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I knew I should wake him. I’d promised him I would, only that morning. Next time, I’ll wake you, that’s what I had said.

And I opened my mouth to do exactly that.

But then, for some reason, I found that I couldn’t. As if something physically stopped me from uttering a word. As though the voice had reached into me, closed its fingers around the impulse, and held it still. I told myself I was only being kind. That he was exhausted, that he needed the rest. That I’d be there and back before he ever stirred. They were good lies.

They almost held.

Carefully, so carefully, I lifted the covers and slid out of the giant bed. The night chill raised goosebumps along my bare body. I reached for my robe and pulled it on, the silk a poor substitute for the warmth I’d just left. Then, with one last look at the man I loved sleeping peacefully in our bed, I crossed to the chamber door, eased it open, and slipped out into the hall.

‘Alexandra.’

The voice echoed down the corridor the moment I closed the door behind me, loud enough that I flinched and pressed back against the wood. Almost certain it would rouse the entire castle. But no door opened. No guard came running. The halls stayed dark, silent, and empty. Just as if the voice called only for me.

So I followed it.

Down dim, torch-lit corridors where the shadows stretched and shrank along the rough-hewn stone, the flames guttering in erratic little flickers as I passed. Until I came at last to the narrow stretch of hallway outside the kitchens. And there it was. The plain iron-banded door, exactly where I’d left it, looking like something not worth anyone’s time.

The voice was directly behind it now. I was sure of that.

My hand closed around the cold iron ring, and I pulled. Honestly, I half-expected it to be locked, and a deep, unspoken part of me wished it had been. Any excuse to ignore the deeply rooted hold the voice seemed to have on me.

However, the door swung open without a sound onto a stairway that spiralled down and down, cold and faintly damp beneath my bare feet. I descended, one careful step after another. The torchlight thinned the deeper I went, until the stairs finally ended and opened out not into hell, but into the cellar.

Just as Atlas had said.

Long, low vaults marched away into the gloom on every side, lined floor to ceiling with racks of dusty bottles and great oak barrels taller than I was. The cold air was thick with the smell of old wine and damp stone.

I almost laughed at myself, creeping through the dark in my robe like a thief, chasing a voice down to the wine stores.

But the voice didn’t want me in the cellar.

So it pulled me past the racks and the barrels toward the far end of the vault, where the smell changed. Where the comfortable mustiness gave way to something colder and the stone turned slick beneath my feet. There were doors down here. More than one. Heavy, iron-banded things sunk deep into the walls, and one of them stood ajar as if waiting for me.

It opened onto a second stairway that fell away into darkness. A black, breathing throat of a passage that sank down and down, deeper still and beneath the very foundations of the castle. Cold poured up from it, raising the hairs along my arms, and every animal instinct I owned told me that whatever waited at the bottom of those steps was not something I ever wanted to meet.

But the voice wouldn’t release its grip on me.

It drew me on instead, but this time through a narrow archway I would have sworn hadn’t been there a breath before. So down I went, one last tight coil of steps, until they ended at last, opening into a small chamber.

This far below the foundations, I’d expected even more darkness, dampness, and rot. Instead, the room was well lit, firelight bouncing off the walls and making the space seem larger than it was. And that was the thing that unsettled me most. Because the sconces all the way down the stairwell, and the ones ringing this room, burned bright and steady, as though they had only just been lit.

As though someone had been expecting me.

The voice called again, and the flames flickered violently in answer.

‘Alexandra.’

I turned a slow circle, my face scrunched in confusion, because the chamber was empty. There was no woman here. There was nothing here at all, save a single, solitary pedestal standing in the center of the room.

And upon it sat a single ornate box.

Impossibly, the voice seemed to pulse from within it. The box’s wood gleamed dark and polished, its curved lid etched all over with curling gold filigree.

I edged closer, my heart slamming so hard I half believed it would leap clean out of my chest. The latch on the lid wiggled, a faint rattle of metal in the silence, and I jerked back, dread and curiosity tearing me in two. Every sensible cell in my body screamed at me to turn around and run back up those stairs into the safe, warm circle of Atlas’s arms.

But I no longer seemed to have any say in the matter.

‘Alexandra… open… me’