“Don’t you see?” Nora said. “Freya is the third Candidate. If she survives the Crucible, she will be there for the anointing, along with all three Ascendantsandthe head of the Kyrie line. My stepmother, monstrous creature that she is—she’ll be the one to consecrate the Judge’s death so that a new Watcher might ascend. They’ll all be there.”
“You’re going to kill them all.” Toby’s voice was little more than a ragged whisper. “The Ascendants. The head and heir of the Kyrie line. The other Candidates.”
“If there was a way for me to save the innocent…” Nora stared off into space for a moment. “But there’s not. I can’t risk tipping any of them off, and the end justifies the means. I think Alice knows that deep down. I think she knewshecouldn’t do what needed to be done. That I could.”
“We’re in an underground cave system with thousands of tons of stone above us,” Rohan said, his ears ringing slightly. “A small number of well-placed explosions is all it will take to cause a cave-in of massive proportions.” Rohan and Xander Hawthorne had calculated as much themselves. “You’ve already taken care of placing those explosives, haven’t you? Whilewekept the Ascendants busy, you slipped in unnoticed. We were your distraction. You stood by and waited unseen as they stripped us of every last weapon, and then you found a way to take what you needed.”
“The Candidates will be at the epicenter,” Nora told Toby. “I can’t save any of them, but I might be able to give you two a chance.”
“I don’t want one,” Toby said—but Rohan did. Despite everything, despite the fool he’d been, for better or worse, he wanted to live to play another day.
“I’ll release you when I can, if I can. In the cavern, the tunnel on the left will take you out.” Nora caught Rohan’s gaze one last time. “When the doors open,run.”
Chapter 85
GIGI
Savannah wasfine. Gigi still hadn’t wrapped her mind around that. Savannah was fine, and she was in Arizona, and now so was Gigi, because she’d needed to see her sister for herself. Their mother had been the one to call—from Savannah’s Alisa-Ortega-issued phone, when she’d seen all the missed calls.
“Where is she?” Gigi asked her mom. It was late, but Gigi didn’t care. Savannah wasfine.
“Your room. I’m not going to ask why you both have new phones.” Acacia Grayson wasn’t the world’s best mom for nothing. She dropped a kiss on Gigi’s forehead. “Yet.”
Gigi took that to mean there were a lot of things that her mom wasn’t going to askyet.
“Why is she inmyroom?” Gigi said.
“Do you remember when the two of you were little, and we decided to let you share a room for a few years, because you two ended up in the same bed every night regardless?”
Gigi nodded. “I crawled into her bed every time I had a nightmare.”
“Is that how you remember it?” Her mom smiled slightly. “BecauseI remember you crawling into Savannah’s bed every timeshehad a nightmare.”
Gigi found Savannah exactly where their mom had said she’d be: in Gigi’s room, sitting on Gigi’s bed, which wasn’t really a bed per se. Technically, it was a mattress on the floor.
Technically, Gigi had sold thebed.
“I take it Mom called you.” Savannah was wearing a little black dress, her face fully made up, four-inch heels on her feet. She looked like a supermodel. A supermodel who was staring blankly ahead, a small ball of fur in her lap.
“On a scale of one to forty-seven,” Gigi said, “how pissed is Katara that you brought home a kitten?” Gigi’s Bengal cat was used to being the undisputed queen of her domain.
“Very,” Savannah replied.
You’re not fine-fine, Gigi thought.You’re alive-fine. Hurting-fine. Possibly-plotting-something fine.Crawling into bed with her sister was still second nature for Gigi, after all these years, even when the bed in question wasn’t really a bed per se.
“What happened?” Gigi asked. “I thought they had you. The Gilded Blade. I called you forty-seven times.”
Savannah shook her head. “You and the number forty-seven.”
“What happened?” Gigi could be a broken record when she needed to be. “Because we were all under the impression that you saidyes.”
“No one ever asked.” Savannah was quiet for a moment, and Gigi resisted the urge to fill the silence, to ask where Savannah had been, to say a single damn thing. If the silence got awkward, so be it. If Savannah wanted to talk,shecould talk. And eventually, she did. “What happened in here?” Savannah gestured toward Gigi’s room, her very bare room. “Where’s your furniture? Why is your closet practically empty?”
Gigi looked down. “It is an epic story kind of like Robin Hood, except I’m both Robin Hood and the people he steals from, and it’s all roughly two hundred percent more chaotic.” It felt like an eternity ago now.
“When did it start?”
Gigi met Savannah’s gaze. “You know when.”
