Page 141 of Commanding Scythe and Sky

A foot wide. A layer of filth that probably predated my nation. Weak, flickering torchlight. Just looking down that narrow stairwell had my heart racing—not in the fun way. In the way it pounded in Reyna’s storm cellar while tornado sirens screamed. In the way small spaces had always made me feel one unexpected spider away from death.

That crushing pressure around my chest—the way it was falling a little too rapidly and not rising quite enough⁠—

I stepped around the bookshelf and shoved. The ruby heated. I pushed harder, and the stone grew hot against my skin. “Fuck off, Rhiannon,” I muttered. “Have you seen what your son does to his playthings?” The stone answered with a vibration that, I swore to all seven sisters, felt a hell of a lot like irritation.

At last, the bookcase budged with a mournful screech as I shoved it back into place.

Thoroughly freaked the fuck out, I practically sprinted to my bedroom door, growled when it still wouldn’t open, then launched myself back into bed.

My heart beat like I’d trapped a hummingbird inside it.

The ruby went dark. My heart did not.

“Fuck that shit,” I breathed as I burrowed beneath the covers. “Fuck. That. Shit.” Repetition did nothing to kill curiosity’s apparent death wish for me. No matter how many sheep I counted, my eyes kept dragging back to that godsdamned bookcase.

I was still staring at the damn thing when Bartholomew finally knocked before sunrise. Stiff with exhaustion, still petrified of whatever might lurk in that passage—and of the thing around my neck—I made it to the doorway… and froze at the look in Barry’s eyes.

Like he’d seen a ghost.

“Barry?”

Wordlessly, he jerked his chin over his shoulder, face haunted. My stomach dropped. They knew. Moros knew what I’d done for Fiona, and we were all as good as dead. Worse, Bellamy was already paying for it.

There was no other explanation.

Suddenly, I felt like an idiot for not going down the godsdamned passageway.

“Bellamy?” I breathed. The captain shook his head, and my slip of the tongue seemed to drag him back into himself. He blinked at me like he was clearing fog from his eyes.

“He’s well, witchling,” he said, apparently reading the terror on my face. Gods only knew how brutal an execution for hiding an heir—even an illegitimate one—from a monster like Moros would be. I didn’t care to imagine it. “Hurry.”

Without another word, he turned. I followed, palms sweating all over again.

I braced myself for whatever fresh hell we were walking to.

Braced myself for bones wickedly bent, and Alvara’s hoarse screams.

What I hadn’t braced for was Alvara—fully clothed. In one piece. Sitting in a wheelchair, her eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the rising sun outside the window.

It wasn’t Moros in front of her today, but his twin.

“Just an exam today, doctor,” she supplied sweetly, stroking long fingers through Ally’s hair. The seer didn’t move. Didn’t so much as alter her breathing. Her eyes remained vacant, as though she’d abandoned this body and gone searching for another that wasn’t trapped.

Swallowing the terror climbing my chest, I rushed in front of her and crouched beside the wheelchair.

Frail.

So impossibly frail.

Souls didn’t atrophy like this. Not without an ungodly amount of stress on the system—on the soul itself. For her condition to deteriorate this quickly… What in the gods’ names had they done to her these last few days?

Every joint and angle of the once-magnificent warrior stood out beneath her skin. Her cheeks were hollow. Her eyes sunken. She looked like a human starved past the point of return.

“Will she eat?” I demanded, horrified. For her. For August. Gods, he could sense her suffering. Wherever he was, however hard he was fighting to reach us, he could feel her agony.

“She refuses. I was hoping you could help us with that.”

I blinked at Marlana’s words—at the sincere concern threaded through them. Nodding, I set my hands on the silky pajamas they’d somehow wrestled Ally into.