There was something I’d never been able to explain to my own satisfaction: I’d wondered why Darroc hadn’t been more aggressive, more brutal with me from the very first. It had made no sense to me. He’d seemed almost lackadaisical in his efforts to abduct me and had kept offering me the chance to come willingly. What kind of world-destroying villain did that? It was certainly not what I’d expected from my sister’s murderer. Mallucé had been far deadlier, far more ruthless. Of the two, I’d been much more terrified of the wannabe vamp when I’d first arrived.

Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth. Darroc had resisted harming me because of Alina. He’d restrained himself because he’d cared about my sister.

Just how much—and how much I could use it against him—remained to be seen.

“My deference undermined my efforts, and the Hunters began to question my conviction.”

“So you had me raped and turned Pri-ya,” I say bitterly. How quickly he’d gone from deference to murder, because that’s what turning me Pri-ya had been tantamount to. Until Barrons had pulled me back, no one had ever recovered from being made a mindless Fae sex slave. They died from it.

“I needed to solidify my position. Then I lost you before I even had the chance to begin using you.”

“Who was the fourth, Darroc? Why don’t you just tell me?” He’d stood there watching as the Unseelie Princes destroyed me. He’d seen me naked on the ground, helpless, weeping. I calm myself by imagining the many ways I might kill him when the time comes.

“I have told you before, MacKayla, there was no fourth. The last prince of the Court of Shadows that the king created was the first dark prince to die. Cruce was killed in the ancient battle between the king and queen. Some claim it was the queen herself who killed him.”

“Cruce was the fourth Unseelie Prince?” I exclaim.

He nods. Then he frowns and adds, “If a fourth being was at the church, neither I nor my princes were capable of seeing it.”

He seems as disturbed by that thought as I am.

“I repeatedly offered you an alliance. I need the Book. You can track it. Some believe you can corner it. Some believe you are the fourth stone.”

I bristle. There’s little I’m certain of lately, but this much I’d bet the bank on. “I am not a stone.” I was pretty sure V’lane had the fourth and final one.

“Fae things change. They become other things.”

“Not people,” I scoff. “Look at me. I wasn’t carved from the cliffs of the Unseelie hell! I was born to a human woman!”

“You know that for a certainty? My sources say you and Alina were adopted.”

I say nothing, wondering who his sources are.

He laughs. “No one knows what the king truly did after he went mad. Perhaps he made one of the stones different, the better to hide it.”

“Stones don’t become people!”

“It’s what the Sinsar Dubh is trying to do.”

I narrow my eyes. Was Ryodan right? Was that what this was all about—the Book taking on a corporeal, sentient form? Interesting that both he and Darroc believed this, as if perhaps they had discussed it while forming other plans—plans such as killing Barrons and getting him out of the way! After all, it was Barrons that brought me back from the Pri-ya state where I could have so easily been used. Damned inconvenient for them.

“But the people it takes over keep killing themselves,” I say.

“Because the Book has not found the one strong enough to endure the merging.”

“What do you mean, ‘endure the merging’? Are you saying the right person could pick up the Sinsar Dubh without killing themselves?”

“And control it,” he says smugly.

I inhale sharply. This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this. And he sounds so confident, so certain. “Use it rather than being used?”

He nods.

I’m incredulous. “Just pick it up and open it? No harm, no foul?”

“Absorb it. All the power.”

“How? Who is this ‘right person’?” I demand. Was it me? Was that why I could track it? Was that why everyone was really after me?

He gives me a mocking smile. “Oh, trifling human, such delusions of grandeur you suffer. No, MacKayla. It has never been you.”

“Then who?”

“I’m the one.”

I stare at him. He is? I look him up and down. Why? How? What does he know that I don’t know? That Barrons didn’t know? “What’s so special about you?”

He laughs and gives me a look that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? I hate it when people throw my own looks back in my face.

“But I did tell you. I answered your questions.”

“Trivial questions.”

My eyes narrow. “If you know how to merge with it, why did you insist I bring the stones into the tunnel with me when you took my parents captive? Why are you so interested in them?”

“It is said the stones can immobilize it. I have had little success getting near it. If I cannot get close enough on my own, I may need to use them. I have you to track it, the stones to corner it, and I can do the rest.”

“Is it because you eat Unseelie? Is that why you’d be able to do it?” I can slice, dice, and devour with the best of them. See Mac gorge.

“Hardly.”

“Is it something you are? Something you did? Something you know how to do?” I hear the franticness in my voice and it appalls me, but if he has some way of bypassing the whole absurdity of getting the fourth stone from V’lane, gathering the five Druids—Barrons seemed pretty sure one of them was Christian, and he’s still lost in the Silvers—figuring out the prophecy, and performing some complicated ceremony, I want to know what it is! If there’s a shortcut, any chance I can reach my goal in a matter of hours or days rather than trying to live through agonizing weeks or even months, I want it! The less time I have to spend in this hellish reality, the better.

“Look at you, MacKayla, all flushed and glowing, salivating over the idea of merging with the Book.” The gold flecks in his eyes begin to glitter again.

I’d know that look on any man’s face.

“So like Alina,” he murmurs, “yet so unlike her.”

It’s a difference he seems to appreciate. “What is it about you? Why will you be able to merge with it?” I demand. “Tell me!”

“Find the Book, MacKayla, and I will show you.”

When we finally locate the room with the Silver in it, it’s just as Darroc described: empty of furnishings, save a single mirror, five feet by ten.

The mirror appears to have been inserted seamlessly into whatever the walls are made of in the House.

But my mind’s not on the Silver at all. I’m still reeling from what Darroc told me.

Another piece of the puzzle that had been giving me fits clicks into place. I’d been perplexed by his determination to get the Book, when none of us knew how to touch it, move it, corner it, do a single damned thing with it, without getting taken over, turned evil, then killed, after being forced to kill everyone around us.

Along with wondering why Darroc hadn’t been more brutal, I’d wondered why he was hunting it when he’d never be able to use it, when even Barrons and I had been forced to admit that chasing the thing was pointless.

Yet Darroc had never relented. He’d kept his Unseelie scouring Dublin for it incessantly. The whole time I’d been stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out the four, and the five, and the prophecy, Darroc had been following a much easier path.

He knew a way to merge with the Sinsar Dubh—and control it!

There’s no question in my mind that Darroc’s telling the truth. I have no idea how or where he got this information, but he definitely knows how to use the Sinsar Dubh without being corrupted.

I need that knowledge!

I watch him through narrowed eyes. I’m no longer in a hurry to kill him. Fact is, I’d kill to protect the bastard at this point.