Daivad would never question his instincts again—she had been looking for him.

He straightened, crossed the landing, and dropped into the alley behind her, but said nothing. He watched her figure shiver, heard her breath catch.

Without turning, she whispered, “Your magic is … beautiful. What I’d give to watch you practice…”

The statement made little sense to him, so he ignored it.

He’d been following her long enough to know she was alone, but he waited for a trap to be sprung anyway. It never sprang—the alley stayed quiet. That was far more unsettling. She was far more unsettling.

In a growl that bubbled out of his chest, he said, “Name yourself.”

At the command in his voice, she straightened a bit. “Nyxabella. But everyone just calls me Belle.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “Uh, do you still do the prince thing? Should I call you ‘Your High—’”

Daivad growled a hard, “No.”

“Okay.” She relaxed only momentarily before hesitating again. “So, just, like, Daivad? Or, ah, Mr. Earthbreaker … or, I don’t know, does anyone call you ‘Dai?’”

“Who sent you?”

She paused. Blinked as if considering how to respond. Then pointed to herself.

“What do you want?” 

She perked up. “Only an ear. Your ear.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And how did you know where to find it?”

“It must have been the Dark Mother’s guidance,” she said, like she was amazed at it herself. “It took years of thumbing through rumors, plucking out the right words and stitching them together to form a map pointing to Urden—but then all I do is step within the walls, and you find me? Mother, the first place we went to… I don’t know what to name that if not Divine.”

“That explains nothing.”

She mashed her pink lips together and furrowed her brow, trying to put together a response. When it came to her, she released her lips with a small pop and said, “People talk to me or … mostly they talk around me when they don’t realize I can hear, so I catch a lot of stray information. Most of the time it just becomes useless nonsense piling layer upon layer in my head, but sometimes I’ll catch something specific I’m listening for, you know, like the locations of the labor camps you’ve freed, or maybe the names of cities where your very large figure has been sighted.”

He was conflicted. It sounded like sweet shit—but Daivad had grown up with the world’s most manipulative mother, surrounded by a revolving cast of sycophants just trying to use him; he knew how a lie nudged the heartbeat, warped body language, tainted a scent. This girl’s big, green eyes were earnest, if nervous. 

Her freckled cheeks flushed under his gaze, and she fidgeted, but didn’t look away. He wasn’t sure when or how it happened, but they were just a few feet from each other now. He parted his lips and let her scent bloom across his tongue, sweet like honeysuckle.

Daivad had just sworn to trust his instincts, and they told him she wasn’t lying, but his logic just couldn’t accept it. “For eight years the queen and all her dogs have hounded my trail and only ever found more trail. But you feed me the idea that a mad little girl who talks to monsters strung together some pieces of gossip that led her right to me, and you expect me to swallow it?”

A smile crinkled her eyes. “Mad little girl? Guess those royal manners didn’t stick for you any more than they did for your mother and brother.”

He opened his mouth to correct her—they weren’t his family. But then her words sunk in. He stiffened. Nyxabella sensed the change in him, and the smile dripped slowly off her face. She leaned back ever so slightly.

He growled, “You know them.”

Now that he was searching for it, the traces of the scent of the brother he’d never wanted were obvious, wound in her curls. He had touched her. Recently.

They had finally found him.

Her pink lips parted as she realized her slip. Watching him warily, she said, “Better than I ever wanted to. But they didn’t send me—”

He lunged, but his hand grasped empty air. Daivad could count on one hand the number of people he knew who could anticipate a move like that from him, much less manage to dodge his magic.

On instinct, he tracked her movement—under his arm and around his back. Again, she started to speak, and again he cut her off with a lunge. But as he’d spun, she caught the hem of his cloak and pulled it over his head. He shrugged off the cloak immediately, but by the time he could see the alley again, she was already swinging up onto a landing above.