Page 42 of The Dead Queen

He nods. “Escape.”

“I can’t offer you that.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

“Both.” My voice is calm. Matter of fact. “But I can offer you some life-sustaining bread.”

He tsks, shaking his head slowly, but his eyes drift to the food in my hand. There’s hunger in his eyes that he can’t hide.

“Do you expect me to beg, Red? To crawl on hands and knees and offer you my entire kingdom for a slice of bread?” His words are bitter, mocking.

“No. I expect answers.”

He turns his back to me, staring into the dark corner of his cell. “As I said before, the only answer you seek lies with the queen in Annwyn.”

“You don’t know the question yet.”

He turns to watch me, wordless. He’s right to suspect a trick. I am a Fox, after all.

I reach back into my bag to retrieve a book of moths. Something tells me not to show him Grandmother’s necklace where it hides beneath my clothes. I fumble with the book, opening it up to a page with a sketch that resembles the silver moth. The same one I found scratched into the shop’s paint.

“What do you know of moths?” I ask.

There’s a slight change in his face that I’m sure is unintentional. Lines deepen around his mouth and his gray eyes darken.

“That they are beautiful but elusive creatures susceptible to a whack with a swatter. What of them?”

His indifference can’t fool me. I sense a new layer of tension in the air between us. He knows something.

“Try again.” My voice is full of unearned confidence.

He watches me for a time, assessing. A Wolf calculating the success of a potential target. “Maybe you could be more specific?” His eyes drift to the food in my hand and I know I’ve got him.

“More specifically ...” I lean toward him. “Why have I seen these moths in secret places all around Caerwen?”

I haven’t, of course. But I’m willing to bet they exist. If there truly is something more to these moths, there’s no way they exist only on my grandmother’s necklace and the dirty wall of an old pawn shop.

The corner of his mouth twitches. “You expect a Wolf to know the secrets of a Fox’s den?”

I lower my chin, staring harder into his eyes. “Yes.”

The Wolf walks back toward me with a slight limp, sizing me up like a predator. His chains rattle as they drag along the ground. He grabs the bars on his cell door and leans forward. I resist the urge to back up, standing my ground.

“Do you even know what you’re asking, Little Fox?”

I don’t blink, don’t swallow, don’t breathe. Nothing to give away my position. “That’s inconsequential. I want to know what you know.”

He holds his hand out for the bread. I rip off one small square from the loaf and place it in his hand. He chuckles as he stuffs it into his mouth, wincing slightly as he chews. After he swallows, he pushes himself off the bars and takes a few steps back toward the shadows of his cell. For a moment, I think he won’t tell me anything, but then he speaks, his back still facing me.

“Moths are curious creatures, aren’t they?”

I say nothing.

“They emerge gloriously from the husk of their former selves. Reborn from little more than worms.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “You, Red, are no worm. And thus, no moth.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He laughs in that infuriating way of his, low and taunting. “It means you could never be one of them.”