CHAPTER 4 The Red Door

The servants' passages were a language I'd learned in the first lonely months of my marriage, back when I'd still needed somewhere to disappear.

Narrow. Underlit. Smelling of banked cooking fires and the particular must that clings to very old stone. I'd been grateful for them a hundred times before, always during some interminable state dinner, when the formal rooms grew too warm and the political conversation too sharp to sit through politely. Tonight they meant something closer to survival, and I moved through them like a woman who understood the difference.

Deeper into the palace. Away from the Crown Chamber, away from Darius, away from Seraphina and her borrowed crown and her triumphant, patient smile.

The wand was still in my hand. I should have destroyed it — thrown it into a fire, dropped it down one of the old wells — and instead I carried it like a talisman, like the one true thing left that belonged only to me.

The corridor sloped downward, widening as the candles thinned and the quiet deepened around me.

That was when I heard the voices.

Two women, low and urgent, coming from a service room just ahead. I knew one of them instantly. The second one turned my blood to ice water.

"—weren't prepared for this contingency." A voice I didn't recognize, cultivated, precise, its accent sanded down until it belonged to no particular place. "The Vale girl was meant to be passive. Compliant. The serum should have ensured—"

"She's been refusing treatment since the wedding." That voice I knew — Dr. Ashgrave's, unmistakable, the same gentle certainty she'd once used to tell me my body couldn't manage children. "Her compliance has been deteriorating for months. I recommended a stronger regimen. The Alpha insisted otherwise."

"The Alpha thinks with his wolf and precious little else." The first voice sharpened. "He was meant to keep her contained until the twins were viable. The moment they leave her body—"

I stopped breathing.

They were discussing my children the way one discusses shipping logistics.

"—the psychological handling will matter most," the voice continued. "Once she's delivered, she'll be unstable. Grieving. Manageable, if we're careful. We install her in one of the secondary houses, keep her quiet—"

"And if she resists?"

A pause. The kind of pause that has already decided the answer and is simply choosing how gently to say it.

"Then she becomes a subject in her own right. Her bloodline has value. There's a great deal we could learn from what makes her different."

I took a step backward. The floorboard beneath my foot gave a small, betraying creak, and the voices on the other side of the door went instantly, completely still.

"Did you hear that?"

I ran.

The corridor twisted somewhere I hadn't expected and I caught myself against cold stone before I could fall, my heart slamming so hard against my ribs I thought, absurdly, that it might simply give out before anyone had the chance to take my children from me.

Before anyone could take me.

I rounded a corner into a red door I could have sworn, with total certainty, had never existed there before.

That was impossible. I had walked this corridor a hundred times. But logic had stopped being useful to me somewhere around the third silver line on that wand, and I was operating now on something older and considerably less reasonable.

I hauled the door open and stepped through into total dark.

Behind me, footsteps had begun to echo along the passage. They were coming. They were looking.

I pulled the door shut and — thank every god the temple had ever named — found a lock. I turned it and stood there gasping in blackness so complete it had texture.

Slowly, my eyes adjusted.

The room was unlike the rest of the palace — circular, close, its stone walls curving overhead like the inside of a bell. At its center stood something metal, basin-shaped, its purpose unreadable in the dark. And ringing the walls, set into careful alcoves, were bottles. Hundreds of them. More than I could count in one sweep.

Each one labeled. A name. A date. Something that looked, in the candlelight I finally located and lit, uncomfortably like a blood type.

The first bottle read: ELARA VALE, AGE 6. LUNAR DOMINANT. SUPPRESSION CANDIDATE.

The date was eighteen years old.

The second: SELENE VALE-ARGENT, AGE 22. ROYAL LINEAGE. RESTRICTED.

My mother's name.

My mother, who had died when I was six years old, in an accident everyone had assured me was simply and terribly bad luck.

My mother, whose blood sat in a jar behind a door I had never once seen in three years of living above it.

Behind me, the door shuddered against its lock.

"Elara!" Darius's voice, muffled but unmistakable, edged with something that might have been fear. "Open the door. You're not safe in there — you don't understand what—"

I didn't answer him.

I turned instead toward the back of the room, where the candlelight had just found the top of a staircase, descending into a dark that seemed to go on considerably longer than the room above it had any right to hide.