He drew in a long breath, turning us past a pair of Iseris’s courtiers. “If that were true, I imagine I wouldn’t have stared so often at the inner wall and longed to know what it felt like to cross under the trellis gate.”
The inner wall. He’d seen it.
In the pubs, drunk men had spoken of the inner wall as the thickest of all. So thick it was as wide as the outer and middle walls put together. Beyond it lay the castle, and should the outer and middle walls be penetrated, no one would ever get through the inner wall.
Something occurred to me. A thing that should have been obvious from the start. “You were a boy.”
He grinned down at me, canines gleaming. “So you noticed.”
“Changelings are always girls.”
“Yes.” His grin faltered—just slightly. “Well, not?—”
A ripple passed through the crowd. The music didn’t stop, but something shifted in the room. Dancers turned their heads. A murmur rose.
Cyrus’s hand tensed on my waist.
I turned to follow his gaze—and there was Dorian, cutting acrossthe ballroom floor. Not walking. Stalking. The crowd parted around him like water around a blade.
His eyes were fixed on us. On Cyrus.
Faun followed a few steps behind, her face pale. “Eury!” Her voice was strangled. She pushed through the last of the dancers, her hand going to her hip where a blade must have been hidden beneath her gown. “Get away from him.”
Cyrus’s hands lifted from me at once. “We were only dancing.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “He’s?—”
“Gawain.” Dorian didn’t slow; by now he was close enough that I could see his chest heaving beneath his doublet. Even in this light, even beneath his mask, his eyes gleamed with intent.
Murder. Murder under the midnight sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Eurydice
Gawain.
Dorian’s ghost. His obsession?—
Cyrus was Gawain.
Dorian didn’t hesitate. He didn’t draw a weapon. He just charged, three strides across the dance floor and then he slammed full-body into the other man.
They crashed through the couples nearest us. A woman screamed. Gawain hit the polished floor with Dorian on top of him, and then Dorian was swinging—fist into face, again and again, with a brutality that silenced the music mid-note.
Gawain’s mask cracked, flew, slid across the ground with a streak of blood on it.
The ballroom erupted. Fae scrambled back, forminga ragged circle around the violence. I stood frozen at its edge, my cleavage-knife already in my hand without remembering how it got there.
Faun appeared at my side. Her hand closed around my wrist. “Don’t interfere. Dorian’s liable to put a hole in anyone who gets in his way.”
Gawain managed to get an arm up, deflected a blow, drove a punch into Dorian’s side. The two of them rolled across the floor, smearing blood on marble. Gawain was fast—but Dorian was bigger, stronger, and fighting like a man possessed.
“Tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I said to Faun.
“Dorian is finishing it,” Faun said. “What he should have finished five years ago.”
“Finishingwhat?”