House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

She couldn’t decide whom she hated more: Hunt, Danika, or herself for not seeing their lies. Not wanting to see any of it. It haunted every step, every breath, that loathing. Burned deep inside.

“Even if no enemy seeks it, it is worth ensuring that the Horn does not fall into the wrong hands.”

“Only Fae hands, right?” She smiled coldly. “I thought your Chosen One son was put on its tail.”

“He is otherwise occupied.” Ruhn must have told him to go fuck himself.

“Well, if you can think where Danika unloaded it in her synth-high stupor, I’m all ears.”

“It is no trivial matter. Even if the Horn is long defunct, it still holds a special place in Fae history. It will mean a great deal to my people if it is recovered. I’d think with your professional expertise, such a search would be of interest to you. And your employer.”

She looked back at her computer screen. “Whatever.”

He paused, and then his power buzzed, warping every audio feed before he said, “I loved your mother very much, you know.”

“Yeah, so much you left a scar on her face.”

She could have sworn he flinched. “Do not think I have not spent every moment since then regretting my actions. Living in shame.”

“Could have fooled me.”

His power rumbled through the room. “You are so much like her. More than you know. She never forgave anyone for anything.”

“I take that as a compliment.” That fire burned and raged inside her head, her bones.

Her father said quietly, “I would have made her my queen. I had the paperwork ready.”

She blinked. “How surprisingly un-elitist of you.” Her mother had never suggested, never hinted at it. “She would have hated being queen. She would have said no.”

“She loved me enough to have said yes.” Absolute certainty laced his words.

“You think that somehow erases what you did?”

“No. Nothing shall ever erase what I did.”

“Let’s skip the woe-is-me bullshit. You came here after all these years to tell me this crap?”

Her father looked at her for a long moment. Then strode for the door, opening it in silence. But he said before he stepped into the street, his red hair gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, “I came here after all these years to tell you that you may be like your mother, but you are also more like me than you realize.” His amber eyes—her own—flickered. “And that is not a good thing.”

The door shut, the gallery darkening. Bryce stared at the computer screen before her, then typed in a few words.

There was still nothing on Hunt. No mention of him in the news. Not a whisper about whether the Umbra Mortis was imprisoned or tortured or alive or dead.

As if he had never existed. As if she had dreamed him up.





69

Hunt ate only because his body demanded it, slept because there was nothing else to do, and watched the TV screen in the hall beyond his cell bars because he’d brought this upon himself and Vik and Justinian and there was no undoing it.

Micah had left the latter’s body up. Justinian would hang there for seven full days and then be pulled off the crucifix—and dumped into the Istros. No Sailings for traitors. Just the bellies of the river beasts.

Viktoria’s box had already been dumped into the Melinoë Trench.

The thought of her trapped on the seafloor, the deepest place in Midgard, nothing but dark and silence and that tight, tight space …

Dreams of her suffering had launched Hunt over to the toilet, puking up his guts.

And then the itching began. Deep in his back, radiating through the framework now beginning to regrow, it itched and itched and itched. His fledgling wings remained sore enough that scratching them resulted in near-blinding pain, and as the hours ticked by, each new bit of growth had him clenching his jaw against it.

A waste, he silently told his body. A big fucking waste to regrow his wings, when he was likely hours or days away from an execution.

He’d had no visitors since Isaiah six days ago. He’d tracked the time by watching the sunlight shift in the atrium on the TV feed.

Not a whisper from Bryce. Not that he dared hope she’d somehow find a way to see him, if only to let him beg on his knees for her forgiveness. To tell her what he needed to say.

Maybe Micah would let him rot down here. Let him go mad like Vik, buried beneath the earth, unable to fly, unable to feel fresh air on his face.

The doors down the hall hissed, and Hunt blinked, rising from his silence. Even his miserably itching wings halted their torture.

But the female scent that hit him a heartbeat later was not Bryce’s.

It was a scent he knew just as well—would never forget as long as he lived. A scent that stalked his nightmares, whetted his rage into a thing that made it impossible to think.

The Archangel of northwestern Pangera smiled as she appeared before his cell. He’d never get used to it: how much she looked like Shahar. “This seems familiar,” Sandriel said. Her voice was soft, beautiful. Like music. Her face was, too.

And yet her eyes, the color of fresh-tilled soil, gave her away. They were sharp, honed by millennia of cruelty and near-unchecked power. Eyes that delighted in pain and bloodshed and despair. That had always been the difference between her and Shahar—their eyes. Warmth in one; death in the other.