“When I sleep,” she murmured, “I can hear your heart beating through the stone.” She angled her head, as if the city view held some answer. “Can you hear mine?” He wasn’t sure if she truly meant to address him, but he said, “No, lady. I cannot.” Her too-thin shoulders seemed to curve inward. “No one ever does. No one ever looked—not really.” A

I didn’t remember the bond between us being so hard to hear, even when I’d dwelled on this estate and he’d used it to see if I was still breathing, to make sure my despair hadn’t swallowed me whole.

He said at last, “I’m a warrior. I’ve walked beside Death my entire life. I would be more afraid for her, to have that power. But not afraid of her.”

It was the former he saw first, stumbling out of the dark, wide-eyed, her fear a tang that whetted his rage into something so sharp he could barely think, barely breathe—

Nesta had been beautiful as a human woman. As High Fae, she was devastating. From the utter stillness with which Cassian stood beside me, I wondered if he thought the same thing.

“She could not kill them in the end—they were too strong. They could only be contained.” The Carver wiped a hand through the circles he’d drawn, erasing them wholly. “I knew that long before she ever trapped them—took it upon myself to find my way here.”

“What if I tell you what the rock and darkness and sea beyond whispered to me, Lord of Bloodshed? How they shuddered in fear, on that island across the sea. How they trembled when she emerged. She took something—something precious. She ripped it out with her teeth.”

I raised a brow. Azriel shrugged. “We—Rhys, Cass, and I—will occasionally remind each other that what we think to be our greatest weakness can sometimes be our biggest strength. And that the most unlikely person can alter the course of history.” “The Nephelle Philosophy.”

“Firebird by day,” Rhys mused, “woman by night … So she’s held captive by this sorcerer-lord?”