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“Then you know that it’s everything. It’s nothing. It’s...” Her mouth twists. “It’s what I had to do to get away. Risk it all. Embrace the ether. It was a decision, I could end my life on my terms or the beast could take it on theirs.”

“Are you saying you jumped in the river? To escape?”

From the notes I’ve read, the police report, they weren’t sure if it was intentional or not.

“It was the way.”

I notice she's wary to label the beast as male or female. I step closer, close enough that she can lean against me if she wants. Use me to dig into that place of darkness she’s clearly afraid to go. She doesn’t, but I feel the way her breathing slows, like my presence alone is enough.

“I’m going to find out who did this to you,” I say. “No matter what it takes.”

She blinks slowly, turning to look up at me. “That’s why he sent you. You’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.”

“I’ve been dirty since birth,” I say. “Might as well make it useful.”

The wind picks up, whipping the ends of her dress around her legs. The memory of them wrapped around me in the crypt barrels into me. Her skin was so soft and supple. My cock gets hard in an instant. I glance out over the water, where the river churns, white and frothy, pure after going over the rocks.

I don’t think I understood why the King chose me until this very moment.

Arianette may have died here, but now, she’shis. The King’s.

Ours.Me and Hunter.

And it’s my job to make sure she stays that way.

The trail narrowsas we climb, the dirt soft beneath my boots. The river hisses below, seeming to grow louder the higher we go. Arianette walks ahead of me, her steps light but unsteady, hands trailing along branches and mossy trunks like she’s blindfolded and feeling her way through a dream. Predictably, her shoes aren’t up to the task and more than once, I place my hands on her hips to leverage her out of the muck.

“There,” she says finally, pointing toward a flat patch of stone overlooking the bend in the river. “That’s where I jumped.”

I nod. It’s just a slab of stone and dead leaves now, nothing remarkable, nothing that screams of a girl willing to throw herself to her death. It’s not the landscape I’m trying to read, it’s her.

She lowers herself slowly to the rock, skirt pooling around her dirty feet, eyes scanning the treeline as if something might flicker back to life there. I crouch nearby, resting my bow against a tree.

Arianette starts to hum again, soft and tuneless. “I used to count the windows,” she says after a minute. “To make sure none of them were open. Just in case one of the little ones thought about flying.”

I freeze. Little ones?

“There was a girl,” she continues, eyes glassy, like the world has peeled away and left her in memory’s hollow shell. “Red. That was her color.” She lifts a hand to her face and flinches like someone’s just hit her, even though there’s only wind. “At night they’d take her, after the music and dancing. After theentertainment.”

I swallow and ask in an even voice. “Did she have a name?”

She thinks, head tilted. “Em? Emily? Emma?” Her eyes flick to the dirt. “It was a long time ago.”

I’ve seen the transcript of Arianette’s conversation at the hospital after she was found. That FBI agent and police officer probing her for details. Much of it had been gibberish, and the toxicology reports did come back saying she’d had drugs in her system. It makes her story even more unreliable and hard to understand. There are times when she seems to confuse the present with the past. Or maybe they’re the same thing. There’s no real way to find out.

“I was there to dance,” she says. “But sometimes, that’s not all they wanted.”

“What did they want?” I ask, playing along.

She looks at me then, something sharp and unspoken in her eyes. “They made mewatch, Damon. I had towatch. That was the rule.”

My throat tightens. I sit beside her now.

“The hallway outside the blue room always smelled like sweat and old flowers. Expensive, oily perfume. They’d leave the door open just a crack. Just wide enough. I could hear the crying. Other times laughing. One of them still had their baby teeth.”

She wraps her arms around her knees, rocking slightly.

“There’s a kind of sickness you get from seeing too much and doing nothing. I still have it. It lives under my tongue, behind my ribs. I carry all their screams in a glass jar inside me. Sometimes it rattles. Sometimes it breaks.”