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Hands took her waist, lifting her and placing her on her feet with her back against the stone in exactly the spot where the person had been standing. A dark silhouette blotted out the orange sun in the dome, and Ryn froze, blinking rapidly when her eyes didn’t adjust.

“You should watch where you’re going.”

Xerxes’s voice.

Ryn realized she’d grabbed his sleeves like she’d been ready to toss him aside and run for her life. She wondered what she was so afraid of, but she shook her head when it occurred to her she’d imagined an Intelligentsia hood, thin purple lips, and dark eyes.

She glanced up, able to make out Xerxes’s features now. She was still squeezing the life out of his sleeves. He looked irritated about it.

Ryn dropped her hands. “Sorry,” she rasped again. She inhaled quickly and let it out just as fast. His face didn’t change from its frown, his pulled-together brows, his hard jaw. A strange coldness drifted from him, encompassing her like she’d stumbled into a dark cellar.

He didn’t speak for several more seconds, and she couldn’t take it. “Is this about Damon?” she asked.

He blinked. A few times. “What about Damon?” His expression morphed into an odd mix of things she couldn’t interpret anymore.

“Well, he and I…” It occurred to Ryn that Xerxes really might not have seen anything in the atrium. “Nothing,” she said, waving a hand between them.

Xerxes was quiet for a moment, but after several more seconds of hard staring, he drew away and let out a huff. He put his hands on his hips and began to pace. “I’m angry, Ryn,” he said. When he turned around to wander back, his eyes were closed, a crease on his forehead. “You shouldn’t be here.”

She noticed his collar was scuffed, his royal coat was undone, his boots were only half laced. She hadn’t been able to tell before in the darkness, but now that she could see him, he looked a little bit… monstrous.

“Why are you angry?” she dared to ask.

“Because everyone lies to me,” he said. “I can’t trust the people here. I can’t stand liars.”

Ryn closed her mouth. When would Xerxes figure out that a liar stood right in front of him?

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked in a small voice.

Xerxes took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Honestly? No,” he said. He folded his arms and settled his miserable, pointed gaze on her again.

Ryn swallowed. “What do you want to do, then?” she asked.

He didn’t avert his stare. “I just want to look at you, Maiden. To prove to myself that you’re real and not a figment of my delusions.

Because if you’re real, there might be an end to this torment soon, and all I have to do is hang on a little longer.

” Ryn’s heart squeezed. She’d been so distracted by everything; she’d momentarily forgotten that he’d begged her for help.

“But most of all,” he went on, “I want to go steal those cursed cookies.” He unfolded his arms and resumed his pacing.

Ryn thought he was joking, but his frown didn’t waver. He glared in the direction of the kitchens where the smell of baking came from. And Ryn couldn’t stop herself—she laughed.

He tore his gaze back to her again, a look of shock etched over his features. He watched as she slid down the wall a few inches, losing her balance. As she slapped a hand over her mouth to quiet herself.

“How many?” she finally asked when she could speak. “How many cookies do you want to steal, I mean?”

Xerxes bit his lips together. The shadow of a smirk found his mouth. The ominous glaze had left his face—In fact, there was a twinkle in his eye when he leaned toward her and whispered, “All of them.”

It wasn’t easy to sneak into the kitchen without anyone noticing, but the hardest part was rolling out two carts piled with baskets of cookies before the guards did their rounds or the kitchen staff emerged from the break room.

Only three baskets remained inside the kitchen, and Xerxes and Ryn risked the journey back in to get them.

They bumped into each other on the way out, and Xerxes dropped a basket to the floor.

Two dozen cookies shattered and bounced away, and he looked up at Ryn with wide eyes.

“Run,” he whispered. He grabbed her hand and tugged her out the swinging doors just as the staff door screeched open across the kitchen.

They each took a cart and fled down the halls, the metal wheels squeaking and rattling from the weight. “This way!” Xerxes veered into an unlit passage.

Ryn’s heart raced; it would be one thing if the King was caught stealing from the kitchens, but it would mean something else entirely if she was caught. She grinned as they veered around a bend and came to the foot of a spiral staircase.

Xerxes grabbed the baskets from his cart and two from Ryn’s, and he darted up the stairs with them. Ryn took her remaining baskets and chased him up, their tapping footsteps echoing through the narrow space.

They emerged at the top of an outlook tower. Heavy winds stole Ryn’s breath, tossing her hair from her shoulders. The storm hadn’t let up yet, and rain pattered over the glass palace below.

Xerxes dropped his baskets, letting them spill over the ground, and he grabbed a cookie.

He hurled it into the storm. “This is for you from your King, Per-Siana!” he shouted.

“Enjoy it!” He grabbed a basket and flung the whole thing from the tower next, sending a sprinkle of soggy chunks onto a glass roof below.

Ryn sighed and took a cookie from her own basket. She bit it while she watched him release his wrath upon the baking.

Xerxes unleashed a roar over the city, a spiteful laugh mixed with a victorious sound that rivalled the thunder crackling in the heavens. His navy coat fluttered in the wind as he staggered back, his chest pumping while he caught his breath.

His face changed when he noticed Ryn. “Don’t eat them.” He walked over and tried to flick the cookie from her hand, but she maneuvered out of the way, and he huffed. “They’re cursed. I told you that,” he said.

Ryn raised a brow and licked the crumbs from her lips. “But they’re delicious.”

Xerxes’s mouth twisted in contemplation.

“Fine.” He took a cookie, stared at it, then he ate it in two bites.

“But the rest of them must die,” he said from a full mouth.

He lifted two more baskets and dumped them down the side of the tower where they smacked the same roof below and melted in the rain.

Ryn leaned against the rail on her palms. She could see the whole Mother City from this high up.

She could almost spot the hills surrounding the village she grew up in with her mother and father too.

Her gaze dropped to the spoiled cookies littering the palace roof when she thought about that.

Her home village was a harsh reminder of what she was, and that the King beside her hated Adriels.

A slow, ferocious urge lifted through Ryn’s chest. She eyed the baskets of cookies.

She found herself grabbing one and throwing it with all her might into the rain like Xerxes had.

She imagined it splattering against the faces of those who would see her dead, all those who continued to persecute her people in the kingdom, and all those she had to hide from in the palace.

She didn’t mean to imagine Kai among them, but the moment she pictured her cousin out there, she grabbed a handful of cookies and threw them at him, one by one.

He’d sent her here. He was the reason she was in this position.

He hadn’t stopped her from coming back to the palace even though it could mean her death.

He chose the Priesthood over her. Divinities, he abandoned her.

Ryn threw a cookie with every ounce of strength as a tear broke loose and warmed her face.

A silent sob escaped, dissolving into the noise of the storm. Because she didn’t hate Kai. She loved him.

That was why it hurt more.

As she watched her last cookie descend over the side of the palace, she traced the trajectory and gasped. “Oh no…” She looked around the tower for a place to hide and dropped to her knees behind the rail as the cookie splattered onto the head of a passing Folke guard.

The guard spun around far below, drawing his sword, and Xerxes’s coarse laughter erupted through the tower.

Ryn giggled, smacking a hand over her mouth as she peeked over the rail from her hiding place.

The guard started running through the garden like he was chasing someone and disappeared into the orchard.

Xerxes tossed the last basket away. He breathed a long sigh of relief and leaned out the opening, sticking his head from the cover of the tower just enough for rain to drizzle into his hair.

“What were those cookies for anyway?” Ryn asked.

“You don’t know?” Xerxes panted, drawing himself back. He dragged a hand through his messy, damp locks. “Every Weylin knows why we make ginger cookies in the seventh month. Didn’t you ever have to sing that terrible ‘ginger song’ for the King’s prosperity when you were a child?”

The blood drained from Ryn’s face. She turned toward the city, away from Xerxes. “Ah. Right,” she said, her fingers gripping tight to the rail.

She heard him chuckle behind her, his foot scraping over the stone floor as if he was nudging cookie crumbs around with his toes.

“Ah. That relieved more stress than even the drills I’ve been doing with the Folke,” he admitted.

“What are you training so hard for?” Ryn asked.

When he didn’t answer, she dragged her gaze back to find his smile vanished. The lightness that came with destroying the cookies had left, replaced by the dark look he had before in the hall. “I did a bad thing,” he said. His throat constricted. “And I think very soon, I’ll pay for it.”