rapped my thighs raw with reeds because they suspected me in every prank and theft and fight? Would you like to hear how I remember the day I decided to never cry again? I was six.”

His gaze descends into something savage, something raw and violent—the very birthplace of all his Dark. “Do you want to hear how the one thing I had from my infancy was a little stuffed fox? It smelled like my mother, and they took it and drowned it in the latrine, laughed while doing it. Do you want to know what happened to those children, the ones who took my fox, when I got hold of them?”

The Darkness swirls around his fingertips, asps of lethal Dark. “That is where the Nightmare was born. Not in war. Not in vengeance for the Dark. In a little orphanage with a leaky roof. Every ounce of shadow came from that.”

He wants me to think him a nightmare. He wants me to be afraid, fists clenched and dark eyes burning with sleepless fire. He wants me to cower.

But my broken heart does not fear as others do. I don’t retreat. I step toward him, Great Nightmare, scourge of Gault, killer and enemy. In this moment, I’m not tempted by his blood. I’m drawn by something else.

I place my hand gently against his cheek. “I am with you,” I say. “In the Dark and in the Light. I’m with you.”