The Treasure Keeper

Zoe felt herself smile, a horrible smile, arctic and unkind. 'Shall we not punish her first?'

The woman closed her eyes, kept rocking.

'Is that what you wish?' asked the prince, unmoved.

'It is your right.' She kept her smile, gazing at the woman.

'Zoe,' rasped the monster in his broken voice.

'Shall I?' She stretched her fingers by her sides, felt the fire behind her begin to rise and gain strength. 'Shall I, female? Shall I offer you what you deserve? No doubt there's a great deal we may learn from you before ... matters are concluded.'

The cook didn't answer, her cheeks apple red, her knuckles blanched. Her rocking increased. Now that Zoe knew what she was, she could feel the woman's deep white panic, the spiral of blind, total fear that cinched her heart and clogged her mind. A true drakon never would have surrendered to such blank sedated fear. A true drakon never would have betrayed her own kind.

'But I don't know, I'm undecided,' she said gently. 'I do have a certain sympathy for your position. You say you have a son. It's a great pity. Yet perhaps I don't like you well enough to kill you when I'm finished with you. Perhaps I like you only enough to make you suffer.'

'Zee,' said the creature who had been Lord Rhys. One of the clawed hands twitched against his chest. 'Stop.'

'Why should I?'

The monster shook his head. 'It should not be you.'

The woman had bent over completely, hiding her face between the skirts at her knees. Her hair was sand- colored and wet and fraying from its braids. Zoe gazed at her, then gave a flick of her hand.

'Fine. Live.' She looked back at the prince. 'I'm leaving. Don't follow me.'

'My lady, it's not safe—'

'Do you imagine,' she said, in the same gentle tone of before, 'that I care even the slightest jot about your opinion? I'm not asking permission, Highness. I'm leaving. I will return. That's all you need know. If you've left for your home by the time I get back, Godspeed.' She moved to the doorway, paused with one hand upon the wooden frame. She spoke her next words to the red-and-cream runner in the hallway; she didn't face the parlor again. 'Make certain you take her with you, or I won't be responsible for the consequences.'

The Palais des Tuileries was also unlit. The rain remained steady, which made it simpler for her to walk there. She'd shed the cook's gown and moved unseen along the streets, but they were nearly deserted anyway, despite the fact that it was a Wednesday and the bells of the cathedral upon the Ile de la Cite were ringing over and over for the midnight Mass.

The gate into the royal gardens had a new lock upon it. Zoe cupped the weight of it in both hands, water beading and rolling along the metal. It was shiny and thick and each little piece had been fit together like a clever puzzle. The king's crest was stamped across the front. The bolt felt warm against her rain-cold fingers; she hooked her thumbs through the loop of it, gave it a swift jerk.

The lock broke into its pieces, and without nearly the fuss of the iron manacles.

Her path through the gardens felt familiar enough that she hardly paid attention to it. Her feet knew the way. She passed hedges and faceless eerie statues, fallow flower beds and the entrance to the labyrinth. Her favorite door into the palace was a hidden servant's entrance set behind an overgrown yarrow, still unlocked. She eased inside.

It was vast. So vast. How could she have forgotten it that quickly? She went from invisible to seen with scarcely a thought, no longer worrying about footprints, or sound, or human eyes peering past windowpanes. She was small as a flea in such a space.

There was no one else about. Tuileries greeted her as it always had: with marble hush and the promise of echoing solitude. Even if someone were to discover her footprints, she'd be indiscernible before they could speak a word.

Her apartment was just as before. Clearly no one had discovered it since she and the prince and—

Her apartment was the same. The bed, stripped of its covers; on the night they'd come, she'd returned each piece to its rightful owner. The broken mirror, still propped massive and hulking against its wall.

The fissure of silver that marked the divide in the glass. The stark-faced woman on one side, and the deep bottomless blue on the other.

She stood motionless a moment, taking it all in. Rainfall peppered the lead gutters outside, cascaded down the slick walls. It penetrated the stone palace, changed the song of the foundation from sleepy to sleepier, notes that suggested undiscovered quarries far and away, mountains untouched, rivers undammed. A world flowing free.

Zoe walked across the chamber. She knelt before the mirror, her palm pressed to the cold flat glass. She felt naught but that: the cold, hard and unforgiving.

Her head bent; her forehead touched it. Nothing.

Her breath clouded it. Nothing.

Even the usual spirits were gone; nothing bright moved before her. She gazed at an endless span of dark cobalt blue, the silver fracture, unrelenting.

The air changed then; it went so thin her lungs closed. She could not breathe any longer. She could not breathe or think. He wasn't there. She thought he would be, and he wasn't. He wasn't anywhere anymore.

Something hot at last—her tears, chilled already by the time they reached her chin and dripped upon her thighs.

Zoe curled slowly down to the floor, one hand still braced against the glass, and wept into the crook of her arm, making hardly any sound at all.

The world hurt. It was a bitch of a thing, because it wasn't an ordinary sort of hurt, not the kind of pain he'd shrug off as a lad at school after a hard game of cricket, or a harder night of carousing. Rhys had had his share of bruises and bleary mornings. Once he'd even severed the primary bone of his right wing from a rushed landing in a burst of wind amid the downs, and that had been one of the most atrocious moments of his life.

This was different.

It hurt like someone had ground mounds of serrated glass into every crevice of every joint. Like he'd gone to sleep one night in his very prime, a twenty-nine-year-old drakon, and awoken an old, old man, so old his skin had shrunk and thinned and his body no longer obeyed him and little children would stare and point and run away if he beckoned to them. His hair was strange and his hands downright grisly, each a blasphemous mix of his human shape and dragon. His body was stooped. Clambering up the steps into the carriage he'd caught a smeared glimpse of his face in the window glass, and then he better understood Zoe's constant, horrified calm when she looked at him.

He was a corpse. All that time with her, he'd thought he'd been dead, and it must have been true. Nothing living would look as he did.

He watched her leave the maison and knew there was nothing he could say or do or hope to stop her. He even knew where she was going. The risks she took walking alone in this colossal city of peasants and nobles and poisonous enemies. Had he a wisp of the bravado he'd possessed months before, he would have leapt up, taken her in his arms no matter what she said. Let her shed her grief and fury upon his chest; he could accept her blows, her physical rage. That would have been all right.

It was her eyes that tore him apart. Her eyes, jet-black and beautiful and still brimming with all the tragic, shimmering sorrow he'd never before seen shining out at him. That last look she'd sent him before leaving, a mere sidelong glance from beneath brown lashes, and it had flayed him to the core.

He'd been wrong. He knew that now. She had loved Hayden James. She'd loved him, and now, because of his quest to free Rhys, a good man—a noble drakon —was gone forever.

And poor Zoe Lane. She'd be given to the second son of the Alpha anyway. Even like this, even mangled and destroyed as he was, as truly, truly fucking sorry as he was ... when they got back to Darkfrith, after all her dodging and hiding and intricate devious plans, she would be given to him.

The beast inside him—the dragon that yet smoldered as a cinder in his heart—was green and selfish and glad.

So he'd let her go for now. He let her slip back to her palace, to her looking glass of sallow spirits. He hoped that James was there, actually. He hoped she got to say good-bye, and that afterward James drifted away to his