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Chapter Forty-One
Zaina
The bell is on its fourth and final toll when I reluctantly abandon any hope of sleep.
Which isn’t unusual. Since I woke up trapped in my childhood nightmare, sleep has proven to be an elusive prey.
Tonight, my mind refuses to stop analyzing all the reasons Aika may have fled the ball, and what Madame might be doing to her as punishment.
She probably wouldn’t ruin her mission by killing Aika, but the things she can do to a person are far worse than death. When the images assaulting me in the dark become too much, I make my way into the main part of the suites, trying not to wake Einar.
Khijhana follows, right on my heels.
A teapot hangs from an iron bar, just close enough to the dwindling hearth to stay warm. The sight soothes something inside me, knowing that Helga or Gunnar took the time to set it up for me.
I’m pouring myself a lightly steaming cup when the front door swings open.
My heart leaps into my throat, but Khijhana’s lack of reaction has it calming down before Helga comes into view.
She doesn’t comment before she goes to the small bedroom to wake her brother for his shift. She stands watchfully until he emerges, bleary-eyed but alert, to stand guard in the hall.
Once he shuts the door behind him, Helga surprises me by returning to the sitting room instead of heading to bed. She sinks gracefully into one of the chairs, her porcelain features not showing a single sign of fatigue after a night on guard duty.
“You’re worried about your sister?” she asks me in Jokithan.
At least she doesn’t bother to pretend she and Gunnar can’t hear my heated conversations with Einar.
“Always.” I let out a wry laugh, but it isn’t fooling either of us.
“Is she like you?”
It’s an interesting question, and I open my mouth to sayno, when I reconsider it. Aika and I aren’t alike, but we aren’t precisely different, either. Two girls taken in by a monster, trained relentlessly and tortured sporadically and exposed to the worst things life has to offer.
“In some ways,” I allow. “I suppose it depends on what you mean by that.”
Helga meets my eyes directly. “She is a fighter?”
“She’s very skilled,” I confirm.
Helga hesitates before taking a breath to speak. “Gunnar and I were the same age when our parents died, but he seemed younger to me then. He was smaller, not as strong. I find sometimes that image never really left me. Even now, I forget he can protect himself.”
I picture the tall, strong man who rivals Einar in his fighting ability, who required Einar and me both to subdue him when he was poisoned into believing we were the enemy, and I almost laugh.
But I hear what she’s saying, and what she isn’t.
I let my mind wander back to Aika the day she arrived, skinny and half-starved, covered in fleas. It was only a couple of weeks after Rose died, and all I could see was another victim for Madame to torture and use against me.
“That girl doesn’t belong here,” I tell Madame.
Frustration laces my tone, and the girl narrows her onyx eyes at me.
“The Girlhas a name,” she spits. “It’s Aika.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her.
She doesn’t understand why I don’t want her here, why she would be better off anywhere else in the world, why my treating her as anything close to a sister ends badly for both of us.
I spin away from her, walking on soft, even footsteps to my room so that Madame doesn’t punish me for insolence. The only reason she didn’t already is she’s still putting on a show for the girl, but I’m fair game in the privacy of my room.
