My head snapped up to find him grinning down at me.
“What did you say?” I gasped, trying desperately to hold back more tears, but I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think…
Dahes flicked his fingers as thirty sentries stalked into the room. “Bring them to the river. It seems I have something I need to show Magnolia.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Token
MAGNOLIA
Hael and I were chained in front of the Examinis, its iridescent foam casting a glow over the cave underneath the castle.
The water was loud, moving fast and swirling around the middle. The sound roared in my ears, echoing off the rocky walls. If it wasn’t so deadly, it would have been beautiful. It was the kind of pretty that made you want to jump in. I imagined the water was warm, despite everything in Moriann being freezing, itlookedwarm. But maybe that was part of the illusion. It was all a cover for the rot hidden below. It was why so many outcasts ate the berries around the bridges. The temptation was there, the allure of the river just as deadly as the Hell lurking beneath it.
The air smelled like stagnant, metallic mildew. It made everything feel damp down here, even though the only moisture was confined to the running currents.
We were at the widest point before it spilled out into the ocean. No one ever swam in the southern tip of the Adrian. The saltwater counteracted the effects of the river, but everyone was so scared of dying—so downright terrified of Dahes—that the northern beach became the only swimmable strip of shoreline. Not that anyone ever took leisurelyswims here—it was more if you became desperate enough to wash off the grime from the streets.
If it wasn’t for the chains bolting Hael and me to the ground of the underbelly of Dahes’ castle, I would have thought Dahes was going to push us in.
The sentries clamped shackles over my own wrists, and the feeling was so jarring that it brought me back to my first year of slavery, when I spent every waking second in them. I swore I still felt the permanent bruises beneath my skin from the metal rubbing against my bones.
“Your Token isn’t transparency,” Dahes said, forcing me to look up from the rushing river.
“What do you mean?”
“Think back to the night it manifested, Magnolia. What was your deepest necessity?”
I could feel Hael staring at me. Before I told Hael why I became transparent, I always felt like he knew. Even when I was standing in the Vivenian throne room and King Elion was laughing at me, he knew.
Hael’s response when I told him came crashing back to me, hitting me so hard that it hurt…
“Is he dead?” His voice had been so lethal. “The bastard that did that to you. Is. He. Dead?”
Then his voice dropped even lower. “I will walk into Moriann right now and kill him so slowly that it’ll take months. Hell, I’ll drag him out here so you can do it yourself if you want to. Just tell me his name.”
But I hadn’t. I never told himwhotried to do it to me, and now I ruined everything. We could never go back to how things were.
“I didn’t want you to touch me.” I barely heard my own voice, wasn’t aware of my lips moving to form the words of what my necessity was. I wanted to crawl into my own skin and disappear until I was nothing more than the wind howling through the kingdom.
I hated what almost happened, hated that it always made me feel this way. Hated even more that Dahes used it against me to get Hael to agree to this… Maybe if I told him everything then, maybe if I hadn’t left out the important details, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Dahes smiled. It was soft and gentle and more terrifying than his usual malicious smirks. “That’s not true. You’re forgetting that you didn’t block me out back then. I saw everything in that little mind of yours. Think, Magnolia. What were youreallyscared of, because it wasn’t just me fucking you.”
I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t only make myself numb to block out Dahes. I also did it for myself. My life was filled with horrific memory after horrific memory. There was so much I wanted to forget. There was barely any good, except…
Except forhim—the reason I got myself into this mess in the first place.
Masin.
“I was scared you were going to kill me,” I admitted. “After you got what you wanted, I thought I was going to die.”
Dahes was full on grinning now. He started pacing the bank of the river in front of us. The foam casting a glow around him, making his eyes look even more iridescent. “Exactly. So how do you protect yourself against getting killed, Magnolia?”
I couldn’t think of an answer. All I knew was that I had to live. I had to find a way to get back to Masin.
“You die,” he said, stopping his pacing as he stood directly in front of me now. “You didn’t want me to kill you, so you killed yourself.”
