Chapter 15

“Don’t waste your strength, Your Highness.”

The woman’s voice slid through the iron as though the door weren’t there.

Lucian hit it anyway. I could smell his shoulder tearing, hot copper in the dark, and I stood with the whistle biting into my palm and counted his breaths. They were coming too fast.

“Your father built that door to keep a secret in,” she said. “How funny that you’re the one inside it.”

“Who sent you?” Lucian snarled.

“No one sends me, darling. I came home.”

Light footsteps, unhurried, drifting away.

Then came the crackling.

Cassian turned toward the sound. “The lantern.”

The fallen lantern had spilled its oil across the passage. The fire had found it, spreading along the ground until flames crawled toward the iron door. Smoke began to seep beneath it, thick and oily.

“She’s trapped us in here to burn!” Cassian swore and drove his weight against the iron.

The air turned to gravel in my throat.

“Down!” Lucian dragged me low. “Cassian, the hinges.”

“They’re on the other side!”

Heat pulsed against the door like a heartbeat. We had minutes. I knew it the way you know a tooth is about to break.

I couldn’t see, so I felt: cold stone, the iron leg of the cot, and then a thread of air across my knuckles, thin as wire.

It came from behind the bed.

“There’s a draft.”

“There’s a fire,” Lucian said.

“Behind the cot. That lamp burned perfectly steady in a sealed room. Nothing burns steady without air. Somebody was breathing through that wall.”

For one heartbeat, nobody moved.

Then Cassian dropped beside me. Together, we felt along the stone behind the cot, searching for the source of the current. His fingers found a groove beneath the frame.

“Here.”

We hauled the cot sideways. Its legs scraped against the floor, and the sound nearly drowned out Lucian’s next breath.

Behind it sat the stone slab that concealed the passage discovered three nights earlier. Its edges had been worn smooth by use.

I put both palms against it and shoved.

It gave.

Cold, stale air poured out of the crawlspace beyond. Cassian muttered an oath.

“How did you know?” Lucian’s voice was at my ear, low and dangerous.

“I breathe. You should try it.”

“People don’t find hidden doors by accident, Elena.”

“People about to choke do.” I shoved the slab wider. “Do you want to argue or live?”

I thought he would choose the argument.

Instead, his hand clamped around my arm and propelled me into the dark.

“You go first. If it’s a trap, you’ll be the one to find it.”

“Charming.”

“Practical.”

The crawlspace was barely wider than my shoulders. Stone scraped my elbows, and the chain between my wrists dragged and clanked with every shove.

Lucian came behind me, biting back a sound each time his injured shoulder struck the wall. Cassian followed him, keeping one hand against the stone and the other close to Lucian’s back, ready to catch him if the wound gave way.

Behind us, the iron door glowed a dull, spreading red.

The passage climbed. It turned. It ended in the iron plate Cassian had secured over the old service tunnel. Three of its four bolts had been drawn back from the other side.

I laid my hand against it, and something went cold in me.

I had watched Cassian’s men secure this plate. I knew the groove in the floor beyond it where water pooled.

I had lain on this floor for three nights.

I pushed.

The plate swung outward on its remaining bolt, and I tumbled onto packed earth and the stink of rust and standing water.

My cell.

Lucian came through behind me, then Cassian, soot-streaked and coughing. Cassian immediately pulled the plate shut, leaving the three of us in the pale moonlight from my high window.

The cot, which should have stood flush against the wall, sat a foot out from it.

I had slept on that cot.

Cassian had posted guards at both ends of the passage. They were supposed to keep anyone from entering or leaving unnoticed.

Someone had walked its length anyway.

“This is your cell,” Cassian said slowly.

“I know whose cell it is.”

Lucian said nothing.

He was looking at the plate, at the dust on the floor, at the clean scrape where the iron had swung. Then at me.

His hand closed around my throat.

Not hard. Not yet.

Just enough to hold me still as his thumb pressed against my pulse.

“The man spoke to you through that wall,” he said. “And now someone has left his mark in a room connected to your cell. Every trail ends here.”

“I told you what he said.”

“Everything you leave out keeps getting people killed.”

His fingers tightened.

“Then let me die of it!”

I clawed at his wrist.

“If I’d had a way out, do you think I’d still be chained here? Would I have let you drag me down a hole to look at a toy?”

His grip remained for another heartbeat.

Then his gaze shifted.

Something on the cot had caught his attention.

His hand fell away from my throat.

“What,” he said very quietly, “is that?”

I turned.

On the cot, where the blanket had been thrown back, someone had left a folded strip of black cloth.

It was still warm.

It smelled of smoke and burnt honey.

And on the wall above it, scrawled fresh in ash by a finger, was a single line.

ASK THE PRINCE WHO THE BOY WAS.

My blood stopped.

The words seemed to pull the air from the room.

I looked at Lucian.

There were only two people who knew what I’d seen when he caught my wrist.

One of them stood in front of me, his hand still half-raised, every drop of color drained from his face.

He wasn’t looking at the message anymore.

He was staring at me.

“What boy?” Cassian asked.

Lucian didn’t answer him.

His eyes found mine, and the cold in them was something worse than hatred.

“Who did you tell?” he whispered.