Page 9 of Heart of Thieves

My movements are jerky, each step a stomp. I’m no more than a doll. Or perhaps a corpse. Laurel hasn’t let go of her magical control over my body since she found me at the sheriff of Opalton’s home. For seven days, my mouth has spoken words I don’t want to say and my feet have carted me along streets I don’t want to walk. Her magic is too strong, her hold too sound. I’m a prisoner in my own body.

It is worse than any story of the Deep I’ve ever heard.

Once she maneuvers me into the passenger seat, the cab driver jolts out of the vehicle on magical marionette strings of his own. His eyes widen as Laurel takes the wheel in his place and slams on the gas pedal. The tires spatter him in sodden city muck as we peel away.

Pulling into traffic, she peers at me with a grimace. “Please, let me help you.”

She’s just as exhausted as I am. Neither of us has slept in days, and the deep circles under her eyes mark the hours we’ve spent battling for control of my body. She releases her magical hold on my mouth so I can speak.

“It isn’t real, Laurel,” I rasp for what feels like the millionth time.

Her jaw hardens as her grip tightens on the steering wheel and her magic slams my mouth shut once more. “Stop saying that.”

I try to pry open my jaw, but it is made of stone.

Tears shine in her eyes. She releases one hand from the wheel to grasp mine. “Nic,” she whispers.

It’s the first time she’s touched me—actually touched me—since that sheriff ’s house, and the instant the chips of moonshard in her skin brush my knuckles, something vibrates through me. Familiar as my own breath, it dances between us like sparks of electricity. I inhale sharply, tasting the scent of . . .

My own magic?

I let my senses go hazy so I can see the threads of my power. Sure enough, it shimmers through her, twined along her limbs, a faint trace of me woven all through her. Where did it come from? What, exactly, is it?

“I can’t watch you end up in the Deep,” she whispers. “It will break me.”

The fear in her words strikes something deep and primal inside me. A memory from my childhood thrashes forward. A younger Enzo wading into the ocean searching for shells, drawn to the Deep by curiosity, heedless of the danger we’d been taught lurked within. The thousand nights afterward I spent lighting candles and pleading with the gods on his behalf. The bone-deep desperation that kept me returning to the temple, my determination to keep Enzo from becoming seaspawn bordering on madness.

That same madness burns in Laurel now. She sees me not just standing in sea-foam the way I caught Enzo, but plunged in over my head, swimming out to Ivian, the god of lies, himself. And no matter how many times I might try to explain that Ivian does not exist, that the ocean is just water, that she doesn’t need to be afraid, she won’t hear me, just like I never heard Enzo.

Laurel sucks in a slow, trembling breath. “I’m only trying to help you.”

I blink, but she still holds my mouth captive, and I cannot ask her any of the questions rising like a tide in my throat.

She squeezes my hand, and I sense, once again, that thread of magic in her. Not the golden fabric of illusions, nor the stench of secrets . . . a multicolor vibration, powerful and dangerous.

All at once, it hits me.

It’s an Unbreakable Lie.

Adrenaline cracks through me like lightning. Did Lola use her Unbreakable Lie on Laurel somehow? But when? Why?

I focus on the lie braided through Laurel’s soul. Now that I know what to look for, I can see the evidence of that lie woven through every strand of her tendons, every fiber of her muscles. A deception written in her bones.

A lie that says her sins are not her fault.

Somehow, one of my Unbreakable Lies is what turned Laurel from the girl I once knew and loved into this self-righteous villain.

So desperate with hope it’s making me quiver, I pull on that lie through the voratium in her skin, trying to dismantle the magic the way I do any other illusion I’ve cast. But it won’t give; the threads are bound through the very beat of her heart.

I cannot pull the lie away.

My heart sinks, and blood roars in my ears.

Laurel has become what she has because of me. The moonshard may have cursed her, but my magic tipped her into ruin. Shed her of the shame that kept her from acting upon her most militant, self-righteous desires.

I have to fix this. Have to figure out how to stop her.

“The gods show me people’s sins,” Laurel says softly. “They gave me power to stop those who would corrupt their world.”