Paranoia twisted my mind. I didn't hear any footsteps following me inside, but Graysen's youngest brother could be stealthily hunting me down here, his figure sheathed with midnight ink.

The staircase gouging the earth was so deep down, I'd obviously traveled well beneath the Keep and its dungeon. The flashlight shook in my sweat-damp hand. Yellow light skittered over the walls and steps frosted in dust. If the battery died I'd be engulfed in darkness. It would fall over me like a shroud.

I have more.

Other batteries.

A spare flashlight.

When I stepped onto the level ground, I didn't know how long it had taken to reach the very bottom of the stairs. Hours? Days? Time held no meaning in absolute darkness. I knew that better than anyone.

A passageway stretched before me, long and straight. As my flashlight swept over a gap carved within a wall, I realized why Jett had said there is 'an entrance' to the tunnel. I poked light into a second passageway that connected with the one I stood inside. Obviously, there was a second entrance to the escape tunnel somewhere inside the Keep. Where it was no longer mattered because I'd already found the path to freedom.

Before me lay the way off the estate.

But being down here was too much like being trapped in the tithe prison. Except in the prison, I had no flashlight, I'd been submerged within an ocean of darkness and jet-black waves of nothingness.

I stood there shaking and swaying on the verge of a panic attack, staring into the pitch-black landscape, as my past stalked me like an old foe.

My mother's fingernails dug crescents into my arm, and she ignored my wails, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry... I didn't mean to..." as my feet tripped along the bumpy, rambling stone path that cut through the gnarled trees. The tree's limbs were thrawn and skeletal, trunks misshapen and sickly looking as if the darkness contained in tithe prison had leached into the ground and corrupted their roots.

Momma's grip on my arm was fierce, but her other hand clutching the round, flat stone shook. She tugged me along, staring dead ahead, unmindful of my ashamed sobs, or Evvie racing behind us. I looked back over my shoulder, watching her dash toward us, crying out, "Momma! Momma!" Her pretty ballet shoes were filthy from running across the muddied lawn and the dirty flagstones as she chased after us. "Momma. Stop. Stop!"

Evvie whirled in front of us. The pink ribbon tying her hair into a ponytail flicked through the air like a pennant. "It's just a stupid Barbie doll. She didn't mean to hurt Lise!"

I'd wanted the doll, but Lise wouldn't give it to me.

Lise had held the Barbie high above her head, out of reach, laughing spitefully as she'd teased me. My anger surfaced. A plague of fury. I'd stamped a foot and unleashed an ear-shattering scream. I heard the crunch of bone and watched the Barbie doll fall from Lise's limp grip, and her scream joined mine. But hers was one of pain.

"She fractured Lise's wrist. She wasn't even touching her!" Momma cried back.

Evvie struck out at Momma's hand on my upper arm, trying to free me. Both of us knew exactly where she was taking me.

"Get out of my way." Momma thrust an elbow into her, hard. Evvie stumbled backward, her arms flinging wide to right her balance, but her ankle rolled as she miss-stepped on a jutting root. Her features twisted in pain, and she fell onto her leotard-clad ass beneath an oak with a strangled cry.

I struggled in my mother's tight grip, digging in my heels and reaching a hand toward my older sister. "Evvie! Evvie!"

"Nelle!" Evvie shrieked, pushing to her feet, wincing as she hobbled toward us.

But my mother's pace quickened as she yanked me along.

The tithe prison was much like a silo but this one was made from adamere that glittered with silver in the gloom. It was enormous and stark and foreboding.

Momma pressed the stone against the curved wall and a sudden ripple of greenish light scored up and across and down, creating an outline of a doorway. She pushed against it and the door yawned wide and all I could see inside was black.

My eyes went wide. No, no, no.

I tugged and flailed, trying to yank myself free.

The wind stirred and the earth trembled beneath our feet.

It wasn't a natural quake.

It came from me.

Momma jerked me closer. Clammy sweat glistened on her temples, her complexion wan, chin quivering. That's what terrified me more than if she'd shouted at me in anger. Her deeply rooted fear. The panic shining in her eyes. "I'm sorry." The flat of her hand met my back and she shoved me inside.

I staggered into the darkness and spun around quickly, about to run for the door and freedom. But the door shut on a rumbling thunk and daylight winked out.

Terror consumed me instantly. My nightmarish screams ricocheted off the walls and rebounded in the darkness.

I gasped in relief when the door reopened shortly after, then I whimpered in denial when my mother shunted a tray of food and water inside, along with a bucket for me to use as a toilet, before the door slammed shut with heavy finality.

I screamed and shrieked and sobbed until I could no more.

No one came to free me.

Time was endless without the sun and moon to count the passing of days and nights. I had no idea how long I'd been capsized in darkness.

A day or two? A month? A year?

Sometimes I tentatively paced, walking a tight circle in my circular cage, around and around and around, trembling, my breathing shallow, my mind teetering on the verge of spiraling into insanity at being submerged in the dark. Other times I pinched my inner wrist with sharp, stinging nips to remind myself that I was alive, whole, I lived in a body.

But it became too much... Too much to endure...

And my imagination began to spin at what our House had trapped inside the prison walls over the years.

Mortals with a taste for killing.

Others with terrifying powers.

Otherworldly beasts that liked to feast on the bones of little children.

My mind whispered to me that those things could be imprisoned with me, and I fell into mindless terror. I collapsed in a tangle of limbs to the floor, my mind turning inward to protect me.

How long I lay there I didn't know.

When I rose to consciousness, it was because I'd sworn a slender shard of sunlight pierced the darkness and my sister's face had been hovering overtop of me. But when my mind awoke fully, I was alone in the dark, unable to see my hand in front of my face.

And then I heard her.

My sister's voice whispering behind the thick stone.

It shouldn't have been possible for her voice to breach the dense wall of adamere, yet I heard her. I scrambled to my feet and followed her voice over to the circular wall.

Tears of relief leaked down my cheeks. "Evvie! Evvie!" I banged my fists on the solid wall until they throbbed in agony, but she didn't hear me. And yet not hearing anything in return, Evvie never left my side.

I curled up at the foot of the wall and pressed my ear to the icy stone and listened to her tell tale after tale of the old gods to keep me company. Evvie's favorite had always been Skalki, our goddess of birth, of life. She could entice seedlings to unfurl from barren earth by simply striding across desolate wastelands scorched by the sun. I sniffled, wiping my tears on the sleeve of my dirty dress as I listened to her tell of Skalki defying her brother Hazus and braving Nine Hells. She went in and saved her mortal lover, dragging him back to the world, breathing life into his lungs once more. And she'd stolen him away, hiding them both where no one, not even another god, could find them.

And one day, the door to the prison opened and sunlight flooded in and I was set free.

My freedom, I discovered, wasn't for long.

Every single time my father left the estate that year, my mother dragged me sobbing and begging not to be cast into the tithe prison ...Please, please, please...I promise I won't hurt anyone...I promise to be good... My mother never heeded my tears and wails. She shoved me into the deep well of pitch-black nothingness and locked me away to keep my sisters safe from someone so strange and alarming she couldn't begin to understand what I was or how to deal with me.

And Evvie returned to sit outside the prison to keep my terror of the dark at bay.

And now, here I was, once more within a nightmarish crypt.

Perspiration stuck the dress to my upper body, my fluttering heartbeat like the wings of a frantic bird trying to escape flesh and bone. I rasped for breath. I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. It was as if I stood on the summit of a mountain, eternal snow caressing its craggy peak. Too high up. The air too thin.

I wanted to spin around and run back the way I'd come. Throw myself into daylight and never venture down here again. It was too much. The absence of light too cruel. My fragile sanity threatened to snap like a twig.

And something unexpected occurred.

Strength burst through me. Warm as sunshine. Strong as iron.

Courage infused my very being, coming from someplace deep inside. It came swiftly, brief as a meteor razing the sky with fire, but it was enough for me to grab hold of those thrumming strands of might and take my first step forward before it bled away.

Just one footstep, one after the other.

Just one more.

On...

And on...

And on I walked.

The tunnel itself was utilitarian, carved from black adamere that glittered like a snail trail as torchlight slipped over its pitted walls. The tunnel itself was wide and tall and braced with wood and steel. Stale air pinched my nostrils. My feet scuffed through the thick layer of dust that billowed around me like dirty fog as I edged onward, not able to burst into a faster pace, my terror of the dark too great.

How long had I been walking?

A minute? An hour? A day?

My heart beat erratically. Fat droplets of sweat trickled down my spine. The sound of my bare feet slapping stone echoed into the void before me. It was like traveling on the road, headlights spearing through the night but only showing so far, a blur of asphalt, of painted lines, the roadside verge smearing by. The darkness threatening to swallow me whole.

I'm okay...I'm okay...

My fingers bunched into my shawl but I couldn't stop shivering from fear.

I'm not alone...I'm not alone...

That's what the Uzrek had told me down in the catacombs when I'd tripped into a panic attack after Graysen had left me alone to fight the papier-mâché warriors that had swifted into the catacombs to claim me.

The ancient monster hadn't specified it at the time.

But now, on the other side, I knew what it meant.

You've never been alone, Wychthorn.

My wyrm.

It had spoken of the wyrm inside me. The wyrm that had been with me since birth, growing, maturing with my age. Though the rope around my throat bound its might, and buried it so deep inside I couldn't feel its presence, it was still part of me.

I'm not alone...I'm not alone...

I wasn't going to be swallowed up by the darkness. I could do this, just one foot in front of the other.

But what Jett had said earlier amplified my fears.

Even if I managed to get the rope off my neck, the wyrm's powers would be reduced to nothing. I wouldn't be able to use its brutal might to obliterate the Crowthers, to tremble the ground so badly the Keep would crumble like a mountain falling to its knees. I wouldn't be able to turn its insides into an oven and burn it, melt it, destroy it.

A distant part of me worried that the rope around my neck would stop me from escaping. But maybe there might be some kind of loop in the conditions that bound me to the estate. Maybe down here, below the Keep, beneath the estate and the earth, I might be able to flee the Crowthers with the rope cinched around my neck.

I wanted to cross that void and keep running to freedom.

I wanted to climb to the surface at the other end of the tunnel and make a run for it. I'd run and run and run and no one would find me.

On and on I walked through piles of dust that told the tale that no one had been down here for a very long time. I passed through liquid darkness that held a quality of time with no end and no beginning.

Surely I'd be close to the edge of the estate by now. And almost as soon as the thought crawled across my mind, the rope twitched around my throat.

Excitement and dismay barreled through me all at once.

Dismay because it meant that there was no way off the estate with the rope binding my body here. Excitement because it meant I was at the edge of the Crowthers' estate. So close to stepping over the threshold and beyond lay freedom.

How far would the escape tunnel go before it began to curve back up to the surface?

The rope snagged tightly around my neck.

I stumbled to a stop, taking a few steps back to loosen the stranglehold of the noose. With a hand trembling with excitement and exhilaration, I raised my flashlight. All I wanted to do was peer through the tunnel and see that it went on, even if at this point I couldn't. But freedom was right there, I could taste it on my tongue and it tasted effervescent.

Hope spun through my bloodstream.

My torch slid through the darkness and then...

Then...

It struck a wall directly in front of me.

A solid wall.

The escape tunnel was blocked.

I knew with certainty that I'd need a special key to get past it. I realized now why Jett didn't give a fuck if I knew about the escape tunnel—because there was no way I could get through it. Hope shattered. It obliterated into fragments as a myriad of thoughts, all of them dark and twisted, rushed through my head. Here in the darkness with only a feeble light staving off the black inkiness, a wail wrenched from my throat. So much like the terrified cries of the small frightened child I once had been.

I couldn't get into the Crowthers' armory to find Zrenyth's mites.

I couldn't get the rope off my throat.

I couldn't get past this wall.

I couldn't get free of the Crowthers' estate.

There was no escape. Even beyond the rope, beyond the wall, there was something more sinister than everything combined—the Alverac. A darker part of me, one I'd refused to acknowledge, rose up in bleak waves and whispered I'd always had a greater problem than Zrenyth's collar. The Alverac would bind me to Graysen's will in two weeks' time, and there was no escape for me when that happened.

Desolation crashed upon me, and I did something I promised myself I never would.

I broke. Horribly. With violent, ugly tremors that rattled my bones. I heaved great shuddering sobs of misery and wretchedness that split apart the eerie silence.

My knees cracked against stone as I crumbled, falling forward, my palm slapping the cold floor. The flashlight escaped my limp grip, growing dimmer as it rolled out of reach.

Salty tears of anguish flowed down my cheeks as darkness folded around me. Not to soothe but to mock and claim me.

You are nobody. And you are nothing—whispered the darkness.