Chapter Twenty-Three
I wait only thirty seconds, long enough for Bram to leave this floor, before I burst out of my door and race down the stairs,
across the frozen courtyard, and up the stairs of the east wing.
I don’t bother knocking, and the ornately carved door isn’t locked.
The room is dark, and in the middle of the bed, Emmett’s sleeping form is tucked under a pile of blankets. I am flooded with
relief that there isn’t someone next to him. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d found Thalia here.
I shove his shoulder. “Emmett, please, wake up.”
He startles awake. “Ivy?” His voice is gravelly with sleep and he rubs at his eyes.
“We have to go.” I throw the blankets off of him, then snatch the jacket hanging on the back of his desk chair and toss it
at him. “Get up, now.”
I’m reminded of a night just like this, months ago. I burst into Emmett’s room right after Queen Mor told me I’d lost the
competition for Bram’s hand. I was panicked then, too. If only I’d known.
“What’s happening?” Emmett says groggily. His long hair hangs over his face. He makes an attempt to brush it away, but it flops right back.
“Bram knows.” I pull shoes from the wardrobe and throw them to the edge of his bed. “He knows about us.”
“How?” Emmett is moving, but too slow for my taste.
“He came to my room glamoured as you. I think he suspected it was you who was knocking earlier, so he left and came back.”
I swallow the sob crawling up my throat. “I thought he was you.”
At this, Emmett springs from the bed and races over to me.
He captures my face in his hands and tips it from left to right, looking for any signs of harm. “Are you all right? Did he—”
“I’m fine. He didn’t get far.”
Emmett sighs in wordless relief, then slips on his breeches, his jacket, and laces up his boots.
He rises and grabs both my hands in his. We’re both shaking a little, but neither of us acknowledges it.
“Are you ready?” he asks. His eyes are so soft, and in them I see how deeply he wants to protect me, how it kills him that
he can’t.
“It’s time. It has to be now.”
“Marion and Faith? Rhion? Your sister?” he asks, and a stab of pain bolts through me.
“We don’t have time. Did you send Nan the letter?”
Emmett nods, his eyes swimming with grief.
“Then let’s go,” I say.
We race across the castle to my room, which feels tainted and wrong now. The bed is rumpled, the carpet corner askew from
where I ran out the door. Mercifully, Ferrinus is right where I left it, tucked safely between the bedframe and the mattress.
I’m grateful Emmett and I had the foresight to create a backup plan last night, but I never dreamed we’d have to put it into action so soon.
He helps me out of my nightclothes and into a simple black dress, and I toss my blue cloak over it. I hide the knife in the
interior pocket, its weight a steady comfort.
We take the back service staircase down into the dungeons, hoping to avoid Bram or his guards.
The first guard we encounter stands at the entrance to the dungeons; when he sees Emmett and me, he waves us by lazily.
I feign tripping over the hem of my dress and fling myself onto the ground at the guard’s feet.
As he bends to help me up, Emmett uses his height to reach over his head and swipe the set of keys that hangs on the pegboard
above the guard’s chair.
The dungeons smell of rot and damp earth. Emmett is so tall, he must duck as we navigate the dark, narrow passages.
His breathing is ragged, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides. I run a finger over his white knuckles and realize
he probably hasn’t been down here since he himself was a prisoner.
“Are you all right?” I ask him. “I can do this on my own if you need me to.”
He grits his teeth and shakes his head. “I’ll be fine.” Then he glances back to the sliver of light behind us, marking the
entrance. “Did you know they threw me down those stairs?” he asks softly.
“I’ll kill them all for you,” I whisper, surprised to find I mean it. Bram coming to my room in a glamour, touching me like
his right to my body was inherent, has filled me with an inferno’s worth of rage. My anger is no longer some simmering thing
I can live with.
Emmett shakes his head. “No. You don’t need to kill them all, you only need to deal with the one.”
Our footsteps squelch through the damp earth until we finally reach the last cell. In the deepest, darkest bowels of the prison,
she is illuminated by only a single, dim faerielight.
“Ivy Benton.” Her voice is croaky with disuse. She looks to my left and laughs. “And Emmett De Vere. My, you two are predictable.”
I have no time for small talk or her tricks. “This ends tonight. You need to take us back to England.”
“That sounds rather difficult given my current predicament.” She arches a perfect brow and waves her thin hand toward the
bars of her cell. Without the trappings of her court gowns or bejeweled tiaras, she looks even younger than usual. Her flawless
skin is wan and her dark hair hangs limp around her shoulders. Her doe eyes might read as childlike if not for the fathomless
darkness within them.
“No more talking in circles,” I declare. “We don’t have the time.”
I pull Ferrinus from my cloak and hold it up to the dim faerielight. She squints her eyes and then goes still. “Where did
you get that?” she asks, a quiver in her voice betraying a crack in her armor.
“I will use it to kill you if you don’t take me and Emmett back to England this very moment and lock the door behind you.
You locked it four hundred years ago. I know you know how.”
“Those are my options?” she asks, her voice steady. “Take you and the boy home or die?”
“And lock the door. But yes.”
She sizes me up with her fathomless, dark eyes. “What about your sister? Your friends? Weren’t you all thick as thieves?”
I place my hands on my hips and swallow the rising nausea. “You know nothing of love, so I won’t waste time speaking of it
to you.”
Mor tilts her face, like a bird of prey examining a mouse. “Is that what you think? You know, you never asked me why I sent Lydia here the first time. I kept waiting for you to question me, but perhaps you’re less clever than I’d hoped.”
I can’t help myself; I take her bait. “Why, then? If you’re so eager to tell me.”
“I may have shut the door between our worlds, but I never lost sight of who I was, or where I truly belonged. I might have
found the mass torture of humans distasteful during my reign, but I understood that it served an important function in keeping
the court sated. Do you think Lydia is the only misguided youth I sent to the Otherworld? There were hundreds just like her,
begging for escape, and to some of them, I granted it. Every few years, I would pass a human through the door as a show of
goodwill to the fae court. I believed my former husband was still ruling and I thought it a gesture of diplomacy. I didn’t
realize Bram had killed him long ago.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Queen Mor takes a sharp breath. “So that you understand where my loyalties will always lie.”
I’m counting on that.
“Only Lydia wasn’t supposed to come back to England. You Benton sisters ruined everything.”
“Shouldn’t you have known then that something was wrong?”
“I thought my ex-husband had sent her home. He did that from time to time, back when he was still living. As always, my love
for my son blinded me to his true nature,” she says.
At the thought of Lydia, a stab of pain shoots through my chest. We’ve failed each other in so many ways, but I have to believe
I’m doing right by her now.
“Bram has gone mad, or maybe he was mad to begin with. But he’s found Emmett and me out and he’s going to kill at least one of us. We need to go, quickly, before we are discovered.”
Queen Mor pushes herself up off the ground. In her dirty white chemise, threadbare blanket over her shoulders, she looks like
a phantom.
Her black eyes rake over Emmett. “I always told you your soft heart was going to be the death of you, Emmett De Vere. You’re
so like your father.”
“I wouldn’t know.” He growls. “I never got the chance to know him before you killed him.”
“Oh, that.” She sighs like she’s sad about Edgar’s death. “I figured one of two things was true; either that he’d helped Bram
with his coup—I knew he’d been leaving you little hidden messages for years—or he hadn’t, and Bram was going to torture him
worse than I ever would have. It was a punishment or a mercy depending on how you look at it.”
Emmett’s face crumples. “It was murder.”
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t care for him. I regret what I had to do to poor Edgar. He was one of my favorite husbands.”
This is already going on too long; we can’t let her goad us like this. I know her well enough by now to know there is a good
chance she is biding her time, waiting for Bram to find us down here, to prove her loyalty to him.
I flash the knife. “The time for discussion is over. What will it be?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ve always been rather invested in my own self-preservation. Open the cell.”
Emmett produces the heavy brass key ring he swiped from its hook by the door.
The lock slides open and Queen Mor steps out of her cell with all the grace of a queen parading in front of her people.
She holds her hands out to us.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
We nod and take one hand in each. Like her son, her skin is the same cool temperature of the air. It’s like holding hands
with a dead body.
The air goes still, and it’s as if I can faintly hear another far-off lock click open, and then the door materializes in front
of us.
It first appears as a rectangle of light, appearing at eye height, about the size of a painting. Slowly, it expands until
it’s large enough for a human to step through.
It’s daytime in England and the sudden change of light burns my eyes. Queen Mor tugs our hands, and without any fanfare, the
three of us walk through together. In half a heartbeat we travel from the dungeons of the Otherworld into the grand foyer
of Kensington Palace.