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“Kaspias won’t let them hurt her,” I say confidently.
I peer to my left, seeing Dessin’s hand on Warrose’s slumped shoulder. He’s panting, trembling, flexing every muscle like he’s going to rip the world to small shreds of paper.
“It’s okay, Warrose. She may be a traitor, but I don’t wish her to be tortured. She’s Kaspias’s lover. This is all to get a rise out of us.”
Her stormy hazel eyes leak thin, hardly noticeable tears. “It’s working.”
“Ruth!” Niles’s flustered voice stretches across the mass of the huddled inmates. He stands on a step leading to the stage, darting his focus from her to us and back to her again.
Fuck. He doesn’t know what’s going on.
“I don’t think Kaspias will stop this,” Marilynn says quietly behind me, like she knows something we don’t. A warning.
I gulp, holding my breath in defiance. She’s wrong. She’s wrong. She’s wrong.
“I think she’s right, baby,” Dessin says loudly enough to penetrate the thick plate of armor I’ve been molding around my breaking heart.
A soldier, the size of an ogre, tall with muscles as thick and broad as a horse, enters the stage holding an axe.
An axe.
Ruth’s expression flinches, shuddering away from the image of strength and rebellion. Now appearing like a little girl in the middle of a battlefield. A place no child should ever go.
“Dessin,” I whine, snatching his wrist through the chains.
He stiffens, leaning forward to get a better look.
The blade of the axe is the size of a dictionary. Its handle is a thick pole of iron, matte black with dents and jagged markings, like it’s seen the display of clashing swords in a war.
“Dostërovex hiurëz dexezels!” the Ringmaster bellows with a show of electricity that crackles across the ceiling and blue flames licking the edges of the stage.
“NO!” Dessin roars, veins bulging in his neck.
“What?” I yell. “What did he say?!”
Ruth’s face breaks apart into a look of unadulterated terror. She cries out, shaking her head with burning red cheeks, fat tears rolling off her bottom lashes and puckered bottom lip.
“He said ‘Remove her legs!’” Dessin translates in a single, horrified breath.
I gasp, my mask of confidence shattering in the wind. I choke on a cry as Warrose roars at the top of his lungs, bucking like a bull against his restraints.
Within a small tunnel, in a single moment, Ruth looks directly in my eyes, straining to see me through a thick wall of tears. She mouths a single word. One that shoots through my chest like a spear.
“Void.”
The soldier walks to her, spinning the handle in his beefy hands.
“Please, help me peek into the void! Only for a moment! Help me see what Ruth wants me to see!” I silently beg that voice in my head that has guided me through the most dire of moments. “Oh God, please help us!”
A glimmering hand reaches out of the thin veil of air, hovering toward me.
“Here, take my hand, Skylenna. Quickly!”
Latching onto her wrist, I’m sucked into the darkness by an inhumane force. A loophole sneaking me past my splintering migraine, my brain sitting in a swollen shell of agony. I whirl past flickering moments in time, zooming through hours until we land on a setting in a hallway, the one that leads to the commissary. Kaspias is leaning against the wall, and Ruth asks him for food for me.
His only condition.
An injection he pushes under her arm. And as she asks him what it is, he smiles that wide, delirious grin. “Vexamen altered Mind Phantoms. You won’t remember this. My brother won’t even be able to catch the usual symptoms.”
