“He was murdered, Conan!” Queen Meredith smmed her fist against the table.

  The Emperor sat on the edge of a small couch, as prim as an Ozite whore. A vase full of snapdragons—the st still in bloom in the pace—rattled under the force of her blow. “Inside my pace. Right under our noses!”

  White-hot iron burned inside her skull. Shadow Queens past had never known such a fury as she felt. Not even Anastasia, when she came to sack the kingdom her predecessor’s daughter founded.

  Yet Conan was as calm as she was shaken, as cool and collected as she was angry.

  She could have guessed he would behave this way. That he would not come to comfort her, or seek to abate her anger.

  He did not love her. He was in love with an idea, an ancient one he hoped to revisit, which would never return.

  He had never loved her predecessors either. The queens of Shadovane were a weapon in his hand, nothing more, but that he would see them as tools did not give him the right to treat her as he did now…with such ambivalence.

  Her house was on fire. With his almighty power, he could put it out in moments, but he refused.

  “You will help me find whoever is responsible.” She breathed. “As a guest in my house, you will do this.”

  “Bold tonight, aren’t you.” He said. “Have you forgotten your pce already?”

  She gred at him.

  He sighed, squeezing the bridge of his nose. A low fire chewed on the st remnants of a few, slim logs in the hearth, and he stood with his back to it. A soft light emanated for a finger’s width around him, but the aura was uneven, filled with pits and valleys.

  “Put this matter to bed, Meredith. Lord Bran was unimportant.” He said. “Many had grudges against him. It should come as no surprise he met his end through violence. He was an arrogant prick and a drunk, and his house will be better off without him.”

  “It is not who was murdered, but the act itself that bothers me.” She growled. “It is only a matter of time before others become involved. If there are no more deaths, there will still be that uncertainty lingering in the minds of his peers. If I could not keep him safe, what of them? Some may even believe I sanctioned it.”

  “If you are that concerned, call on the Council of Liam. Let them deal with it.” He said.

  She turned her back on him. It was the simplest means of masking the burning in her gaze, the easiest means of keeping him in line. She remembered their st argument. She did not wish to repeat it.

  “I want them found.” She whispered. “I want them sin where every noble, and every servant, can see. And when it is done, I want you out of my pace, and my city.”

  “Trust I have no desire to be here. I would not be, if it was not so clear your people needed a reminder of who is in charge.” Conan said. “This cycle will continue beyond you, as it has before you. That pendant you bear does not make you special.”

  Meredith kept her features smooth, mirroring him as she at st met his gaze. She did not have two thousand years of practice in keeping her composure, but she knew the burn of acid.

  He made her skin crawl. In the memories of those other women had been in a pattern for her to witness. Manipution of the weak among them, control through hostility for the defiant, subjugation through abuse for those who flew too close to the sun…the ones who he acknowledged almost as equal were the malicious and the cunning. Those who understood how to wield their power softly, from the shadows.

  She harnessed her venom, and put every bit of it into the look she set against him.

  “Celesti never loved you, Light of Ignorance.” She said. “For all of your pining over her, she could not see you as anything except an obedient dog hoping one day to be her equal. But she was a goddess, and you were no god. You saw the contours of who she was, but you could never see her truth.

  “What I find myself wondering so often…why have you wasted so much time hoping she awakens in us, when you know deep down there is nothing you can do to make her yours.”

  Conan surged toward her. His hand fshed out, took her by the throat. There was true anger in him—smoldering, toxic—as he cmped down hard enough to bruise, cutting her air supply down to a trickle.

  “I know…why you keep…coming back.” She groaned. “To monitor me…because you think…you think I will awaken.”

  Spots darted across her vision, and darkness crept in at the edges. If he kept up like this, he would kill her.

  “Like you believed Mariah would. So much…so much…that you raped her.”

  His grip loosened, the anger repced by something harder to define. A mix of resentment and sorrow. She would survive this time as in all times past. He needed her—to believe in this fantasy of his, that if she performed in the right ways, perhaps she would unlock some secret her predecessors had not, and fade away to make room for the woman whose soul inhabited that pendant.

  He reached for it, hungry longing in his eyes, a desperate, obsessive need which would never be sated. Twitching fingers stopped short of touching it.“You will remember your pce.” He whispered. “Beneath me with the worms and the vermin.”

  They both knew he could not touch it. In all of those memories conferred to her by Celesti’s Soul, that fragment of stone so like jade, he had never touched it. She had never understood why it was so, but he drew away each time he came close. Those memories went back millennia, encompassed all of the history of her city beyond the fall of the Mother of Night. She remembered that hunger as seen through their eyes, the way it ebbed out of him as his fingers retreated, twitched inches from her breast, and then fell away.

  Mariah was four hundred years dead, but her legacy lived on. She had been Conan’s favorite, the one who most resembled the Celesti of his memories.

  She had also been his greatest mistake.

  Now, watching those slender fingers contract, those eyes burn with crazed hunger, she wondered if he would do to her what he did to that other woman. One more he did not love, the unwilling mother of his heir.

  His hand slid away from her throat.

  “Find who did this. Kill them.” He said, as if she had not been telling him this was her intent, as if it was a command. “I will leave when I am ready.”

  He stormed out of her apartments. She heard the door click shut down the hall. Only when he was gone did she y fingers on her neck, test tender flesh and measure the damage.

  It would bruise before morning, and she would deal with it then.

  I’ll have to call on a healer. She thought. Call on my generals. Lord Giram will keep them in line, and Lord Elise will be there to ensure he is not too merciful. And when this is over, maybe I will invite that bastard to the dungeons. He will know his pce, then.