“Or it’s you being scared shitless that you’ve found someone who means something to you.”
I stared at him for a long moment, not speaking as his statement ran through my mind. “Maybe I am,” I replied finally. “But I’m not going to resolve anything sitting here in this fucking cave, hiding out with you. We leave tomorrow for Aurum, so just . . . can you drop it for now?”
“Fine,” Axel replied as he took another drink of whiskey before pulling out the deck of cards we’d found and shuffling the deck.
6 Days Until Mission
I sat in the debrief room, drilling my fingers against the table as I stared at Elion. We had only arrived back in Aurum Quartertwenty minutes ago, and we were already getting our stars-damned asses chewed out for the mission.
“You had one task . . . one mission. And yet, I’ve been fielding reports for the past four days about why the Aurelian Guild—the Shade, nonetheless—has been running missions in Solis Quarter.”
I sighed as I watched Elion pace the ground before Axel and me.
“I’ve got the King of Aurum calling me, demanding to know what’s going on. I’ve got complaints coming from his commander, who’s been dealing with decoding messages and threats from Solis Quarter. And what have I had to answer with? What, you ask?Nothing! Because my two top spies in the entire stars-damned Guild have been off in the desert for the past few days, unreachable.”
The doors behind Elion whirled as the keypad unlocked, and then the metal slid open, and Eleana walked through the room, grimacing as she caught sight of the two of us.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, dipping her head in respect toward Elion. “The training sessions with the new initiates ran late today.”
“Take a seat,” Elion commanded as he sat down at the head of the debrief table. “Blackwood and Pierce were just about to share the intel they’ve collected from their mission.”
30
RAELYNA
The locker clicked shutbeside me, jarring me from my thoughts as my gaze flicked up to find Finn staring at me with concern.
“Sorry, what?” The words fell from my lips in a hollow tone.
“You need to snap out of this, Rae,” he said. “Now more than ever, we need to be on our game.”
I sighed, a weary note, as I stared up at my best friend, noting the dark lines present under his eyes.
It had been an entire week since Callum and Axel snuck out my window, escaping from under Lucanus’s grasp, and I hadn’t heard a word from him. Not that it stopped me from texting him each night, giving him a brief update on what was going on in Solis Quarter.
Maybe it was idiotic to think that a male I’d known for less than a month—a member of the Aurelian Guild, no less—would text me back, mid-mission. But I sent him updates as promised, nonetheless.
My episodes continued, returning with more frequency—only now we knew I couldn’t go to a doctor to get help. Sage spent every spare moment she had trying to research how Icould get the markings to reveal—I’d been learning more about Aeternus, about the true creation of the City of Gold—but nothing had coaxed the gold ink free.
On top of the chaos that was my life, we had hardly heard from Orela since she had been taken to the High Temple, other than a few short texts. My mother was worried sick, and Kira couldn’t stop crying each night. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep it up.
I didn’t know how to explain it to Finn.
The nonexistent feeling growing inside me. I was just numb all over.
Numb.
It didn’t matter what happened next.
What anyone said or did.
It just felt like if I didn’t care . . . it couldn’t affect me.
There was too much going on. Too much to deal with.
And I knew somewhere deep down that I did care, and itdidmatter. But the weight of it all was pressing in on me from every side, and it felt harder and harder to stay afloat.
The only positive thing to have happened lately was that Sage had come home one day with a file she had received. There was no name, no traceable number, nothing. She said an older male had dropped it off one day, courtesy of a mutualfriendof ours.
