My gaze flicks to him, and Typhus’s green eyes seem to darken. There’s still plenty of anger in them, but now there’s lust there too.

I smile. Someone probably wants to hate-bang me.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

I readjust myself on his lap, shaking my hair out.

Why did I think glamouring him was important … ?

Oh, right.

“You will answer all my questions fully and honestly,” I command. “Now, how long ago was the tomb opened?” I ask.

His upper lip twitches in distaste. “A few weeks ago.”

Recent. Part of me had assumed the tomb was opened years ago.

I glance over my shoulder at Des, a self-satisfied smirk on my face. He stares back at me, and his expression is amused, but his eyes are stormy.

Swiveling forward again, I lean into this idiot king, petting his cheek. In response, the room dims a little. Apparently, my mate has some objections to me petting other men.

“And who opened the tomb?” I breathe.

“I don’t know,” he growls.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean it wasn’t a who at all.”

Losing patience.

“Explain,” I command.

Again, he hesitates. How precious. As if he can fight the hold I have on him.

After two short seconds, he gives up. “On the night the dead man rose—the night Galleghar rose—” he clarifies, making it clear that he knows exactly who lay buried in that grave, “it was a shadow that retrieved him.”

Chapter 12

I don’t think I breathe. Around me, the room darkens.

“A shadow,” I repeat.

Back to this insidious shadow. I’d almost forgotten about this aspect of the Thief of Souls. The Night Kingdom’s wet nurses had seen a shadow watching over the casket children, and in the Flora Kingdom I had heard about a shadow visiting the sleeping women.

I glance over my shoulder at Des, the two of us sharing a look.

“What did the shadow look like?” I ask, facing Typhus once more. My voice lilts as the glamour drips off my tongue.

Typhus glares at me, his fury still apparent. “It looked like a shadow. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. This is just what was reported to me. Godsdamn idiot slave.” This last part he says under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear.

The room darkens anyway. I don’t need to look behind me to know Des is all but primed for an attack. I don’t let him get the chance.

I click my tongue and grab Typhus’s chin, squeezing his jaw the way annoying relatives love to squeeze kids’ faces. I lower my voice to match his. “This idiot slave has your willpower by—the—balls. Now, apologize to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

It’s the least sincere apology I’ve ever heard.

I shift my weight, the reaction pulling a groan from him.

Definitely in hate-bang territory with this one.

“What are you sorry for?”

He glowers at me. “Absolutely nothing, you cock-sucking whore.”

My claws sharpen, and my back pricks were my wings want to manifest.

Why do men like this always revert to the insults? It’s embarrassingly predictable.

“You’ll pay for that,” I say quietly. “After you give me what I want, you’ll pay for that.” I lean in to his ear. “Perhaps I will make you suck someone’s cock.”

Over my dead body would I make someone do that. But a little empty threatening does wonders for cooperation.

I pull back. “I could you know,” I say, my voice low like a lover’s. “I could make you get down on your knees for every single man in this room, and you’d be powerless to stop me.”

Typhus’s borrowed magic seeps into the air around us, the most obvious indicator that behind his frozen exterior is a firestorm of anger.

Someone is really unused to being at the bottom of a power dynamic.

I pat his cheek patronizingly. “Now, be a good boy and let’s cooperate for a change.” My hand drops to one of his necklaces, and I finger a small bone. “You said that the shadow retrieved Galleghar. What was Galleghar doing while this was happening?”

“Walking.” He says this so derisively, like there is no other way a previously dead body could leave a tomb. After a brief pause, he adds, “My reports said he walked out of the tomb alongside a shadow.”

So Galleghar lay undying in his tomb until one night a shadow came and presumably awakened him. Then the two skipped off into the night, and the rest of us were none the wiser.

“Good,” I say absently, patting his cheek once more. “Good.”

I begin to climb off of Typhus’s lap, my thoughts racing ahead to sleeping bodies and shadows, when I pause. “Oh, I almost forgot. There was one more thing.” I sit back down on the king’s lap, cocking my head to the side. He doesn’t know it yet, but this is how a bird sizes up a particularly juicy worm.

“How is it you are so strong?” I ask, my skin still glowing, my voice still harmonizing. I’m burning through magic like I’m a sorority girl throwing back tequila in Cabo.

“I already told you,” he says between gritted teeth, “I am cobound to my subjects.”

“How does one … cobind themselves to another?” I glance over at Des, who’s beginning to pose frozen fairies like they’re Christmas reindeer, each position a little more compromising than the last.

I face forward again, just as Typhus replies, “Say a short oath, exchange a little bodily fluid, and briefly embrace—that’s all it takes.”

“All it takes for fairies to what, give you their power?”

“If that’s the oath they’ve sworn.”

“And all these fairies just happily gave you their magic?” It’s hard even voicing such a ridiculous question.

“They don’t just give me it.”

It sounds like I’ve come close to ruffling this king’s feathers. Poor little Typhus, getting accused is just the worst.

“That’s right,” I say slowly, “you offer them protection in return—and I’m guessing a place to stay in your underground city. How magnanimous of you.”

The air thickens with Typhus’s magic.

Definitely hit on a sore spot. His eyes no longer look just angry; they seem wild with panic.

Right now, he can only answer my questions, and I’m curious to see what’s going on behind those eyes.

“What is it, Typhus?”

“Fairies die out here all the time.”

“And I bet you have nothing to do with that.”

Again, he looks desperate to explain himself. Too bad we’re not playing this game by his rules.

We’re playing it by mine.

“Do you or the fae who work for you have anything to do with the deaths of the fairies who ‘die out here all the time’?” I ask, throwing his words back at him.

Again, that panic is in his eyes.

You made your shitty-ass bed, buddy. Now you have to lie in it.

Typhus holds out responding for a whopping three seconds.

“Sometimes,” he finally hisses out.

We’re not talking loudly, but his words still echo throughout the room.

I swear the silence somehow just got claws and teeth to it.

I lean a little closer and drop my voice. “Remember when I told you you’d pay for your words?”

He glares at me. The fucker remembers.