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Letting it go, I tug out another dress. This too has a tag still attached.

All the women’s clothes seem to have tags.

They’re also all roughly my size.

These are meant for me,I realize.

That really shouldn’t stun me—Memnon intends to marry me, after all. Still, this is…a lot.

An old feeling, one that belongs to Roxilana, rises.

This would’ve won her over. Easily.

Before Memnon took her away and married her, she had little to her name. Even for me, independent though I am, being doted on is alluring.

This is blood money, Selene. And the price is letting the asshole get his way.

Dicks will sprout wings before that happens.

I stare at the clothes a moment longer. I do have to get dressed, I concede. I rifle through the women’s clothing until I find a pair of jeans and a simple white shirt.

Goddess, forgive me for taking from the devil.

On a shoe rack below, there are three different pairs of shoes in my size, one of which happens to be a set of Doc Martens.

I grab the combat boots.

Forgive me, Goddess, for taking these too. And for keeping them.

I mean, it’s not every day one gets new Doc Martens.

Grabbing the items, I head into the bathroom and quickly pull on the clothes, my agitation growing. I don’t know where Memnon is, but the time I have before he returns is limited.

When I straighten, I notice that tucked into the bathroom mirror is a photo.Of me.

In it, I’m clinking a champagne flute with a few people who are off camera. I know from memory that it was taken this last New Year’s Eve, when Sybil and I and a few of her coven sisters were all at an apartment party. It’s an action shot of me, one where I’m genuinely smiling and my eye just happened to catch the camera.

My heart does a funny thing, finding this picture in Memnon’s otherwise bare bathroom, knowing he must’ve takenit from one of my photo albums and placed it here where he’ll see it every day, alongside his own face.

I stride out of the bathroom and snatch up my phone, which rests on one of the bedside tables. It clings to a mere five percent of battery life.

I slip it into my back pocket and survey my surroundings once more.

There’s not much to see in this room, nor was there much to the bathroom and closet. For some reason, I assumed there would be. Memnon is good at playing the game of rulers, and in the modern world, so much of that is owning lots of expensive things. But so far, there’s really not that much that screams self-involved.

I guess my warlord ex is a little too rugged to bother with more creature comforts. That, or he’s still amassing his wealth, one victim at a time.

I need to go, now.

Yet my attention moves to the one place where Memnon has accumulated items: his bookshelf. Without intending to, my feet lead me over to it.

There are books from Pliny the Elder written in their original Latin, alongside the Greek versions ofThe Iliad,The Odyssey, and Herodotus’s writings, and some ancient poetry. There’s a biography of Nero as well as some histories of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas that span the time frame when Memnon and Roxilana lived.

My eyes move to the lower shelves, where they snag on the familiar spines of my notebooks.

I don’t breathe.

It’s not possible.Memnon burned them. Iwatchedhim burn them.