Rion nodded as he waited for Herric to loop around before he lifted the girl’s hair.

“So like Amara,” he said softly. “Remarkable.”

Herric circled to Rion’s other side and returned to his dais, spinning around and falling onto his throne before crossing his legs with a flourish.

“So tell me then, what do you want?” He gestured to Rachel. “Her, I presume?”

“Yes. I ask that she be returned with me to the surface.”

Herric threw his head back and laughed, the sound ricocheting off the cavernous ceiling until it sounded like a thousand Lords of the Underworld mocking his utter stupidity.

“The surface?” Herric asked with a gleeful spark in his eyes.

“Yes,” Rion said, squirming under the girl’s weight. He couldn’t wait to get her off him, but he couldn’t release her yet.

“But you realize she is dead.”

“Surely someone as powerful as you can rectify that.”

Herric laughed again, steepling his fingers together and studying Rion like he was a bug.

“You came to bargain with me? Are you . . . a fool?”

Rion didn’t answer, and Herric stared at him for so long that the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Suddenly, he became aware of his position. He was alone, surrounded by the dead, as they gathered behind him, creeping forward, pressing into his space.

Herric chuckled as Rion’s gaze swept around the room. He was a fool. What had he been thinking coming to the Underworld with his demands?

In his desperation, in his drunken haze, in the splinters of his broken mind, he had walked in here thinking he held any sort of power. He realized then how grievously wrong he’d played this. He’d become so used to power that he’d forgotten he would have none to speak of here.

“The ark,” he croaked. “I left it in the Keep.”

Herric’s amused expression didn’t waver.

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” Rion said, once again hoisting the girl on his shoulder. It was screaming now, his entire back aching, pain radiating down through his hips and thighs. But he refused to let her go, clinging to this last hand he had to play. “You’ll release Rachel to me, and then I will send someone down to deliver it.”

Herric narrowed his eyes. “You will leave the girl here.”

Rion’s jaw clenched, wishing he could defy the order, but he heaved her up and set her on the ground. She lay at his feet, her eyes closed and her skin pale, her lips gently parted. Rion remembered the girl he’d tormented. The sound of her screams. That scar over her eye that he had been responsible for. He tried to drag up some sympathy for what he’d done, but the heirs of Heart had never meant anything to him. They had always been a means to an end.

“There,” Rion said, looking up.