Now, Ahvi does smile—so big and wide it cracks a fissure through my cold, aching heart. “Nobodycan hurt me through my shield.”
Nausea surges so thick and fast I pull from Kaan’s grip, move toward the windows, dragging clawed fingers through my hair as I work through slow, steady breaths that do nothing to tamp the rapid beat of my heart.
I don’t like this. Any of it.
Can’t seem to shake the feeling that something’s not right.
“Where did it happen?” Kaan asks, and I shove down images of blood and broken bones. Of bits of brain burst across the snow-speckled floor.
Memories of how it felt as my heart began to beat so slow I knew it was ticking toward its final thump—
“An abandoned mineshaft.”
“Which one?”
Pyrok’s voice is hitched in a way I haven’t heard before.
Ahvi answers for me, perhaps knowing my mind is somewhere cold and quiet. A place I’d hoped never to see again, where I almost fell down the dark pit into which I’d stuffed the memories of everything I’d lost during my escape across The Ergor Plains.
“South of Gore,” he says gently. “The bind was made on the outskirts of the Undercity.”
Arkyn stops before Kyzari’s cell, locking eyes with the princess. Bold-blue orbs, like crystals glinting in the dark, bearing more life than when he last met her gaze.
When she was hopelessly pleading for mercy that simply does not exist.
The pale-blue gown hangs in filthy tatters off her sharpened edges, her long hair whiter than it was. Any warmth shocked from it since he tore through her little parchment pet.
Something Arkyn muses over. Findsinteresting.
He flicks the lid on her pah’s weald, releasing a bulb of fire. Closes it again.
“Open the gate.”
His voice moves down the tunnel like a seep of ink.
Kyzari’s brows pinch together. She scrambles to her feet, tucking messy tangles of hair behind her ear as a masked guard clonks the lock open and pulls her gate wide. The hinges squeal in protest.
“Where’s—” Kyzari’s question cuts off with a gasp. Her hand flies to her mouth, eyes on her auntie getting dragged along the tunnel, into the flaming torchlight. A limp weight strung between two of Arkyn’s masked guards.
Blood leaks from Veya’s nose, ears, and eyes, the runes on her temples cut through—disabling them. No longer necessary.
Veya doesn’t fight as she’s backed against the bars on the outside of her cell, tethered in place with an iron chain. The dark dents beneath her eyes underline the flatness in her gaze. The deep exhaustion after three slumbers of sleeplessness.
The vacant hint offailure.
Kyzari’s clamped in wrist shackles, her tether to the ground released. She’s herded out into the tunnel, attached to the bars with a chain short enough that when she tries to jolt toward Veya—to help her—the shacklesbite.
Kyzari melts back. Not that it stops her from nipping wide-eyed glances at her broken auntie.
Arkyn looks at the empty meal bowl sitting in the corner of Kyzari’s cell, flicking the weald open … closed … open …
Hope, it seems, is alive again. Sure sign the truth has been shared between them.
Kyzari knows her mah lives. But does she know her pah is not Tyroth—King of The Shade—as everyone believes? Does she know her pah is none other thanKaan Vaegor?
Arkyn almost laughs at the irony, snapping the weald shut.
Fate must want him to have his revenge, otherwise Kaan’s spawn wouldn’t have landed on his doorstep. Itsmileson him, Arkyn is sure. Offering the blood of Kaan’s blood to scratch his bloodlust with.
