“Until the morning, then,” he said.

“Yes,” said Eva, her eyes on Séverin. “The morning.”

Laila waited until the door of their chamber closed. She held her breath, all too aware of how close they were, how the hair curled at the nape of his neck was damp … the pressure of his fingers at her waist. She immediately slid off his lap.

“Tell me what everyone saw in the ice grotto,” demanded Séverin haltingly.

Laila quickly filled him in on all they had discussed. As she spoke, she watched as his fingers slowly curled and uncurled, movement returning to him. When she was finished, he said nothing except: “Tomorrow morning, we go back.”

After a few minutes, he flexed his hands. “It’s finally wearing off.”

Soon after, he rose and disappeared into the adjacent bath suite. A rush of foolish nerves hit Laila as she walked to the bed. He would be here. With her. All because of an impulsive oath she’d wrung out of him.

You have just agreed to spend every night in my bed.

A low rustle of movement across from her made her head snap up. Séverin stood on the opposite side. He hadn’t changed out of the supple, dark silk nightclothes, and she saw that the color shifted from indigo to black. It matched his eyes, though she wished she hadn’t noticed. He looked at her and raised one eyebrow.

“You must want it very badly,” he said.

Laila jolted. “What?”

“The Divine Lyrics,” said Séverin coolly. “You must want it very badly if this is what you’ll put yourself through.”

But the corner of his mouth twitched up. It was the ghost of his former self pushing up against this new, ice exterior. Stop haunting me, she pleaded silently.

“Of course I want the book,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” said Séverin flippantly. “For the purpose of discovering your origins, etcetera…”

Laila smiled grimly. He had no idea that her life hung in the balance. He didn’t deserve to know.

“… or perhaps it was all an excuse to get me here,” added Séverin with a cruel smirk.

She could have wrung his neck. “I didn’t need an excuse last time.”

If he’d meant to taunt her, to push her farther away, he’d misstepped. And judging by the look on his face, he knew it. So she went in for the kill. She wanted him to flinch again. She wanted any ghost of his former self to retreat so far inside that fistful of snow he called a heart that she would never be reminded of how much he had changed. She crawled onto the bed, rising up on her knees, watching as his eyes narrowed.

“Remember that last evening in your study? You said yourself I was not real, Séverin,” she taunted, enjoying how he flinched. “You could always rediscover that for yourself.”

She reached for him, knowing she’d gone too far the second he caught her wrist. He stared at his fingers encircling her skin.

“I know you’re real, Laila,” he said. His voice was a poisonous silk. “I merely wish you weren’t.”

He let go of her hand then shut the gossamer curtains. Laila watched him retreat to the armchair. It took a few moments before she realized he wouldn’t return. Good, she thought, easing herself into the large, empty bed. Exactly what I want.

As she closed her eyes, she imagined the cold, unlit spaces of the Sleeping Palace. Somewhere inside this place lay The Divine Lyrics, the secret to more life. But nothing was without sacrifice.

The week before she had left her father’s home, he had given her a gift. Not her mother’s wedding bangles as she had asked for, but a small knife inlaid with ivory and gold filigree that swept like a peacock’s tail over the hilt.

“Better by your own hand, than the jaadugar’s,” he’d said.

His meaning was clear. Laila thought of it now as she pulled the covers to her chin. She turned her back on Séverin, on the evenings they’d spent playing chess, the minutes she pretended she didn’t see him waiting for her outside the kitchens of L’Eden, the way he didn’t realize he smiled when he looked at her, and every single second when he never once made her feel like she was anything less than his equal.

She thought of her father’s knife and words, of snow maidens with thawed hearts, and the collar of winter at her throat.

If surviving meant cutting out her heart, then at least she could do it by her own hand.

17

SÉVERIN

Six days until Winter Conclave …

Séverin had seven fathers, but only one brother.

There was a time, though, when he thought he might have two.

Wrath had dragged him to a meeting inside the Jardin du Luxembourg because now and then, Séverin’s trust lawyers needed to see he was hale before they allowed Wrath more finances. They did not listen when Séverin told them about the Phobus Helmet that conjured forth nightmares, the thorny rosebush where he and Tristan hid every afternoon, the bruises on his wrist that always faded in time for a new meeting. Soon, he learned to say nothing at all.

On one of those meetings, he saw Hypnos, walking hand in hand with his father beneath the swaying linden trees.

“Hypnos!” he’d called out.

He’d flailed his hand, desperate to catch his attention. If Hypnos saw, maybe he could rescue them. Maybe he could tell Séverin what he had done so wrong to make Tante FeeFee leave him behind. Maybe he could make her love him again.

“Stop this, boy,” Wrath had hissed.

Séverin would have called Hypnos’s name until his throat turned raw had the other boy not caught his eye … only to look away. Séverin felt the turn of his head like a blade to his heart.

Some months later, Tristan saved them with a plant. Tristan confided that an angel had visited him and given him poisonous aconite flowers that—when steeped into a tea—freed them from Wrath.

Years later, the two of them would stand on the newly tilled earth that would become L’Eden Hotel. Tristan had hoarded his savings to buy a packet of rose seedlings that he promptly dropped into the ground and coaxed to live. As the slender tendrils spiked out of the earth, he’d thrown his arm around Séverin, grinned and pointed at the fast-growing roses.

“This is the start of our dreams,” he’d said. “I promise to protect it.”

Séverin had smiled back, knowing his line by heart: “And I protect you.”

* * *

SÉVERIN COULDN’T SLEEP.

He sat in the armchair, his head turned from the unmistakable shape of Laila’s silhouette behind the layers of gauzy curtains. Eventually, he drew out Tristan’s penknife, tracing the silver vein near the blade full of Goliath’s paralyzing serum.

Séverin reached for his greatcoat and shrugged it on. He didn’t look at Laila as he opened the door to their suite and took to the stairs. Instead, he turned Tristan’s knife over in his hand. He twirled it once, watching the spinning blade turn to molten silver. The roses Tristan had planted were long since dead, torn out of the dirt when he had ordered the hotel landscapers to raze the Seven Sins Garden. But a cutting remained in his office, waiting for new ground and a place to put down roots. He understood that. In The Divine Lyrics, he sensed richness. A future where the alchemy of those ancient words would gild his veins, cure him of human error, and its pages would become grounds rich enough to resurrect dead dreams.