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I didn’t stop until I reached our chambers.

I laid her on the bed, in the center of it, on the cool, clean sheets that still held the shape of where we had slept, and drew the coverlet over her. Then, for a moment, I simply stood and looked at her. So small in that great bed. So grey against the white linen. And I felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, the cold and helpless terror of a man who didn’t know how to save the only thing he couldn’t live without.

In the end, it was Aster who broke the silence.

“Atlas,” he said, and there was something careful in it. He had begun to pace the length of the chamber, which Aster did only when something weighed on him.

“What?” It came out sharper than I meant. I dragged in a breath and tried again. “What is it, Aster?”

He stopped. Swallowed hard before his gaze went to Alexandra on the bed, then to the floor. Then, finally, back to me, and for the first time in a very long time, my right-hand man looked nervous.

“I think I know who might be able to help her.”

“A healer cannot help with this.” I shook my head. “You saw what it did to my power…”

“Not a healer.” He said it quietly, and the unease in his voice, so unlike him, made me go still.

“Aster.” I straightened, my eyes narrowing. “ I swear to every fucking God out there, if you know a way to save her, then just fucking say it! Speak. Now.”

The muscle in his jaw jumped. He bit down on whatever caution held him, and his eyes flicked, just once, to my brother before he admitted, “You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t care in the slightest whether I fucking like it.” My voice had dropped to something low and dangerous, and I couldn’t stop it. “If there is even the smallest chance it saves her, then there is nothing in either world I would not do, and nothing you could say that I am not willing to hear. So tell me, Aster. My patience is the last thing I have left, and it is wearing very fucking thin!” I snapped.

His eyes went to Lazaros again. My brother only raised his brows, lifted his hands, and stepped back, washing himself of it entirely.

Aster met my gaze.

“The Gorgon King.”

The name dropped into the room like a stone into still water.

Theron.

Of course. Of course, it was him. Why was it that bastard’s name found its way to the center of my every conversation of late, like a splinter I couldn’t work out of my skin?

I rose from where I had knelt at the edge of the bed and stepped toward Aster. But of course, he held his ground, though his eyes betrayed him with one more darting glance at Lazaros.

“You know full well,” I said, “what manner of creature the Gorgon King is.” I shook my head, the more pressing question rising up beneath the first,

“What the fuck could he possibly do!?”

Aster folded his arms. Opened his mouth, then thought better of whatever he had been about to say, and chose his words again with care.

“You ought to remember, Atlas. Think back. To what we saw when we broke into his fortress all those years ago.”

I did remember that day. Far too well.

“Artefacts, fucking thousands of them,” I said.

Aster nodded slowly. “Everywhere. Whole halls of them. And a vault hidden in the Badlands. He had the Weaver’s Torch, the thing that carried us across worlds to reach you in time. A king like that, with treasures like that…” His gaze went to the bed. “He may have something that can help her. Something to draw that darkness back out of her, or failing that, something to tell us what it even is. We are blind down here, Atlas. He is the one creature I know of who might lend us eyes.”

I looked back at her. At Alexandra, lying so still and so pale upon our bed. Her lips slightly parted, the faintest mist of breath the only proof she was with us at all.

And I asked myself the only question that mattered.

Was there anything in either world I wouldn’t give to see her smile at me one more time? To hear that laugh of hers. To watch those green eyes light with mischief, with want. To feel her mouth on mine and her warm back against my chest. Gods, I would even take her swearing at me, as long as it proved she was alive.

There wasn’t. There would never be.