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CHAPTER ONE

S now exploded beneath Tristan Saros’s feet as he landed in a forest overlooking the bone-white cliffs of Tartarus.

Across the lifeless valley, a swirling tempest of black shrouded the continent’s legendary prison.

He stretched his aching wings as he trudged to a clearing, the icy wind plucking at his feathers. It was one of the few forces besides light that could penetrate the prison’s powerful wards.

He suspected he wouldn’t be able to breach them. But he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t at least try.

Cassandra Fortin—his Daredevil, his ma’anyu , the brave, selfless little idiot who’d sacrificed her freedom—was trapped behind those wards.

The prison’s intake tower stood atop a rocky outcropping, a lonely red-black spire at the edge of the known world. And no one in Ethyrios, save the damned, knew what lay within the obsidian mists beyond.

The weapons Tristan carried had been stolen from an Imperial soldier at a hostel in Cernodas. Tristan had left the male in pieces—a fleeting satisfaction—then stripped him of a Typhon broadsword, a stun pistol, and a snakebite. High-Gods-willing, the plum-sized bomb crafted with wind magic and Deathstalker venom would be powerful enough to tear a hole through the wards.

The frozen air needled his lungs as he summoned the wind and speared across the valley, the wards nipping at his power.

He pushed harder, his back muscles screaming. Warnings blared through his head to stop, to turn back before he plummeted to the valley floor. He ignored them, sights narrowed on that tower.

As he approached, his wind sputtered. He tucked his wings, barreling like a bullet toward the cliff-edge and smashing into it with nearly the same force.

Clinging to the rock, he began his climb. He dug his hands and feet into the cracks, trying to ignore the pain in his wrists, ankles, and shoulders. He grunted, inching slowly upward, the weight of his wings an increasingly heavy burden.

Once he reached the top, he dragged his grief-laden body up over the ledge, struggling to catch his breath.

The intake tower was a silent sentinel against the fading sun, several thousand paces ahead. As he heaved himself to his feet, he spied not a single individual, neither through the windows nor in the boulder-strewn yard. Was no one there? Or were the wards masking their presence?

He wondered how many had stood here before him. Had anyone, in the seven centuries of the prison’s existence, ever been fool enough to break into Tartarus?

Tristan crunched toward the wards, noting a slight distortion in the air like looking through a thin wall of water. It buzzed against his hand as he pushed against their teasing pliability.

He unsheathed the Typhon broadsword from his back, then stabbed it into the wards. The air distorted around the tip, and for one relief-filled moment, Tristan could’ve sworn he saw a tiny tear forming. He pushed harder, but the wards fought back, the tear restitching as a red glow pulsed brighter at the contact point.

Tristan was blasted backward in an eruption of crimson sparks, his feet skidding through the gravel.

He peered into the yard, wondering if anyone could see him out here. He knew there were no guards—the wards were the guards—but could the prisoners sense him?

Could she sense him?

He pulled the snakebite from his pocket, then shot a tiny gust of wind—all he had left—into the bomb before tossing it toward the edge of the wards. He dashed off the cliff, grabbing the edge as he dangled over the side and nearly losing his grip when the ground-shaking explosion threw stones against his fingers.

As the smoke cleared, he pulled himself up—and his final ember of hope was snuffed out.

The snakebite had failed, evidenced by the perfect semi-circle of scorched dirt above which the shimmering wards were still intact.

Fuck .

He threw his head back and roared to the sky, then barreled into the wards, banging his fists, feet, head and shoulders against them.

He refused to believe he couldn’t break through, couldn’t get to her.

Seconds, minutes, hours ticked by as he beat himself against the impenetrable shield, the indifferent moon above the only witness to his crushing failure.

Until a burst of rainbow light flashed in his peripheral vision.

“You won’t get to her that way.”

The soft voice of Ione Saros, leader of the Teles Chrysos rebels—and his former lover—did nothing to quell his rage.

He cuffed her throat, a feral beast driven by instinct and madness, and slammed her into the wards. Her glistening white wings shuddered.

“Leave me,” he growled, gnashing his teeth and exposing his sharp canines.

She snarled back, baring her own fangs, and the sight shocked him into releasing her. They were so different from the delicate human teeth he remembered. “You don’t frighten me, Tristan. You never have.”

Her indigo eyes gleamed with affection and, for a single moment, he was pitched back to the night he’d confessed his love for her. The night he’d attempted to Turn her.

The night he’d lost her.

She appeared only a few years older than she had then, her mortality inching glacially forward. He wondered if he looked any different to her. Had the centuries been as kind? Or could she see the buried scars her loss had inspired?

A violent, painful maelstrom seized his heart—past and present colliding.

She expelled a bitter laugh. “I confess, I thought you might have been a bit happier to see me after I rescued you from your brother. Or that you might have stayed in Akti long enough to thank me.” She leveled him with a pleading stare.

He bit back his fury. Why hadn’t Ione let him know she’d survived? That the Turning had been successful? What the fuck had she been doing for the past two centuries, and why had she only come for him now?

“We have so much to discuss,” she said, as if reading every question written across his anguished face. “I will tell you everything, but you need to return with me, Prince.”

“I’m not a fucking Prince anymore,” he spat. “That dream died the moment Eamon took Cassandra from me. I don’t want any part of a plan that doesn’t start with getting her back.”

Pain, envy even, flashed through Ione’s eyes before she smoothed her expression and dared to place a hand on his shoulder. He shook her off. “If you want any hope of freeing her, I need you to trust me.” She pulled a glowing fire opal from her fur-lined cloak. “ Please .”

Was it the plea of a long-lost love, desperate to rekindle their passion? Or was it the plea of a leader, determined to save her people and in need of a partner with the right title and history to do so?

He couldn’t yet tell. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. But what were his choices? Stay here and break himself against these wards? Flee from Ione again and traipse unprotected across a continent on the brink of civil war? Wait for his brother to capture him again?

Or take a chance on the female in front of him? A female who, once upon a time, he’d trusted with his most secret wishes for this world.

He gazed up at the tower, his shoulders dropping. “I never told her.”

“Told her what?”

“That I loved her.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “That I love her. She’s trapped in there, fragile and frightened, without even the certainty of my feelings for comfort. I have to fix this, Ione. This world means fucking nothing to me without her. If I can’t break through these wards myself, then I will raise an army to free her.”

A forced smile crawled across Ione’s face as she reached for him. “We have one of those.”

He didn’t know how to read her, but he grabbed her hand tight as she murmured the name of their destination into the opal and the world around them dissolved into strings of rainbow light.