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you’d know that I’m not a maid any man would want to ravish.”
    Turning to look at the Guardian of the Abyss, she found him staring at her again. Once more, she felt like a bug, an insect. But she straightened her shoulders and said, “Your castle, my lord?”
    A long pause that made an icy bead of sweat trickle down her spine before he led her back up the winding stairs and into the dark heart of his domain. Stopping in the hall of black mirrors when she hesitated, he said, “Do you want to see?”
    Everywhere she looked, she saw reflections. Him, so tall and sun-golden and piercingly beautiful—and her, so short and badly formed. “What?” she asked, looking away from her own image.
    “The Abyss.” He swept out a hand without waiting for a response and the mirrors filled with images of churning horror. At first there was only a wash of black and green flame, an impression of things burning. But then she began to see the faces. Contorted faces drowning in pain. Clawing hands asking for help before they dug out their own eyes in an effort to escape. Limbs floating in the black, twitching as if sensation remained.
    And the screams. Silent. Endless. Forever.
    Clapping her hands over her ears, she shook her head. “Stop it!”
    “Do you feel pity for them?” He touched his finger to the image of a face flayed and torn, its eyes red orbs bulging with terror as a basilisk feasted on its body. “He sold his children to…a sorcerer. The…sorcerer tortured and murdered them because that is how he gains his power. The man knew.”
    No matter that she stood in the midst of such violentanguish, she caught his hesitation. “Blood Sorcerer,” it seemed, was something he couldn’t say. But if he remembered her father, even if only in the most hidden depths of his psyche, then there was a chance he’d remember his family, remember what he had to do before it was too late.
    “Please,” she whispered, feeling as if her ears were bleeding from those silent screams that reverberated relentlessly in her head.
    “This one,” he said, pointing to another face so burned the flesh was melting, but with eyes of perfect alertness, “trapped those creatures he considered lesser—brownies like Jissa, the wise gazelles of the plains, cave trolls so small and shy—and butchered them for his own amusement. And this one, she poisoned an entire wood so that the creatures tied to the earth would curl up and die and she would have their land.”
    Unable to take the pressure of the screams any longer, her gut twisting from the horrors he was painting onto the walls of a mind that already held too much, Liliana ran forward to press her face to his back, her hands fisted against the hard carapace of his armor. “Stop, or I won’t cook for you again.”
    A moment’s pause.
    The images disappeared.
    Peace.
    “You will cook for me.” An order—but there was a thread of what she might’ve almost called disappointment in the tone of his voice.
    Blinking, she wondered if he had been trying to show her something that was important to him, something he’d thought she would like to see. Surely not, for he was the Lord of the Black Castle, and yet…he was alone. A monster who stood as the last defense against the other monsters. “They say,” she whispered, “that once there was no Abyss, that the world was innocent and its people, young and old, untainted.”
    He shifted away to face her, his eyebrows heavy over eyes become that beautiful winter-green. “You tell night-tales.”
    “Perhaps.” In truth, regardless of what she wanted to believe, she’d seen too much not to understand that there would always be those whose souls were malevolent. “I do know many night-tales.”
    He cocked his head. “How many?”
    “Many,” she said, seeing in his intrigued expression a way to reach the boy who lived within the lethal Guardian, who had to live within. If she was wrong, if that boy was long dead, crushed beneath the weight of