House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas

“Fuck you,” Ruhn snarled.

The hawk shifter weighed the knife in his hands. “His father has disowned him. Or whatever’s left of his body.” A wink at Ruhn. “Your father has done the same.”

Hunt didn’t miss the shock that rippled over Ruhn’s face. At his father’s betrayal? Or at his cousin’s demise? Did such things even matter down here?

Baxian rasped to the Hawk, “You’re a fucking liar. Always were … always will be.”

The Hawk smiled up at Baxian. “How about we start with your tongue today, traitor?”

To Baxian’s credit, he stuck out his tongue toward the Hawk in invitation.

Hunt smirked. Yeah—they were all in this together. To the bitter end.

The Hawk cut his stare toward Hunt. “You’ll be next, Athalar.”

“Come and get it,” Hunt gasped. Ruhn extended his tongue as well.

The Hawk simmered with rage at their defiance, white wings glowing with unearthly power. But slowly, a smile lit his face—horrific in its calculation, its gradual delight as Pollux turned, the poker white-hot and rippling with heat.

“Who’s first?” the Hammer crooned. The angel stood poised, silhouetted against the blazing fire behind him.

Hunt opened his mouth, his last bit of bravado before the shitshow began, but in the shadows behind Pollux, beyond the fireplace, something dark moved. Something darker than shadow.

Not Ruhn’s shadows. The prince didn’t seem to be able to access those when constrained by the gorsian shackles. Only the prince’s mind-speaking abilities remained.

This shadow was different—darker, older. Watching them.

Watching Hunt.

Hallucinations: Bad, because it meant he had some infection that even his immortal body couldn’t fight off. Good, because it meant he might quietly slip away into death’s embrace. Bad, because it meant the Asteri might turn their attention fully to Bryce. Good, because the pain would be gone. Bad, because he still held out some stupid, fool’s hope deep in his heart of seeing her again. Good, because Bryce wouldn’t come looking for him if he was dead.

Across the room, the thing in the shadows moved. Just slightly. Like it had crooked a finger at him.

Death. That was the thing in the shadows.

And now it beckoned.



* * *



Night.

Borne on a raft of oblivion, Ruhn drifted across a sea of pain.

The last thing he remembered was the sound and sight of his small intestine splattering on the ground, pain as sharp as—well, as sharp as the curved knife the Hawk had plunged into his gut.

He wondered when the shifter would disembowel them with his talons in his hawk form, as he was fond of doing. Ruhn could imagine it easily: the Hawk perching on his torso and clawing out his organs, pecking at them with that razor-sharp beak. He’d heal, and then the Hawk would begin again. Over and over—

Ruhn had been a fool to think nothing that happened down here could be worse than the years of torture at his father’s hands. The burns, the gorsian shackles his father had put him in to keep him from fighting back, keep him from healing—then, at least, he’d developed his own ways of surviving, of recovering. But now there was only pain, then oblivion, then pain again.

Had he died? Or been a whisper away from death, as Vanir could be if the blow wasn’t truly fatal? His Fae body would regenerate the organs, even slowed by the gorsian shackles.

Night.

The female voice echoed across the starlit sea. Like a lighthouse shining in the distance.

Night.

Here, there was no escape from her voice. If he roused himself, the pain would wash over the raft and he’d drown in it. So he had no choice but to listen, to drift toward that beacon.

Gods, what did he do to you?

Anger and grief filled the question as it came from all around him, from inside him.

Ruhn managed to say, Nothing you haven’t done a thousand times yourself.

Then she stood there with him, on his raft. Lidia. Fire streamed off her body, but he could see her perfect face. The most beautiful female he’d ever seen. A flawless mask over a rotted heart.

His enemy. His lover. The soul he’d thought was—

She knelt and extended a hand toward him. I’m so sorry.

Ruhn shifted beyond her reach. As much movement as he could manage, even here. Something like agony flashed in her eyes, but she didn’t try to touch him again.

He must have been killed today. Or come close to it, if she was here. If he had no defenses left and she’d broken through that mental wall for the first time since he’d learned who she was.

What had they done to Cormac to render him irrevocably dead?

He couldn’t stop the memory from flooding him, of sitting beside Cormac in that bar before they went to the Eternal City, of that one moment he thought he’d glimpsed the person his cousin might have been. The friend Cormac might have become, if he hadn’t been systematically stripped of kindness by King Morven.

It shouldn’t have been a shock to Ruhn, that the two kings had disowned their sons. Though one king had fire in his veins and the other shadows, Einar and Morven were more alike than anyone realized.

Ruhn had always held some scrap of hope that his father saw the Asteri for what they truly were, and that if it ever came down to it, his father would make the right choice. That the orrery in his study, the years spent looking for patterns in light and space … that it had meant something larger. That it wasn’t simply the idle studying of a bored royal who needed to feel more important in the grand scheme of things than he actually was.