I stormed through the crowd, searching for where Kael had gone. If he thought he could threaten me like that here in my own home and just walk away, he had another thing coming.

But before I caught sight of him, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I twirled around to find Aerden’s mother, Tatiana, standing there in front of me.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Were you heading somewhere? Or do you have a moment to talk?” she asked.

I glanced in the direction Kael had disappeared to and took a deep breath.

Maybe it was good that she had stopped me. If Kael really had as much power as he seemed to think he had around here, confronting him now, in front of everyone, would do nothing but put my life in danger.

“It’s not important,” I said, turning my full attention to Tatiana. “I always have a moment to talk with you.”

She smiled as if she hadn’t just recently been talking to her daughter about how to get rid of me.

I glanced around the room and wondered just how many of the demons here were truly glad I had returned? And how many of them were plotting how to break or destroy me?

“Would you like to walk with me for a moment?” she asked, offering her arm to me. “It’s a beautiful night out.”

I hesitated. She must have wanted to talk about something important if she needed such privacy. Why wait until tonight to seek me out when she could have come to me at any point in the past few weeks here in the castle?

I placed my hand on her arm. “I would love to walk,” I said. “Thank you.”

She led me through the crowd and out onto the terrace. We walked in silence for a little while before she finally paused near an archway and leaned against the balcony.

“There,” she said, pointing into the distance.

I looked out at the city and swallowed as I realized she was pointing toward the arena. From our vantage-point here near the top of the throne room’s terrace, we could make out the figures of demons fighting there on the dusty floor of the arena’s large battlefield.

“Do you see them?” she asked.

I leaned against the edge of the obsidian bannister, my heart aching. “Is he there?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

“He’s there,” she said. “They’re too far away for me to tell which one is my son, but I know he’s there.”

She grew quiet, and we watched together as the sparks of spells and magic flew into the air like fireworks.

“Why did you bring me out here?” I asked.

“Because I know you’re the only other one here who cares as much as I do that he’s down there, preparing to fight for his life.”

I needed to hold my tongue and keep my opinions to myself, but I was fairly certain I’d used the last of my willpower up on that dance with Kael.

“Then why didn’t you do something to get him out of the dungeons when you had the chance?” I asked. “You and your husband are members of the council. Why didn’t you fight to have him set free? He deserves better than this.”

She wiped a tear from her face and straightened her shoulders. “He deserves much better than I’ve been able to give him for most of his life,” she said. “But sometimes our choices are not that simple.”

I closed my eyes for a brief moment and tried to calm my anger. Saying anything that could have this woman label me as a traitor and have me thrown back in the dungeons would not do me any good right now. I needed to be careful around her, but the rebellious side of me was tired of playing nice.

“I’m sure deciding between your own position in the kingdom and your son’s life is quite complicated,” I said, keeping as much of the acid out of my tone as I could manage.

She snapped toward me. “Do you really think you’re the only one who has made sacrifices to keep him safe?” she asked.

“I know that when he disappeared, you told us to forget about Aerden,” I said. “You abandoned him without even trying to bring him home.”

“I was trying not to lose both of my sons to the Order, but I lost them anyway. And now my precious daughter is gone, too,” she said. “I’ve lost so much.”

“Then why do you stand here watching it continue to happen?” I asked. “Aerden is down there alive. Jackson and Illana are in the Southern Kingdom, fighting for what we all know is right. If you really want to save them all, then fight for them.”

She shook her head. “You are still very young and very naive,” she said. “You think you understand the sacrifices that have been made. You think you’re better than all of us because you left to fight a losing war. You took them both from me, and yet here you stand, ready to take the throne from us, too.”

My eyes widened. Had she really just admitted that she wanted the throne for herself?

Was this entire conversation just a trap to get me to admit my loyalty to the Resistance or the Southern Kingdom? Or was she really finally admitting the truth of why she never tried to save her sons?

And how in the hell did she figure that I had taken her sons from her in the first place?

“I had nothing to do with either of your sons leaving this city,” I said. “No one knows why Aerden left, and no matter how much I tried to convince Jackson to stay here and find a way to fight without abandoning his kingdom, he was determined to leave. All I did was stand by his side.”

Tatiana made a face and turned away. “Don’t call him that,” she said. “It makes him sound so human.”

“He prefers that name now,” I said. “Maybe because he feels closer to the friends he’s made in the human world than the demons here who betrayed him.”

“You speak of things you know nothing about,” she said. “I tried to keep them safe, but once they were gone, there was nothing I could do to help them.”

“You could have gone after him like we did,” I said. “Aerden is alive now because we refused to give up on him. And now you’re going to take the second chance you’ve been given and throw it all away again? I don’t understand you.”

“Aerden never should have been taken by the Order in the first place,” she said, facing me. “I made a great sacrifice to make sure he would be safe. I still don’t understand why he was taken. That never should have been possible.”

I stepped back, my hand absently fluttering to my chest. I no longer had the diamond key I had worn close to my heart for a century, but I could still imagine its cool metal against my skin.

Tatiana studied my reaction, her eyes widening. She raised a hand to her lips, as if holding back a cry.

“You know, don’t you?” she asked. She closed her eyes and leaned against the bannister for support. “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before this moment. He gave it to you, didn’t he? He gave you the key? Before he left?”

My heart raced. I had wanted to know the origin of that mysterious key for decades. Even more so after my last fight with the hunter attacking the domed city to the south.

“Where did you get a diamond key, Tatiana?”

“I told him to keep it on him at all times and to never take it off for anything or anyone,” she said, still looking into the distance toward the demons sparring in the arena. “I knew he...but I never dreamed he would give it to you. He was the one in danger, not you.”

I gasped. “You knew he was going to leave,” I said, realizing it for the first time. All this time, I’d thought Aerden’s absence from the castle on my engagement day was a surprise to everyone.

Tatiana ran a hand along her own thick braids, smoothing her hair even though not a single one was out of place. “I suspected it for several moons before he left. That’s why I gave him that key,” she said. “It was never meant for you, and if you hadn’t taken it from him, he would have been safe. He would have eventually returned to us. Our lives would be very different if you had never accepted that key, Lazalea.”

I closed my eyes and let her words sink in. Were Aerden’s years of slavery my fault?

“I didn’t know,” I said, finally steadying myself enough to look at her. “He said it was an engagement present. He made me promise to never take it off. I had no idea you had given it to him to keep him safe from the Order. How could I have known that?”

Tears shimmered in her eyes. “You couldn’t have known,” she said. “I just wish it could have been different.”

“Where did you get a diamond key, Tatiana?” I asked again.

She hesitated, gripping the stone on the edge of the bannister tighter. For a moment, I thought she would refuse to tell me, but after a long pause, she eventually turned back to me.

“I bought it from a shaman who used to live near the borderlands,” she said. “She was not the type of demon I normally would have wanted to have any dealings with. She was rumored to deal in dark magic and items stolen from the witches and hunters of the Order of Shadows.”

“Did she tell you where the key came from?”

“She told me she’d stolen it from a hunter who worked for the High Priestess herself,” she said. “She said the hunters use keys embedded with a gemstone from each demon gate portal. That’s how they mark a demon to be taken. They mark their chosen demon with a dark kind of magic and lock a piece of their spirit into a small box. Later, when they come back to retrieve the demon, they simply use the key to open the box. The magic summons that demon from their home where they are sent through to the human world and locked inside a witch’s body.”

My throat went dry. This was information the Resistance struggled for decades to discover. We’d found keys in the lairs of some hunters in the past, but we never knew the purpose of those keys or their small boxes until recently.

“You’ve known this for all these years and never told anyone?” I asked. “It took the Resistance decades to uncover the truth about how the hunters mark the demons they intend to take. If we had known this information, we could have saved lives, Tatiana.”

“We?” she asked, smiling sadly. “You stand here in the gowns of a princess, but you still think of yourself as a member of the Resistance.”

“I am both,” I said. “All of us should want nothing more than to see the end of the Order of Shadows so that we can bring as many of our demons home as possible.”

“When Aerden was taken, I thought that maybe the shaman had lied to me,” she said, ignoring my comment. “When I had a chance, I went back to search for her, but she had closed her shop and moved on. I’ve never seen that shaman again, and I blamed her for my son’s disappearance, never dreaming that he had given the key to you all those years ago.”

“Did she tell you anything more about the origin of the key?” I asked. “As far as anyone knows, there are no diamond gates in the human world. We’ve heard rumors and speculation about diamond covens and gates, but in all our time searching, we’ve never once found proof that they exist.”

Tatiana shook her head. “She didn’t give me any further information,” she said. “She simply told me she’d bought the key from a demon who claimed to have killed the hunter who carried it. I foolishly trusted her, and at great cost to myself. I emptied most of our savings and gave away many of our most precious family treasures in exchange for that key.”

“The key is real,” I said. “She didn’t lie to you.”

Tatiana’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”

I swallowed and glanced away. How much should I tell her? After all, this was a woman I’d recently overheard discussing my permanent relocation to the dungeons. I shouldn’t trust her.

“Recently, that key saved my life,” I said. “The diamond inside it is real.”

“Where is it now?” she asked. “Do you still have it?”

The truth was, I didn’t know where my key was now. It had been inside my bag, along with the diamond amulet I’d taken from the hunter who attacked the domed city the night the world was frozen in darkness.

That bag had been taken from me by the guards when they’d brought us here, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to let Tatiana know that it was possibly still here in the castle.

Besides, Essex had created that bag specifically for me, making sure that no one else could open it, no matter how hard they tried. I kept my most important possessions in that bag.

“I lost it,” I said, lying.

Tatiana sighed. She looked tired as she turned her gaze back toward the arena.

“I did try to keep him safe, Lazalea,” she said. “And I begged him not to volunteer in these games. He refused to listen to me.”

“You went to see him?” I asked, my heart aching. It had been months since I’d seen Aerden, and I missed him so much it hurt.

“A few times,” she said. “But, like you, he believes I abandoned him. He hates me. He won’t listen to a word I say.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” I said. “He’s hurting, and coming back here and being thrown in the dungeons instead of being recognized for the hero he truly is doesn’t help.”

“I wanted to set him free, but those decisions aren’t up to me, anymore,” she said. “The council is nothing more than a lie these days. Surely you see that, don’t you?”

“What do you mean? The council isn’t working together to make decisions for the city?” I asked.

She sighed again, lifting her head as the sparring in the arena came to an end and the prisoners were lined up and taken back through the archway that lead into the cells where they were being kept.

“You are a smart girl, Lazalea, but you see only what’s there on the surface,” she said. “If you looked deeper, you might start to see things as they truly are, rather than how you imagine them to be. All the answers you seek are right there in front of you. All you have to do is open your eyes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to the party. I’m sure it won’t be long before our presence is missed.”

She started back toward the main ballroom, but I called after her and she turned slightly, her face enveloped in the shadows cast by the large obsidian archways.

“Why did Aerden leave the city?” I asked, a part of me not quite sure I was ready to hear the answer to the question. “Why did he give me that key when he knew how important it was?”

Tatiana glanced toward the arena one last time. The shadow of a smile played against her lips.

“Maybe you should ask Aerden that question,” she said. “Good night, Princess.”

She left me standing there, alone in the chilled spring air, afraid that deep down, I already knew the truth.