One way or another, I would have ended up here, with him, in the middle of this mess.

“Because of your sister, I resisted harming you.”

More than anything he has ever said, those words stun me. I stand half dazed as they echo through my brain, knocking loose conflicting thoughts, nudging them to where they no longer oppose. Without warning, my convictions shift and settle into a new position. I’m startled by where they end up, but they moved with such logic and simplicity that I can’t deny the veracity.

Darroc did care about Alina.

I believe him.

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. Somebelieve 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.”