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

Athalar’s swollen eyes cracked open. Hate blazed in their dark depths.

The halo inked anew upon his brow seemed darker than the shadows of the dungeon. His battered mouth parted in a feral smile, revealing bloodstained teeth. “Morning, sunshine.”

A soft, broken rasp of a laugh sounded to Athalar’s right. And though she knew it was folly, Lidia looked.

Ruhn Danaan, Crown Prince of the Valbaran Fae, was staring at her.

His lip was swollen from where Pollux had torn out his piercing. His eyebrow was crusted with blood from where that hoop had been ripped out, too. Across his tattooed torso, along the arms above his head, blood and dirt and bruises mingled.

The prince’s striking blue eyes were sharp with loathing.

For her.

Pollux slashed his whip into Athalar’s back again, not bothering with questions. No, this was the warm-up. Interrogation would come later.

Baxian still hung unconscious. Pollux had beaten him into a bloody pulp last night after severing his and Athalar’s wings with a blunt-toothed saw. The Helhound didn’t so much as stir.

Night, Lidia tried, casting her voice into the moldy air between herself and the Fae Prince. They’d never spoken mind-to-mind outside of their dreaming, but she’d been trying since he’d arrived here. Again and again, she’d cast her mind toward his. Only silence answered.

Just as it had from the moment Ruhn had learned who she was. What she was.

She knew he could communicate, even with the gorsian stones halting his magic and slowing his healing. Knew he’d done so with his sister before Bryce had escaped.

Night.

Ruhn’s lip pulled back in a silent snarl, blood snaking down his chin.

Pollux’s phone rang, a shrill, strange sound in this ancient shrine to pain. His ministrations halted, a terrible silence in their wake. “Mordoc,” the Hammer said, whip still in one hand. He pivoted from Athalar’s swinging, brutalized body. “Report.”

Lidia didn’t bother to protest the fact that her captain was reporting to the Hammer. Pollux had taken the Harpy’s death personally—he’d commandeered Mordoc and the dreadwolves to find any hint of where Bryce Quinlan might have gone.

That he still believed Bryce was responsible for the Harpy’s death was only because Athalar and Ruhn hadn’t revealed that it was Lidia who’d murdered the Harpy. They knew who she was, and only the fact that she was vital to the rebellion kept them from spilling her secrets.

For a moment, with Pollux turned away, Lidia let her mask drop. Let Ruhn see her true face. The one that had kissed his soul and shared her own with him, their very beings melding.

Ruhn, she pleaded into his mind. Ruhn.

But the Fae Prince did not answer. The hate in his eyes did not lessen. So Lidia donned her Hind’s mask once again.

And as Pollux pocketed his phone and angled his whip anew, the Hind ordered the Hammer in the low, lifeless voice that had been her shield for so long now, “Get the barbed wire instead.”





PART I


THE DROP





1


Bryce Quinlan sat in a chamber so far beneath the mountain above that daylight must have been a myth to the creatures who dwelled there.

For a place that apparently wasn’t Hel, her surroundings sure appeared like it: black stone, subterranean palace, even-more-subterranean interrogation cell … The darkness seemed inherent to the three people standing across from her: a petite female in gray silk, and two winged males clad in black scalelike armor, one of them—the beautiful, powerful male in the center of the trio—literally rippling with shadows and stars.

Rhysand, he’d called himself. The one who looked so much like Ruhn.

It couldn’t be coincidence. Bryce had leapt through the Gate intending to reach Hel, to finally take up Aidas’s and Apollion’s repeated offers to send their armies to Midgard and stop this cycle of galactic conquest. But she’d wound up here instead.

Bryce glanced to the warrior beside Ruhn’s almost-twin. The male who’d found her. Who’d carried the black dagger that had reacted to the Starsword.

His hazel eyes held nothing but cold, predatory alertness.

“Someone has to start talking,” the short female said—the one who’d seemed so shocked to hear Bryce speak in the Old Language, to see the sword. Flickering braziers of something that resembled firstlight gilded the silken strands of her chin-length bob, casting the shadow of her slender jaw in stark relief. Her eyes, a remarkable shade of silver, slid over Bryce but remained unimpressed. “You said your name is Bryce Quinlan. That you come from another world—Midgard.”

Rhysand murmured to the winged male beside him. Translating, perhaps.

The female went on, “If you are to be believed, how is it that you came here? Why did you come here?”

Bryce surveyed the otherwise empty cell. No table glittering with torture instruments, no breaks in the solid stone beyond the door and the grate in the center of the floor, a few feet away. A grate from which she could have sworn a hissing sound emanated.

“What world is this?” Bryce rasped, the words gravelly. After Ruhn’s body double had introduced himself in that lovely, cozy foyer, he’d grabbed her hand. The strength of his grip, the brush of his calluses against her skin had been the only solid things as wind and darkness had roared around them, the world dropping away—and then there was only solid rock and dim lighting. She’d been brought to a palace carved beneath a mountain, and then down the narrow stairs to this dungeon. Where he’d pointed to the lone chair in the center of the room in silent command.