Chapter 82
Chapter Eighty-Two
HOOK
The door slams open, rattling through my bones. Magic leaps from Alice, breaking through whatever tried to hold it shut. We stagger inside, breath heaving.
The room is vast. Suffocating.
The air is thick with magic—dark, cruel, twisted shit. It sinks into my skin and slithers into my lungs like poison. It's wrong, tainted with blood and power.
The whole room is wrong. A place that has seen centuries of suffering and never tired of it. It presses against me, choking, heavy, whispering my name back to me like the room itself knows who I am.
I grit my teeth, tighten my grip on my sword. But it isn't the magic that has my shoulders locked, my chest tight.
It's the throne.
Alice stands beside me, tall and unshaken, her breath drawn slow and steady. I feel her. The same way I feel the pulse beneath my own skin, the pull in the room dragging us both to the same place.
The dais rises at the far end, jagged and uneven, carved from black stone that shifts under the flickering light. The throne is not made.
It is grown.
A monstrous thing, pulled straight from the earth, a twisted crown of bone and stone and thorns. It climbs out of the dais, curling upward in sharp, clawed edges, every inch of it alive with veins of red light that pulse like a beating heart.
The arms of the throne twist like roots, thick and gnarled, gripping the seat like the throne itself decides who gets to sit on it.
It's not just a chair.
This is magic. This is what powers Wonderland, what beats at the very heart of it.
But it isn't the room or the throne that has me tense, and Alice sucking in a soft gasp. It's what's on top of the dais, on the throne, sitting like she fucking owns the place.
The Queen of Hearts.
A smile curls at her lips, her eyes lighting up as we enter. She's watching us. She's been waiting for us.
"Alice," she says.
Guards flank her sides. At her feet, a man, beaten and broken, his face bloodied, his back lashed, and wrists bound in iron.
Thorn.
But even that scene isn't what gets me. It's the thing in her hand that makes my chest tighten.
The amulet.
My amulet.