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“It will have to.” Darius turns to me. “Once I break through, come up to join me. I’ll have to lift you the rest of the way to reach the outside.”
Fear roils in my stomach. “Then how will you get out?”
“You’ll have to find something to use as a rope.” He grips my shoulders. “Worst-case scenario, you get out, and I discorporealate, right?”
“Right.” Still uneasy about the plan, I step back.
Darius carefully climbs the mountain of bones, the unstable structure shifting and rocking beneath his weight.
At the top, he carefully stands and raises his arms above his head. Fire rises from his palms, slamming into the roots with more force than he could achieve from the ground.
As the thick roots sizzle and blacken, hope unfurls within me.
This plan might actually work.
Movement from the corner of my eye pulls my attention away from Darius’s battle as a human skull bounces off the mound we made, followed by another, and a light tremor rolls through the ground beneath my feet.
“Darius…”
“I’m getting there,” he gasps out, his full focus on directing the fire.
The tremor increases, and then a wave of bones heads toward us, as if a giant creature moves beneath them like water.
“Get down from there! It’s going to collapse!” I shout as I run across the bones toward the far wall.
Darius’s head whips toward me, then his eyes widen when he spots the approaching wave.
His fire cuts off, and he slips and slides down the hill, hitting the ground running.
The wave strikes the hill, throwing bones in every direction just as Darius’s body slams against mine, his broad back taking the brunt of the projectiles as he curves around me protectively.
He grunts as bones pummel his body, his eyes closing and his jaw clenching through the pain.
When the bones settle, he slumps forward, his head on my shoulder in defeat. “I’m sorry.”
Heart pounding, I slowly wrap my arms around him. “There’s nothing to apologize for. Your plan was working until whatever that was went on the attack.”
Darius’s face turns toward my neck, his lips brushing my racing pulse as he speaks. “I wanted so badly to save you.”
My arms tighten around him. “You will.”
“I don’t know if I’m capable.” He releases a ragged breath. “I couldn’t even save myself before. I’m no good with traps.”
“Darius…” Pain tightens my chest at the vulnerability behind his words, and I gently push him back to gaze up at his face. “You never talk about what happened to you when you were captured by Lord Talkis.”
His expression tightens, and his eyes refuse to meet mine. “It was nothing.”
The others had told me how they found him in the dungeon, with metal poles driven through his body, then melted to the ground. And that was only on the day they found him. Darius had been in that dungeon for months, enduring torture for being an oath breaker.
“It wasn’t nothing.” I cup his cheeks. “Talk to me.”
For a moment, I think he’ll refuse, but then he lets out a long sigh, his gaze fixed on the wall at my back.
“It was…hell, Merri,” he admits, his voice rough. “Lady Casira administered my punishment, and she was creative in how she tortured me. She found my ability to resurrect so many times…intriguing.”
I reach for his hands, squeezing them in reassurance. “You don’t have to go into details if you don’t want to.”
He shakes his head, a bitter smile tugging at his lips. “It would have been easier if she had wanted something from me, but all she sought was my pain and death. I tried so many times to free myself, but it was all part of the torture.”
