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The intensity on his face didn’t falter. “No one shall even know that you are back in this world until I see fit.”

“And then you’ll tell the Asteri?” Her heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t let that happen.

Her father smiled again. “That depends entirely on you.”

* * *

Ithan ran himself into the ground all the way back to the eastern gate of Crescent City, hundreds of miles from the dock in Ionia where he’d left Tharion and the others.

Make your brother proud.

He hadn’t been able to get on that boat. Ketos might be able to walk away from the consequences of his actions, but Ithan couldn’t.

Gilded by the setting sun, Crescent City bustled on as usual, unaware of what he’d done. How everything had changed.

He took the coward’s path through the city, cutting through FiRo rather than going right to the Istros through Moonwood. If he saw another wolf right now …

He didn’t want to know what he’d do. What he’d say.

He was no one in the hustle of rush hour, but he kept to the alleys and side streets. He didn’t spare a glance for the Heart Gate as he sprinted past it, nor did he let himself look eastward toward Bryce and Danika’s old apartment when he passed that, too.

He only looked ahead, toward the approaching river. Toward the Black Dock at the end of the street.

Despite the chaotic throngs of evening commuters in the rest of the city, the Black Dock was silent and empty, wreathed in mist. Down the quay, a few mourners wept on benches, but no one stood on the dock itself.

Ithan couldn’t bring himself to look deeper into the mists, toward the Bone Quarter. He prayed Connor wasn’t looking his way from across the river.

Ithan shifted into his humanoid form before walking a block westward along the quay. Ithan knew where the entrance was—everyone did.

No one ever went there, of course. No one dared.

The great black door sat in the middle of a matching black marble building—a facade. The building had been styled after an elaborate mausoleum. The door was the focus, the main reason for its existence: to lead one not into the building, but below it.

No one stood guard at the door. Ithan supposed nobody was needed. Anyone who wanted to rob this place would deserve all that they’d face inside.

Crude, ancient markings covered the black door. Like scratches carved by inhuman fingernails. At its center, an etching of a horned, humanoid skull engulfed in flames stared out at him.

Ithan knocked on its hateful face once. Twice. The metal thudded dully.

The door yawned open, silent as a grave. Only darkness waited beyond, and a long, straight staircase into the gloom.

It might as well have been Hel on Midgard.

Ithan felt nothing, was nothing, as he strode in. As the door shut behind him, sealing him in solid, unending night.

Locking him inside the House of Flame and Shadow.

30

If the Autumn King was indeed cooking their meals, then Bryce had to admit that he wasn’t a bad chef. Roast chicken, green beans, and some thickly sliced bread waited on the marble table in the vast dining room.

Apparently, she’d arrived around three in the afternoon on a Friday. That was all she’d been able to get out of him while he’d led her from his office to a bedroom on the second floor. Not what the date was, or even the month. Or year.

Nausea coursed through her. Hunt had been kept in the Asteri dungeons for years the last time … Was he still there? Was he even alive? Was Ruhn? Her family?

There was nothing in her bedroom, an elegant—if bland—blend of marble and overstuffed furniture in varying shades of gray and white, to aid in answering these questions. Her father wanted her cut off from the world, and so it was: No TV. No phone—not even a landline. A glamour shimmered on the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an interior lavender garden, blocking prying eyes from seeing in. A peek toward the sky showed an iridescent bubble over the whole place—wards. Like the ones the Fae had established to lock down their territory during the attack this spring.

But it was the screams of pleading Fae parents as Silene locked them out of their home world, leaving their children to the Asteri’s cruelty, that echoed through Bryce’s head.