A Red-Rose Chain

“Yeah, but he’s not.” I smiled thinly. “I have diplomatic immunity from being cut up by assholes. He broke it, even if he wants to claim that finding me in the vault was proof of treason. The High King isn’t going to let him keep his throne, and I intend to deliver the fucker to Toronto myself. As for Tia, she’s a bad dog, and bad dogs get punished. Now let’s go.”


The room where I’d been destined to be sliced and diced was connected to a hallway that connected, in turn, to the main hall. Marlis led the way. We didn’t see anyone as we walked the halls like something out of a horror story, me drenched in blood, Tybalt still more cat than man, and Marlis in her butcher’s apron, which she had refused to remove before we left the surgery room. “I’m done hiding what he made us do in his name,” she’d said, and now she stalked ahead of us, a scalpel in her hand and murder in her eyes. If she found Rhys first, there might be a violation of the Law after all—and I couldn’t say it wasn’t earned. After what the bastard had done to her family, I would have been happy holding him down while she killed him.

But I didn’t have that luxury. I’d see him deposed, elf-shot, and shunned by pureblood society before I’d see him dead. He didn’t deserve to turn me, or anyone else, into a killer.

“That blow to the head should have broken the skin,” I said. “If he’s bleeding, I’ll find him.”

Something touched my shoulder. I turned just enough to see that it was Tybalt’s hand. His eyes were still fixed straight ahead, his pupils narrow slits of black amongst the green. There was a tremble in his fingers that worried me, but this wasn’t the time to ask him about it, or to do anything but keep on walking. We had to find the King of Silences. We couldn’t fall apart now.

“So I’m thinking this isn’t where we’re going to go for our honeymoon,” I said quietly.

Tybalt almost jumped, turning to stare at me like he had just noticed my presence—even though his hand was still resting against my shoulder, even though he hadn’t been more than a few feet away since we’d been reunited. “I would prefer something drier, and less filled with intrigue,” he said.

“That means Disney World’s out, too,” I said. I offered him a smile. He didn’t return it. “I’m okay, Tybalt. It’s almost over.” He didn’t know how close I’d come to bleeding out. Sure, I was covered in the stuff, but that didn’t mean anything—I’d been covered in blood before, lots of times. It wasn’t always life-threatening. Not to me. As long as May didn’t tell him the false Queen’s knife had actually pierced my heart, he never needed to know.

Sometimes silence is a greater form of mercy than the truth.

“Is it?” he asked, and I didn’t have an answer for him.

Marlis stopped at a blank stretch of wall. I almost expected her to walk straight through it, like she had before, but instead she reached out and touched a patch of wood, her fingers tracing the grain. “There used to be a gold yarrow branch here,” she said. “He had it removed. He had everything but the fountain removed, and he would have taken that, too, if it hadn’t been connected to the foundation of the castle.”

“Home décor is not currently our priority,” I said.

She shook her head. “It should be,” she said, and pushed inward.

The wall swung open, revealing, not a hidden passageway, but an entire hidden room. It was empty, and smelled of dust and long, lonely days, hours where no one walked within it, or even remembered its existence. Marlis stepped inside. Tybalt and I followed her, his hand remaining on my shoulder right up to the moment when I stiffened, sniffing the air, and turned to point at a narrow doorway on the room’s far wall.

“That way,” I said. “He went that way.” The smell of blood hung in the air, faintly tinged with wine vinegar and meadowsweet. That could have been the residue of his magic: if he’d teleported here, the smell would naturally have lingered.