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Leonardo, my eldest, was worried—it’s why he’d made the trip to Netherstone. He’d heard rumbles of a certain member of the Renault family switching allegiance to my brother, and some conversations were better had in person. The fact that his mother was of the Renault family complicated things.
Yet his loyalty was always with me. Betray one family for the other. I’d always asked a lot of Leo, true, but he was the future. He was the one that would take over ruling the malefics and also the one that had to keep all his siblings in line and behind my agenda for our species.
A lot on his shoulders, but I’d raised him to be able to handle it. All of it.
Leo had just left Netherstone, and I was walking back from the coach house after seeing him off, my mind set on stoking back to flames the hatred I needed to feel for Ada. Hatred for all those years she hid from me. Hatred for how she stole Venetia away. Hatred for Rodolfo.
Those flames of hatred were the only defense I had against her—the only way I was going to keep my hands off of her and my dick firmly in my pants.
I started down the hallway that went by the library, intent on getting back to my study to lose myself in more piles of work interspersed with some serious hate-concocting.
Then the scent of Ada hit me several steps before the opening of the library, little sparks of energy swirling in the air around me like they always did when I was in her vicinity.
I planned to just walk by the open door of the library, determined to not even slow because I knew she was in there. But then I made the mistake of glancing into the library as I passed it.
Ada was sitting on the far side of the room, tucked onto the window seat that spanned the base of one of the tall reticulated windows with the repeating quatrefoils on the top. Her legs were long across the cushions and her forehead was pressed against the glass as she was looking downward.
What the hell?
I veered into the library, walking over to her as she sat by the windows that looked out over the great ravine between the mountains. There was nothing in the valley now except for snow on the ground. Aside from reusing everything of the castle I could when I’d had it rebuilt, I’d also had the lava field that had hardened, creating a deep crevice, removed.
No evidence of what Venetia had done, even if the ghosts of it still surrounded me.
Ghosts like the new stones that had been carefully hammered to fit in with the ancient ones, the color of them too clean.
Ghosts like the glass of the windows, easy to see through, not wavy with time, morphing the outside world.
Ghosts like the splinters and gouges in the ancient doors, where the wood had cracked and had to be glued back together.
Ada leaned away from the window, looking toward me at my footfalls into the library.
I pointed past her. “You’re looking down.”
She’d always been squeamish around heights—especially the heights here at the castle. Never willingly peering over any ledge or window that looked downward.
She glanced over her shoulder at the valley. “Yes, well, plummeting to the bottom of the ravine in that SUV when the castle was destroyed had one benefit—it cured me of my fear of heights.”
I stilled. “What? You didn’t make it out far enough on the road to avoid the crumble? I thought that’s how you escaped the wreckage of the castle. How you escaped me.”
I’d found plenty of crumpled black SUVs in the rubble, but there had been no telling one from another. Mine, my men’s, Cletus’s men’s. Nondescript black SUVs were a common occurrence in our world.
“No.” She shook her head. “It was terrifying, to see the road just disappearing behind me until gravity swallowed me. The SUV broke apart on the way down and I landed at the bottom of the valley on the edge of the rubble. I lost consciousness for a while and then I went looking for Venny as soon as my eyes opened.”
The mention of my daughter sparked to fire that ember of fury I’d been trying to flame.
I took a last step toward her, my knees almost touching the edge of the window seat and boxing her in.
There had always been one thing that had bothered me about that night—how Ada could have disappeared so quickly.
Now was the time to ask.
Her look dipped down to my legs blocking her, wariness setting into her eyes as her gaze lifted up to me.
My finger flicked out toward the window again, pointing downward. “If you were down there, how could you have possibly gotten out of the valley without me knowing? There was not one trace of you and Venetia ever going through town. And I searched every last video feed, talked to every soul. There was nothing.”
“We didn’t leave through town.”
“What?”
