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The group ahead of Arianne disappeared around the corner. She would be missed if she didn’t hurry. “What tower room?” she asked, her own hand clamping around the gypsy’s for a brief instant. “Please tell me…”

“Is this old one bothering you?” The dungeon master had returned without Arianne’s noticing him. She paled as she gazed up into his long, cruel face.

“No, no—she said she was thirsty, that’s all.”

“Ha! She’ll be worse than thirsty before the duke has finished with her,” he snorted. “Be off with you. Only the duke is allowed to speak with the prisoners.”

“I didn’t know,” Arianne mumbled, trying to look suitably cowed. She threw the gypsy one last glance before hurrying after Katerine and the others. The woman’s glowing eyes seemed to burn a hole in her brain.

As did the image of Marcus’s weary ones.

Where was Nicholas right now? she wondered.

She didn’t recall a tower room from her previous visits to Dinadan.

She would have to ask him about it. It was impossible to know whether the gypsy was speaking truth or rambling like a madwoman, but Arianne felt in the old woman’s words an import that she couldn’t dismiss.

She prayed that Nicholas was safe. Somehow the thought of his being captured, the image of him at Julian’s mercy, twisted through her even more painfully than the thought of her own capture.

Nicholas , she thought, her mind scanning the great height and scope of the castle, searching for him as if she could visualize him somewhere on the grounds. Where are you?

Please be safe. Stay safe. You are my hope.

And my heart. It was the first time she had admitted this even to herself.

When the visitors had left, Marcus set aside the smuggled food from Katerine. He unwrapped the parcel from his sister and smiled for the first time in a long while. Inside the linen was Arianne’s sharp-edged, jeweled dagger.

Nicholas swept a keen glance around Julian’s apartments.

They were the same ones his father had inhabited when Nicholas had last been in the castle.

Julian had changed a few things here and there, but most of the rich tapestries, the carved bedposts adorned with circlets of emeralds and rubies, hung with purple satin and gold tassels—were the same.

He closed his eyes, almost imagining that he could feel his father’s presence.

He saw the archduke’s eyes on the day he’d banished his son.

Filled with rage they’d been—rage and something more. Disappointment, pain. So much pain.

He shook off the heaviness in his heart. The past was dead. He could not change or revive it now. Never would he have the chance to reconcile with his father, to make things right between them, to see love and acceptance once again in his father’s eyes.

It was too late for that.

But it was not too late to save others from Julian’s machinations. The fate of many hung in the balance—in particular, and weighing most on Nicholas’s mind, the fate of Arianne.

She was in dire danger every moment Julian held command of this castle, and Nicholas vowed to himself as he searched through the duke’s private chambers that not another sun would set before his enemy was overthrown.

He moved swiftly through the antechambers and the bedchamber. His father had kept the dungeon keys in a small chest near the window. When Nicholas looked there today, however, he found not the keys but another treasure.

The royal medallion of Dinadan.

The ancient gold gleamed warmly in his hands as he lifted the square medallion out of the chest. Something wrenched inside him as he stared at it.

The medallion was the symbol of Dinadan peace and unity.

It was worn on all state occasions, whenever the archduke appeared before his people—at coronations, celebrations, executions, feasts, and during battle.

Nicholas had received it from his father when he turned eighteen, as a sign that he was the one chosen to rule Dinadan when Armand stepped down.

But he’d been commanded to return it before he left Castle Dinadan and his homeland ten long years ago.

It scalded his palm. Somehow the medallion felt heavier now than he remembered. Its inscription read, Long Live Dinadan .

The sound of footsteps in the corridor galvanized him. Quick as a blink he dropped the medallion into his pocket and slipped into the anteroom just as the door opened and Duke Julian strolled in, accompanied by several nobles, Cren the Astrologer, and Baylor, the Captain of Arms.

“I’ve been pondering the executions of Count Marcus and that gypsy,” Julian informed his captain. Nicholas listened from the anteroom, his fingers clenched around his sword.

“The stench of their perfidy is rising from the dungeons to pervade the castle. I want them gone, a warning to my people that any opposition to the crown will not be tolerated. I have decided to move up their executions. Baylor, proclaim to all that the traitors will die tomorrow. I expect every noble and merchant and peasant to attend.”

“My lord, it will be done. When?” Baylor inquired.

“My subjects are commanded to gather in the courtyard at the stroke of dawn. When first light comes, the prisoners will be brought to the scaffold in chains for all to see, and they will be paraded and then hanged before all of Dinadan.”

Nicholas could hear the smile in Julian’s smug, velvety voice. In the shadows of the anteroom, Nicholas’s eyes narrowed, and tension gripped him like iron chains.

This was too soon, much too soon. No reinforcements could be expected yet, unless fortune was strongly on his side—and it had not been on his side for a long while now.

But he couldn’t wait. With or without the soldiers, he needed to retake the castle, and he had to act before dawn.