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Thea reminded herself to unclench her jaw, starting towards where the doe had fled.

‘Why isn’t Callahan the Flaming Arrow doing the hunting?’ Hawthorne asked, following.

‘I was trying to get away from you,’ Thea said through gritted teeth, pausing at the spot where the doe’s fresh tracks began. ‘You take all the air.’

Hawthorne raked his bound hands through his hair and sighed. ‘It’s me who can’t breathe when I’m around you…’

White-hot fury lanced through Thea and she rounded on him. ‘You have no right,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘You don’t want to hear anything, it seems.’

Thea stormed deeper into the forest, following the hoof imprints in the snow, the trees becoming denser as they led to a near-vertical rock face. ‘No. Not from you. Not after you betrayed the guild, betrayed the midrealms, betrayed —’

‘Betrayedyou?’ he finished for her.

A tidal wave of anger crashed against the shores of her composure, threatening to shatter the walls she had built as she took in the warrior before her. ‘I owe younothing. Not a moment of my time, not a single —’

‘Do you truly believe me to be evil?’

‘Stay away from him, Thee… He’s the worst one,’Wren had warned her once, a long time ago. If only she’d listened.

‘You truly think I have fallen to the side of thewraiths?’Hawthorne pressed, his gaze intense. ‘You think I’ve aligned myself with the monsters who did that to my brother? To Tal?—’

Thea stepped towards him, hand ready at her dagger. ‘How did you vanish earlier? Your tracks just stopped. Am I supposed to believe that you’re not in league with them? That you didn’t use shadow magic to —’

Hawthorne took a step backward and ran his hands along the rock. ‘There are tunnels and secret passages all over the midrealms… If you know where to look.’

‘There was no passage there,’ Thea argued.

‘Wasn’t there?’ Hawthorne said cryptically, starting along the base of the cliff. He cut a striking figure in the moonlight, snow drifting around his powerful frame. Thea had no choice but to follow him.

They walked for a few minutes in silence, Thea stewing in her own rage, her hand still clamped around her dagger. She shouldn’t be out here alone with him.

Hawthorne slowed when he got to an overhang in the cliffside, icicles hanging like knives from the mouth of a cave. ‘This is part of the network. Leads through to the other side of the mountain.’

‘This proves nothing. For all I know, it’s just a hole in the rock.’

Hawthorne ducked inside. ‘If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said coldly, her fingers reaching for the poison-tipped pin Wren had prepared for her.

‘You seem a bit too far away to stick your little needle in my neck,’ he taunted, shifting deeper into the dark cave.

Thea palmed her dagger and brandished the pin. If she had to tie the traitor up and drag him through the snow with her horse, she’d do it in a heartbeat. Anything to be rid of him, rid of the unending wrath that haunted her every day he escaped his retribution.

She stepped into the cave.

‘Think you can bring me down, Princess?’ he murmured in the dark.

Thea braced herself for an attack. ‘When I’ve given you over to the rulers,’ she said quietly, lacing her words with venom, ‘I’ll wash my hands of you forever. I’ll never have to see you again, will never have to utter your name… It will be as though you never existed.’

‘Well…’ Hawthorne’s voice was like golden honey. ‘I can’t have that.’

Thea found him in the dark, right by the mouth of the cave. She locked eyes with him, just as he lifted his manacled fists to the wall, striking an all-powerful blow.

She lurched forward, panic spiking.

‘You bastard —’ she cried, as the whole mountain above rumbled.