The door clicked shut behind Mira and Zayan.
Silence rushed back in.
Phaeryl exhaled slowly and let her shoulders drop for the first time since they'd stepped out of that wardrobe. She twisted her ring once, twice, and looked over at Xhanes.
He hadn't moved.
He was still watching the door — not the way a person watches something that has just closed, but the way he watched things he was already past. Like the door was already irrelevant, and his mind had moved three steps ahead without bothering to tell the rest of him.
She knew that look.
She'd seen it in the Keld palace the night he stood at the throne while girls flinched around him, and he just watched, bored and calculating. She'd seen it in the Carlisle market right before he disappeared for thirty-five minutes and came back wi
