Page 10 of Shadow's Heart

Fuck it all.For millennia, he’d endured his existence as weariness seeped into him like saltwater poisoning a spring.Whyhad he endured?

She narrowed her gaze. “Have you no one awaiting you, sorcerer?”

His concubines cared only about gold, extracting it from him like prospectors stripping ore from a mine. “I told you that escape is impossible.”

“I should take your word—a sick Lorean I just met—for that? Remember, my uncle recently escaped from aninescapablejail. I like my odds, sorcerer.”

She had grit, he’d give her that. “What’s your name?”

“I am Princess Kosmina.”

Royalty. His dislike deepened. For ages, he’d been prey to the powerful. “Of what realm?”

“Dacia.”

The connection he’d struggled to make fired in his mind like a zap of electricity. She was a princess of Dacia; Mirceo’s last name was Daciano. Their accents were alike. “Any relation to Mirceo?” he asked, as his faithful companion Revenge helped him lever his frame to his feet, helped him swallow back nausea.

She frowned. “He’s my brother.”

Brother.A blood relation to the male Silt had sworn to kill was trapped with him in Nightside. Gullible immortals might have pondered the coincidence; the rest knew that dark players were forever causing mayhem. Especially during an Accession.

She asked, “Do you know him?”

Silt nodded slowly.

“Then you know he will do anything in his power to reach me here. If I don’t escape first.”

Though Silt’s parents had held no love for him, some families shared devotion and would stop at nothing to rescue one another. Ramifications hit. These Dacians must possess abilities unknown to him—or the Gaolers. Perhaps an incursion into Nightside was possible for Mirceo.And I’ll be waiting with that fucker’s sister, the ultimate leverage.

As always, Revenge was there for him.

The vampire canted her head at Silt. “You’re not friends with Mirceo. Just the opposite.”

He should lie. Falsehoods spilled easily from his tongue, and vampires rarely expected them since they were incapable of lying. But half out of his head with pain, he grated, “Iam the one who brought you here.”

Five

“What are you talking about?” Mina asked the weird sorcerer. She didn’t believe that he—a prisoner clearly in the grips of some kind of withdrawal—had worked with the Gaolers to capture her. Which meant he was insane.

Makes sense.She’d read that Sorceri were often paranoid and delusional. Even Bettina, her Uncle Trehan’s new sorceress Bride, had admitted the rumors about her kind were largely true.

“Did you use some kind of magic against me?” Mina demanded of this one. Normally she wouldn’t be able to speak to an unknown male, much less a half-dressed one, but he was a foe. She boldly scanned his muscle-packed build and the strange tattoos across his broad chest as she would size up someone in the yard.

He was nearly seven feet tall with longish, tangled black hair and what could only be road grime all over his sunken cheeks. A roughhewn metal cuff circled his wrist. His haggard appearance marred what might have been a jot of attractiveness. She thought he had amber-colored irises. Hard to tell since his eyes were so bloodshot.

I’m one to talk about reddened eyes.

“Did sorcery bring you to me? Or fate?” His laugh was a mean sound. “It doesn’t matter. My will has been done. You’ve been offered up for punishment, and I accept the tribute!”

“Explain yourself.”

“Mirceo Daciano is the reason I’m here. He and an accomplice breached my stronghold and turned me over to the Gaolers for gold.”

An accomplice? The sorcerer must be talking about Mirceo’s fated one, Caspion, who was a bounty hunter by trade. Had her brother, always ready for a lark, led a hunt with the demon?

“And then, all of a sudden,youarrived in Nightside—Mirceo’s bloodthirsty sister.”

This male had just assumed she’d been drinking from others. Typical paranoid sorcerer. She raised her chin. “Weakhold.”

---