He’d wanted to use the spear and kill her without going back into the Silvers and wasting weeks, possibly months, doing it. But after I pulled him aside and explained that she was the perfect test, he’d reluctantly agreed, and I realized that he, too, hoped the legend was an erroneous myth.

Why? He thought I was the concubine. Considering what I was afraid I was, the concubine didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be.

Unless he’d concluded that, if I was the concubine, the king himself was destined to come for me at some point, and that was one foe he might not be able to take on, even in beast form. Perhaps he worried that the king would take his OOP detector, and then where would he be?

But if you ask her one thing about me, Ms. Lane, he’d murmured against my ear, I’ll kill her where we stand, and you won’t get your little test.

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Could he? In the same way he killed Fae, whatever it was? Yet he didn’t offer it as mercy. I wondered what he was feeling as we moved down a rosy corridor. Did he mourn her, this woman who’d run his store for years, this woman he’d trusted with more of his secrets than he’d ever entrusted to me? He hadn’t offered to kill her swiftly, to end her suffering. He’d used it only as a threat to keep me from prying into his business.

His face was set in hard, cold lines. He looked down at the top of Fiona’s head and his face changed; then he saw me looking at him and it was again a mask of stone.

He did mourn her—not her suffering or death but that she’d chosen the path that had led her here. I suspected that he would never have stopped caring for her, and taking care of her, if she hadn’t turned on me. But that action had sealed her fate.

Barrons was one of the most complicated men I’d ever met and at the same time one of the simplest: You were with him, or you were against him. Period. End of story. You got only one chance with him. And if you betrayed him, you ceased to exist in his world until he got around to killing you.

Fiona had ceased to exist when she’d let Shades into the bookstore to devour me while I was sleeping—thereby stealing his only chance at something he wanted very badly, whatever it was—and the only thing he felt now was a twinge of wishing it hadn’t turned out this way, a whisper of a regret. Not so long ago he’d put a knife through her heart, and if she hadn’t been eating Unseelie, it would have killed her. He’d been ready to kill her in the alley, and not mercifully.

I stole another look at him, realizing the full extent of what I’d just been mulling over.

He thought I’d betrayed him by taking up with Darroc when I’d believed he was dead. But he hadn’t excised me from his life. Whatever he wanted from the Sinsar Dubh, he wanted very badly.

And according to my own assessment of him, once he had it, he would kill me.

He must have felt my gaze, because he looked at me.

Something wrong, Ms. Lane?

My gaze mocked, Is there anything right about this situation?

He smiled without humor. Besides the obvious.

I shook my head.

You’re looking at me as if you expect me to kill you.

I jerked. Was I that easy to read?

You’re wondering what kind of man I am and how I feel about all this.

I stared.

You think you betrayed me and one day I will kill you for it.

I’m not sure why I even bother talking. My eyes flashed with temper. I hated being so transparent.

That you allied with Darroc to attain your goals did not betray me. I’d have done the same.

Then why are you so pissy?

That you fucked him will be forgiven once you fuck me. Another woman might run headlong toward absolution.

I put an end to our discussion by staring straight ahead.

It was slow going. Fiona couldn’t move very quickly. We proceeded at a snail’s pace through rose halls, to sunshine, to bronze.

“The libraries,” Barrons said as we passed. “We’ll stop on the way back, since we’re in here anyway. I want another look around.”

I felt a sudden tension in the cloaked figure next to me as the dark hood turned my way.

I didn’t need to be able to see her face to sense the bitterness of her gaze or divine the morbid turn of her thoughts.

His comment had driven home that he and I would be walking out of here together and she would be dead. And I knew she thought we would be having a fabulous time, dancing and fighting, having sex and living, while her existence would be over, extinguished as if she’d never been born, unmourned, unmissed.

I felt hatred emanating from beneath that cloak, malevolent and dark, and was glad to see black floors ahead.