“You came,” he says, and then he gulps sadly at the food, as if he believes this is a trick and that it will turn to ash in his mouth.
I nod as I push the food through the space between the cell bars. Saddiq grabs the food as if it’s the last thing he’ll ever eat, his body so malnourished that he gags on it as it slivers down his throat. I look at Kaius. “Can’t you let him out?”
Kaius examines the bars and wraps his cold fingers around them. He pulls, but unlike the cell I was in when I first met him, the door does not give. He tries again. Still nothing.
“It’s enchanted,” he says. “I do not know this ward. I will have to go through Dravon to break it.”
I scowl. Not necessarily at Kaius, but at the thought of Dravon forcing us to leave Saddiq here. I sigh and gently reach a hand through the bars to touch Saddiq’s bony shoulder.
“I’ll come back every day with food or clothes or whatever you need. I promise.”
He gives my hand an untrusting glare, alternating between it and Kaius. “Why?”
I give him a soft smile. “The one thing these demons will never take from me is my humanity.”
Ten
Kaius
I lead Adelasia back to her suite in silence, and the entire time I can feel her thoughts. Perhaps it’s because it’s been so long since I’ve had cause to truly care about another, but it intrigues me how invested she’s become in the wellbeing of Dravon’s prisoner.
What concerns me though, is that I can tell that she’s angry with me for allowing it.
As if she needed another reason to believe I’m a monster.
Her last words about not losing her humanity have been repeating in my head over and over since they fell from her lips.
Behind the closed door of her bedroom, she turns to me, nearly knocking me over with the intensity of her stare.
“Make him set Saddiq free,” she demands.
I nod slightly. “I shall speak with him,” I tell her truthfully. The magic on the cell door is unknown to me, and I’ve never known Dravon to care much for the arcane.
So where did he learn it from?Even with Yekaterina’s Bloodstone hanging from my neck, I was unable to break through his ward. I find that deeply disturbing and I intend to find out who Dravon has been speaking with to learn and execute such magic.
“That’s it?” she asks. “You’ll ‘speak’ with him? What if he refuses?”
“Adelasia, I understand that you don’t wish to see a human suffer as he has, but I have known Dravon for many lifetimes and he is not someone that you can get through by politely asking,” I sigh and straighten my shoulders slightly. “I will handle it.”
That seems to satisfy her for the time being. She takes a deep breath and turns to the mirror on her vanity. She takes out the pins in her hair one by one until her long black locks fall freely down her back. The light from the fireplace reflects from it, creating a deep amber color that makes her eyes stand out even more than they normally do.
She breaks me out of my thoughts when she clears her throat, noticing that I’m staring at her.
I clear my own throat. “I apologize. You…your eyes…”
“My eyes?” she whispers, leaning closer to the mirror searching for some flaw that isn’t there. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“Absolutely nothing,” I answer. That’s all I offer.
She looks down slightly. “Thank you for earlier…in the kitchen. How did you know I was there?”
I take a few steps closer to her until I’m directly at her back, yet she cannot see me in the mirror as I see her. She stares into the void where my body should be, her mind trying to understand what it cannot see. I take my hand and gently move some of her hair out of the way so I can reach around her to place my hand on her heart.
“It may not seem so, but the human heart is loud. Yours beats like drums in my ears. I can hear you, always. I simply followed the echoes when you began to panic.”
“You killed him,” she whispers.
“Yes,” I confirm.
