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He came down from the dais then, and gods, the size of him. He stood a full head above me, and I am not a small man. He moved through the dark of his own hall the way a current moves through deep water. Holy without effort and without sound, the shadow-robes flowing endlessly about his feet.

“Well,” the ice-blue eyes settled on Alexandra. “I suggest we put her somewhere rather more comfortable than your arms before you drop her out of sheer stubbornness. Follow me.”

He turned and walked without waiting for a reply, and we followed, because what else was there to do.

He led us up through the castle, and I did not mark the way, knowing that turning back might have cost me my life, given how vast the place was.

Staircases wound upward past all reason; galleries opened on one side to that bottomless, storming darkness. Corridors hung with tapestries long gone to gray rags, lined with doors that made me wonder if they had been opened in the past decade. Everywhere touched with the same gothic decay. With the same sourceless blue light and the same sense of a place far too large and far too old for the handful of things that still moved within it.

And then he brought us, of all places, to a bedchamber.

It was dark and grand, and an immense canopied bed stood against the far wall, its black posts carved into the same clawing, twisting shapes as his throne. One hung with drapes, the deep red of old wine or old blood. Cold blue light spilled from sconces shaped like reaching hands, and a great window framed nothing but the stormy and restless sky. It was beautiful, or as beautiful as a tomb could be. Regardless, I crossed the room towards that monstrous bed and laid Alexandra down upon it as gently as if it were our own. But the sight of her there, so small and gray against all that dark and savage grandeur, very nearly unraveled me.

The Shadow King came to stand over her, and without a word, without so much as a glance at me, he reached down and began to draw back the fabric at her throat to bear the spreading dark beneath.

I had his wrist in my hand before I knew I had even moved.

A surely suicidal move on my part, but one that couldn’t be helped all the same. Not when the beast contained within me was on the verge of erupting.

However, the king looked unaffected by this, nor by the deep, rumbling growl that escaped my lips before I had a chance to swallow it down. It was hardly surprising because his shadows answered before he did. Those living markings poured down his forearm in a heartbeat, coiling, tightening, wrapping about my hand and wrist like a fistful of cold serpents. They clamped down until I felt my bones creak in their grip. All the while, he had not even so much as flinched.

He hadn’t even looked at me. The darkness had done everything for him and went on doing it with slow and patient pressure that promised to squeeze until there was nothing left of my hand to close onto.

“I can assure you,” he said, mild as still water, his eyes never leaving her, “that I mean her no harm. That, after all, is the very reason you have carried her into the heart of my kingdom. Is it not, young king?”

A hand settled on my shoulder, and I looked to Theron, the sight of him enough to clear my head. That and the weight of his hand. A gesture that no doubt saved both our lives, mine and Alexandra’s, as it was enough of a warning and a reminder of exactly how much I stood to lose by being a fool in this place.

It was enough for me to let go.

The shadows withdrew from my hand at once, as if sensing my intent and no longer finding it threatening. They slid back up his arm to settle into stillness, and I, in turn, forced myself to step back to give him room. Even though every part of me was screaming against it. Screaming against letting the master of shadows look at what had been done to the woman I loved.

But now that he had room to do so, he drew the fabric aside. His reaction was immediate, as he went very still.

For the first time since we had entered his realm, something cracked the perfect, cold facade. His brow drew down, and the blue of his eyes flared brighter. Even the shadows along his skin went taut and agitated, rising off him in fine, restless wisps. When he spoke, even the arrogance had gone out of his voice, leaving something harder and colder in its place.

“This should not be here.” He said it almost to himself, fingers hovering above the black veins without quite touching them, as though even he would not lay his hand to this. “This is not hers. This is not solely the means of any witch, nor is it by the hand of any god.” His gaze cut up to me, suddenly highly focused. “This is mine… My shadows. Torn out of my realm and poured into a mortal vessel like cheap wine into a cracked cup.” The markings on his skin churned. “Stolen, and foolishly so. But how? How did this happen?”

So, I told him.

All of it.

The buried chamber, the box, the beating heart. The darkness that had worn my brother and butchered my people and bled through the Rift into another world. The cause of it, a being called Demetrios, and what little we knew of him. I explained the darkness that had risen from that empty box and sunk into her chest. Every single piece of information was one he listened to without a word. His face was a mask of cold fury that I understood better than most.

“Can you help her?” I asked when it was done. “Can you take it out of her?”

He looked at me for a long moment before turning back to her. When he finally answered, it was not an answer at all.

“Shadow is my domain. There is not a thread of it in either world that is not mine by right.” His voice was quiet, certain. “What is mine, I may reclaim whenever I choose.”

It was not a yes.

But it wasn’t a no, either.

Which meant that I had spent enough of these last days bargaining with kings to know exactly what it was.

“And what,” I said through gritted teeth, “will it cost me?”

The corner of his mouth curved, and his eyes began to glow, that glacial blue deepening until it lit the hollows of his terrible face from within.