Page 22 of Daughter of the Dark

Images of his muscles tensing above her flashed before her eyes. She blinked them away and swallowed. “I have a very hard time believing that.”

“You’ll see,” Cora said before patting Reyes’s cheek. “And she can keep the dagger if it makes her feel better.”

The words made Solana feel foolish. Neither Reyes nor Cora were armed, but neither were they prisoners and tortured very recently. Solana’s nerves were frayed, and the contrast of near-death acceptance and current royal employee was too much to swallow. She also wasn’t willing to let the dagger out of her sight again so soon.

Cora must have seen it in her face, because she reached down and untied the weapons belt from her own waist and held it out to Solana. “You’ll get your own soon, but use this in the meantime. I have several.”

The whole ordeal was taking much longer than she would have liked and drawing way too much attention to her. Solana snatched the belt and quickly tied it around her hips and then deposited the dagger into the appropriately sized sheath.

“There,” Cora said. “Let’s go quickly before Reyes decides he’d like to come.” She grabbed Solana’s hand and tugged her out of the room. Reyes gave her a glare full of warning that she barely caught as she had been studiously avoiding his face, and then she was back in the halls, arm in arm with a woman she only just met.

The longing for female companionship had always been strong, but never so strong as then. It was difficult but necessary to remind herself that none of this belonged to her as Cora happily chattered beside her.

And that every good thing came to an end eventually.

CHAPTER NINE

“I have something I need to confess,” Cora said as she pulled Solana to a stop.

Cora had shown Solana where the kitchens, library, training room, and gardens were. They skipped the infirmary, since Solana had only just been there that morning, and they had walked back in through a side door, one that Solana had gone in and out of on the way to the gardens more times than she could count. They now stood in the hall that led to the main receiving room and the throne room beyond. Full night had fallen, and Solana felt dead on her feet. She hoped their next stop was her rooms.

“What’s that?” Solana asked, glancing longingly at the flight of stairs that would carry her toward sleep.

“I helped capture you and your friend.”

Solana’s head whipped back toward her. That sense of familiarity she had felt before suddenly made sense. “You were in the room with us,” she whispered, memories of murmured words and firm commands being tossed over her agonized body flooding in. “You knew what was going to happen, and you let it.”

Cora grabbed Solana’s hand in both of hers and squeezed. “I can’t take back my part in it, but I am sorry. I wish it hadn’t happened that way, and I understand if you want to hold it against me forever.”

Solana shifted, her gaze darting back to the stairs. When was the last time someone had apologized to her, had taken responsibility for their actions, or lack thereof?

It wasn’t something she was accustomed to receiving. Or doing, for that matter. If she sat down and thought about each of her actions and how they indirectly affected others, there were plenty of people she owed apologies to. It was foolish to expect something from a stranger that she didn’t want expected of her. “It’s nothing,” Solana lied. “It likely would have happened eventually, regardless of your part in it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, Reyes also feels badly about the whole thing.” Cora pushed her hair behind an ear and looked off to the side, toward a window where night had fallen and the lights on the castle gates twinkled like stars.

Solana snorted. “I don’t think he’s capable of that emotion.”

Cora laughed, the sound like bells chiming. “You might be surprised.”

The lack of pity he felt was clearly visible in the slack of his face while carving her up. Even in the way he tossed her into the dungeons without batting an eye. He had tortured her for answers to questions she didn’t have. It was more likely he had enjoyed it than felt badly about it.

He would have left her to die among the muki, if not for the king.

“The muki,” Solana whispered. That was one rumor she hadn’t been able to confirm. Moans from the muki held underneath the castle. “Where are they kept?”

For a moment, Solana considered that it was all a lie. That King Killian was only telling the people of Supay that he was mercifully rounding them up and instead massacring them in secret, and that Solana’s hunting was a threat to his facade of benevolence and control.

But then Cora offered to show her, and Solana eagerly followed her past the stairs that led to her rooms. They went down a hall where the carpet ended, down a dim set of stairs that narrowed concerningly, around a corner that led to another set of cold, narrow stairs.

Cora and Solana descended single file for what felt like an impossible length, until they came to a door barred with several locks. Cora grabbed a light from the wall and pressed her hand against the metal.

Under her touch, the locks sprang open one at a time until the whole thing popped open with a clank and a hiss. The room beyond was pitch-black, the light in Cora’s hand illuminating a wide circle around them. A blast of cold, frigid air rushed out at the same time Solana’s dagger sent a burst of heat at her hip. Water dripped somewhere far-off, giving the room an eerie rhythm, as if the space were keeping time.

Solana paused next to Cora and waited for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she stumbled back with a gasp.

The air was pulsing with the breaths of thousands of muki lined shoulder to shoulder, chest to back as far as her eyes could see, the metal bars of cages delineating a narrow path straight down the middle. It was too dark to see specific features, if they were awake or asleep or even alive. She imagined that none would fall over on their respective sides of the room, even if they were dead. Their bodies were pressed so tightly together that they were unintentionally supporting each other’s weight. It was a sea of the haunted dead. The very epitome of Supay’s curse.

The god had wanted more than he was given and had tried to take it despite the cost. Their curse was one of eternal greed, eternal want, eternal misery, and it was so thick in the room that Solana nearly gagged on it.