Chapter 5 Untitled Chapter

VIENNA

The cry came again, and this time it was not a sound at all.

It was a feeling, something that moved through the mark on my neck like a current through water, vibrating all the way down my spine and settling in my chest like a second heartbeat that did not belong to me. I pressed my hand flat against the table to keep from swaying.

Draven was already on his feet.

He moved like something that had never needed to think twice about danger. One second he was across the table from me, the next he was at the door with his hand braced on the frame, every line of his body drawn tight as a blade. He turned his head just enough to look back at me.

"Stay here."

I should have. Every sensible instinct I had told me to sit back down, eat the food, and let the dragon king handle whatever was crawling through the belly of his own castle. I was a human girl in a dress that was not mine, in a kingdom that wanted me dead before sunrise this morning.

I followed him anyway.

The corridor outside the dining room was already alive with movement. Guards moved in formation past us without breaking stride, their footsteps synchronized and silent in a way that made the hairs on my arms rise. The torches on the walls guttered sideways as if something large had displaced the air at the end of the passage.

Draven turned sharply when he heard my footsteps behind him.

"I said stay."

"You also said no one in this castle would touch me." I matched his stare. "And yet here I am, following you into a corridor full of armed guards because clearly the castle has opinions about that promise."

Something crossed his face that was not quite irritating. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to his side without another word, keeping me there as he walked. His grip was firm but not cruel, more like he had made a decision and my wrist happened to be part of it.

We moved deeper into the castle, down a staircase that curved underground. The air changed. It went cooler and damp, carrying the smell of old stone and something else beneath it, something sweet and wrong, like flowers rotting in standing water.

I recognized that smell.

I could not place where from. But my body did. My stomach clenched around it like a fist.

The guards had formed a perimeter around a door at the end of the passage. Draven released my wrist and stepped forward. They parted for him without being asked.

He pushed the door open.

The room beyond was a storage chamber, shelves of sealed jars and folded linens and things I could not identify in the low light. In the center of the floor, one of the jars had been shattered. Whatever had been inside it was gone. The only trace was a dark wet stain spreading across the stone and that rotten-sweet smell rising from it like heat.

One of the guards spoke in the dragon tongue. Low, clipped, urgent.

Draven answered the same way, his voice dropping an octave. It was a voice built for commands and whatever he was saying, the guards around me stood straighter hearing it.

He crouched down beside the stain and pressed two fingers to it. When he lifted them, they came away dark. He held them up, examining the color, then he made a sharp sound through his teeth that was not a word in any language. Just a warning.

He straightened and looked at me.

"You need to go back to your room."

"What was in that jar?"

"Vienna." He said my name. My real name. Not Vianne. The sound of it in his voice stopped everything in me. It was the first time he had used it and he said it like he had been holding it a while, like it had been waiting behind his teeth all through dinner. "Go back to your room. Lock the door. Do not open it for anyone except Maren."

My mouth had gone dry. "You know my name."

"I have known since this afternoon." He was already moving toward the guards, issuing instructions I could not follow. "Maren."

The silver-haired woman appeared from somewhere behind me. I had not heard her come down the stairs.

"Take her up." He did not look back at me when he said it.

Maren's hand curved around my elbow, not unkind, and she steered me back toward the staircase. I let her, my mind still snagged on the way he had said it. Vienna. Not with anger. Not with accusation.

Almost like relief.

I did not sleep. I sat on the bed with my knees pulled up to my chest and I listened to the castle settle and shift around me. Twice I heard footsteps pass my door without stopping. Once I heard voices below the window, too muffled to make out words.

The mark on my neck had gone quiet. Whatever had triggered it was either gone or had stopped moving.

At some point deep in the night, a folded piece of paper appeared under my door.

I stared at it from the bed for a full minute before I crossed the room and picked it up.

The handwriting was sharp and angular, pressed hard into the paper like the person writing it had been impatient.

I know you are not Vianne Adams. I know what was taken from that storage chamber tonight. I know what you carry in your blood that you do not yet understand.

I also know what comes for you next.

If you want to survive it, you will come to the east courtyard at dawn. Alone.

Do not tell the dragon king.

I read it three times.

Then I turned it over, looking for a signature, a seal, anything. There was nothing on the back except one symbol, small and precise, drawn in the bottom corner. A circle with a diagonal line cut through it.

I did not know what it meant.

But my hand was shaking when I set the paper down.

I crossed to the window and looked out at the black-leafed garden below. The east courtyard was visible from here, a stone square beyond the garden's edge, empty and still in the dark.

I thought about Draven's face when he crouched over that stain. The sound he made. Whatever had been in that jar, it had frightened him, or the closest thing a dragon king allowed himself to feel when something frightened him.

I thought about what you carry in your blood that you do not yet understand.

I pressed my fingers to the mark on my neck. It was warm again. Faintly, like an ember.

Dawn was four hours away.

I should tell him. I should take the letter straight to Draven's door and hand it over and let him deal with it the way he dealt with everything, swiftly and without hesitation. That was the sensible choice. The safe choice.

But the letter said something that Draven, with all his guards and his glowing eyes and his castle full of loyal soldiers, had not said once since I woke up with a cracked skull and a brand on my throat.

It said I know what comes for you next.

And I desperately needed to know that too.

I folded the letter and pressed it flat under the mattress.

Then I sat back on the bed and watched the window, counting down the dark.