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Raana’s heart was about to burst through her ribcage. She stepped closer, leaving her grimoire on the counter and leaning against it. “For what?”
Adrien grinned, and it was every bit reckless, damning, and charming. “We’re breaking into the prison.”
CHAPTER35
ISLA
Isla was in the Wilds. She recognized the feel of the rotting earth beneath her feet, the ghastly odor, and the lingering essence of dark, destructive magic budding from every pore. But again, she knew she was dreaming.
She wasn’t only dreaming; she was in a memory.
Donning not her warrior’s uniform but her crimson ballgown from the night of the feast, she lifted her leg over a decaying log as she pushed through the brush. Thorny thickets scratched her arms and face, snagging on her dress as she fought through them before she sensed a tug, a pulse from deep inside her.
When she felt the thick forest would never end, she stumbled into a clearing, and, there, in the distance, she watched herself with Kai.
They’d been shifted, and he loomed over her, a bak dead on the ground behind him—the one he’d killed to save her life. They moved around each other like a dance, doing all they could not to touch when the desire to do so had been so rooted within them.
“You were always meant to return to our greatest failure.”
Isla sucked in a breath, whipping around to seek the woman with violet eyes—
There was nothing, just the endless horror of the cursed woodland.
When she turned back, she and Kai had vanished, but the bak still lay there.
“Where are you?”Isla called, her voice hollow in this place that was not a place.
“Everywhere,”the woman said, a resounding echo in Isla’s mind.“I always have been.”
Isla’s nostrils flared.That’s not an answer.She felt there was no point in asking,who are you, so she chose something more direct. “Are you me?”
Silence greeted her, and she stepped forward. Her feet were bare, sinking deep into the muddied earth, the beautiful dress she’d remember forever torn in the sharp thorns from where she escaped. Where was she?
“We are the same.”The words came from beside her.
Isla turned.
Nothing.
“Cursed with a similar burden.”
Not exactly her, then.
She felt an icy breath against her cheek, gasped, and turned, only to catch a flash of white hair before she was pushed. She stumbled back.
The world shifted, and she tilted, faltered, then fell to her hands and knees somewhere new—somewhere she never had been. But it tugged,tugged.
A palace of crumbled stone lorded before her. A phantom peering from the shadows. Its seeing eye opened wide—a window left vacant in the wake of its shattered stained glass.
Tug,tug.
Her heart pounded in her throat.
She fought to her feet. “What…what is our burden?”
Steeling her will, Isla pressed forward, but no matter how many steps she took, she never advanced towards what she suspected to be Phobos’s Pack Hall. It was a haunting shell of the beauty it had once been, an alarming echo of a dwelling she now called home. The full moon shone behind it, accentuating the shadows.
“Come to me, and I will show you.”Isla didn’t turn at the breath on her neck that shot shivers up her spine.
