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I cursed internally. I’d spent too long in the prisons. Goren would be taking out the guards in the fourth corridor by now.

“You need to move faster.” I towed Mara onward, my steps clapping over the tiles. “We only have a short window until—”

She halted so suddenly that I stumbled, forced to stop with her. Her eyes had widened, now glassy with agony.

“Mara, I know you’re in pain, but we need to—”

A violent sound burst out of her, chilling my blood. Because I knew that sound intimately—had heard it coming from my own mouth and had brought it out from the mouths of others.

It was the distinctive sound of choking.

Another set of footsteps approached, and I whipped around, ready to combat Arun or one of his guards.

But at the sight of the young man who faced me, my stomach dropped.

“Sorry, darling,” said Zeke, seething, “but you’re not taking her anywhere.”

49

Zeke’s skin was ashen, his clothes soot-stained. Stitches ran along his cheek from where Mara had thrown her blade. But despite his injury and exhaustion, fury seemed to throb around him in waves, as mighty as the specter he’d spent so long smothering.

The specter that was currently wrapped around Mara’s throat.

“Zeke.” I stepped forward, trying to speak calmly despite my own wild heartbeat. “What are you doing?”

“Exactly what your bodyguard told me to do.” His breaths came out sharp and fast. “What I was too much of a coward to have done the first time. I’m fighting back.”

I tentatively fed my specter toward Mara’s neck, the touch fluid and nonthreatening. I didn’t want to hurt him. Not after everything he’d been through. “Zeke—”

At the first brush of my power, his specter flared, yanking downward. Mara’s body followed, her knees slamming against the tiles.

“Don’t,” he warned me, and I quickly withdrew. “I won’t stop you from leaving. But she stays.”

I raised a palm, signaling peace. Though Zeke’s power had felt clumsy against my own, it had rippled with innate strength.

If I made one wrong move, he could very well crush Mara’s neck.

“Zeke, let me explain.”

“You don’t need to,” he snarled. “I saw you being dragged away, taken exactly where you needed to go. I saw where the guards emerged from.” Of course he would have guessed at my motives; he’d heard me at the settlement, protesting Mara’s execution. He and I had even used a similar method when we’d first arrived in Ansora—when Valeria had taken us to the medical tent, exactly where we’d needed to go. “You want to save her.” He looked me over, disgusted. “You’re no better than the rest of them.”

I inched closer. “She has information I need. If she dies, that information dies, too.”

He rasped a laugh. “You’re a fool if you believe she has anything to offer you.”

“Maybe. But I have to try.” I swallowed drily, every lost second resounding like a death knell in my head. If the guards caught us like this, it would be over. “I know you’re in pain.”

“Do you?” Zeke’s face contorted, spittle flying with the words. “Do you know what it’s like to have your entire life destroyed in one day? To see someone you love take a killing blow for you?” His voice broke, and agony seeped into the cracks. “To be the person who leaves them behind?”

Garret’s face flashed across my mind.

I’ll bet it hurts, doesn’t it? Not knowing if he’s dead or alive. Not knowing whether to mourn him or hate him.

The answers were right there inside Mara, trapped under the noose of Zeke’s power. Yet, deep down, I was too afraid to hear them. Because after all these weeks, I still felt guilty for caring about Garret.

But more than that, I felt guilty for leaving him.

“Yes,” I said honestly. “I know exactly what that is like. I also know how it feels to hold the life of a Hunter in my hands, and to want so fiercely to rip it away. I saw nothing except my own pain then, my own need for revenge.” Sorrow bled into the words as I remembered Garret’s pulse, raging under my specter. And I knew that it didn’t matter what answer Mara gave me; I would grieve either way. So I let myself feel, for the first time, the magnitude of losing the boy Garret had once been as well as the man he had become, both of whom had never stopped loving me. “I don’t know what might have happened if only I hadn’t succumbed to that feeling.”