Her lips twisted in a brittle, thin smile. “Don’t worry. I will strike true.”

I returned her grin. “Tell me where they are taking him. If you don’t, you’d better kill me when you take me down because I will come back. And I will kill you.”

“Do you really think that is a threat? That I fear dying? After doing it as many times as I have?” She laughed, and the sound was as crumbling as the grimace of a smile. “I welcome the final death.”

“Do you welcome the death of the people you seek to protect right now?” I challenged, ignoring the spike of empathy I felt for her. “Because if you don’t fear your end, then maybe you’ll fear theirs.”

Her nostrils flared. “You all are no better than them.”

“You’re wrong. I stopped,” I said. “Would any of them have stopped? Would your Queen?”

She said nothing.

“I have no desire to kill innocents. I want to help the people of Solis—free them from the Blood Crown. That is what we wanted to do,” I told her. “But they killed my brother and took the one person who means the world to me. I will do anything to get him back. No matter how badly it stains my soul.”

“Then you know how to get him back,” she snapped. “Submit to her and take Atlantia in her name.”

I shook my head.

“So, you won’t do anything for him, then?”

“Because once she has what she wants, she will kill him,” I said. “She will kill me.”

“Then I guess you’re screwed.”

“No. Because I won’t let either of those two things happen,” I said. “I’m going to give her what she wants, but not in the way she thinks.”

Curiosity flickered through the Handmaiden, but then her attention shifted just the slightest to my shoulder.

“Poppy,” Kieran called quietly as several archers on the Rise scrambled into their nests.

Her chest rose with a shallow breath. “She’ll take him to the capital. I don’t know where. No one knows where she keeps her…pets.”

A shiver of rage brushed my skin, stroking the throbbing in my chest, and her lip curled in disgust. It was brief. I wasn’t sure that she was even aware of it, but I saw it.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “She’ll have every Revenant on hand guarding him. She’ll have him watching over your King,” she told me, and I knew that she spoke of the Prince. “You won’t get near him.” She lowered her bow, her shoulders settling. “Unless you can bring the fire of the gods with you, none of you stands a chance.”

A chill swept through me as I stared at her. Fire of the gods? Her gaze met mine as she took a step back. “I’m sure we will meet again,” she said.

“We will.”

I sat in the wooden chair of the hunting cabin Casteel had brought me to, after he’d saved my life and risked so much in the process, and stared at the bed.