40. Kiera
Chapter 40
Kiera
T he secret passageway is as unguarded as it was the first time I found it. The only difference now is that I’m not seeing it with Ruen at my side. Pushing into the correct brick that’ll release the hidden lever and wincing as it scrapes my skin, drawing the blood needed for it to unlock. I pry open the door and fly down the stairs, sensing the others close on my tail.
I descend swiftly, followed by Kalix and Theos, not stopping until I get to the bottom. Unlike before when I’d had to use Ruen’s illusion ability to see through the gloom, the corridor of the underground prison is now well-illuminated. Someone has come through and cleaned off all of the web-coated torches and lit them.
“Kiera, what are you—” Theos’ question is ignored as I march down the corridor, straight for the end.
I hear the soft murmuring of voices between Caedmon and the woman in the cell next to his before I see them, but when they come into view, I halt in front of the space that separates their matching prisons.
“Kiera?” Caedmon stands from one of the rocks embedded into the dank floor of his cell and comes closer. “What’s going on?”
Caedmon looks better than the last time I saw him. His face isn’t nearly as sunken and his eyes have a bit more life to them. Ruen’s efforts seem to have paid off. I don’t answer him, however. Instead, I turn to her.
“Can you kill Tryphone?”
Her only response is silence.
I step forward and slam a fist into one of the teeth-like bars of her cell. “He helped you!” I yell before nodding down to newer and far less ragged clothes that don her still slender frame. “He fucking fed you and clothed you. The least you can do is answer me.” My voice is a low growl. “Can. You. Kill. Him.”
“Kalix? Theos?” Caedmon’s voice is the only audible sound as the final two Darkhavens arrive quickly behind me. “What’s happened?”
“Ruen was taken,” Theos says. Though neither I nor Kalix had told him as much, he’s smart enough to have deduced that fact. Right now, it’s the only explanation I’m sure he can think of for my willingness to come down here, to face this woman.
Ariadne stands up and shuffles closer to the opening of the cell. Steel gray eyes meet my own. Like Caedmon, her body reflects the effects of Ruen’s care. She’s by no means healthy or well, but she’s far more filled out and less skeletal than she had been days prior. Perhaps it’s the healing of the Gods, but I know there’s no possibility that I would have recovered as fast as she has even if she’s not quite yet there.
“Answer me,” I demand.
“After all the torment he has put me through, after his treatment of my daughter, I would kill my own father without hesitation,” she says, her voice subdued but her eyes cold and hard.
I inhale sharply and start to look around the edges of the cell’s bars for a way in—or rather her way out. “Then I need you to?—”
“I’m afraid, though, that since your question is not ‘would I’ but ‘could I,’ then my answer is no. Even I don’t have that ability.” My hands go still as a burning sensation sparks a fire behind my eyes.
Pressing my palms into the rough stone of the bars, I curl my fingers around their surface. Heat pours through me. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. I close my eyes as tears threaten to leak down my cheeks.
Distantly, I hear Caedmon’s deep baritone as he speaks to Theos and Kalix. Taptaptap. I grind my teeth at Ara’s insistent plea to get my attention.
“But if you release Caedmon, he can help you.”
My eyes pop back open and lock with the woman on the other side of the bars. I frown. “What?”
Ariadne’s hand touches the stone bar, grazing it lightly as she stares at where my hands curl around the coarse surface. She’s not asking me to free her, though if she’s been here since before Caedmon’s disappearance from Riviere, then it’s entirely possible she’s been here for years.
“Seeing Caedmon freed will surprise Tryphone,” she says. “It may give you the surprise you need to rescue your friend.”
“He’s not my friend.” The words are out before I can stop them, but instead of feeling ashamed by the instinctive protest, I feel a sense of rightness. Ruen is not my friend. He’s so much more.
“Your lover, then,” Ariadne corrects herself. She drops her hand from the bars and nods to Caedmon. “Free Caedmon, save him and save yourself as well, daughter mine.”
“I don’t feel like your daughter,” I confess.
She winces as if the words are a physical blow.
“I didn’t say that to hurt you,” I add. “Truth be told, I’ve never really felt like I had a mother. Dad was … well, he wasn’t a woman, but he loved me. Then in the Underworld, I thought maybe … there was a woman there that trained me, but she had her own people to worry about.”
Ariadne stares back at me, unspeaking. I take it as the cue to keep going.
“I can’t treat you like my mother,” I tell her honestly. “Because you didn’t raise me—even if you wanted to—you didn’t. Nothing can erase that fact. Nothing can change the past.”
With trembling lips, she jerks her head down in a nod. “You’re right.”
“You left me behind.”
Her breath hitches. “I did.” Her lips part again, but no words come out. She wants to say something, to defend herself most likely, but we both know there’s nothing that will change the fact that her choices have left me hollow and unwanted by the very people who brought me into this world.
“But you’re not the only one.”
Confusion mars her perfect features, furrowing her brow. “Dad left me too.”
“Kiera…”
“Nothing is as painful as being one of those left behind, whose time is forced to slowly tick on,” I say, feeling my energy drain, my pain slowly ebb from my soul as the words leave my lips. “Second by second passing against their will when they, themselves, froze the moment their loved ones’ ceased breathing. It feels like a betrayal to not die along with them and yet, another betrayal to not live on for them…”
My words drift, but my thoughts don’t. You constantly ask yourself … do you truly live on for them? Or is that the lie you tell yourself to give an excuse not to take a blade to your throat and join them in the darkness beyond?
The guilt eats away at a heart that is broken but still beating. Sorrowful is the soul that craves to reunite with another that no longer exists. It survives despite the hollow emptiness it now holds.
Ariadne grips the bars and leans into them, pressing her recently revived body into the stone with such force that it’s a wonder she doesn’t slice herself open on the jagged edges. “You will live on,” she says. “I didn’t suffer through this—I didn’t give up all of that time with you only for you to die in the end.”
My tongue is thick in my mouth, taking up so much space that it threatens to choke me before I can speak again. “Then help me…” I whisper. I no longer care if I’m begging. I’ll do it. To save Ruen, I will lie, cheat, steal, and … I will beg.
Eyes shimmering with unshed tears, Ariadne bows her head until she presses against the bars. I wait and it isn’t until she parts her lips that I realize all other conversation has ceased behind me. No one is talking. Not Theos. Not Kalix. Not Caedmon. I don’t look back to see if they’re watching us. I just wait for her answer.
“Open the cells,” Ariadne, Goddess of Shadows, says. Her hands fall away from bars and she stands back, straightening as she lifts her head and gazes back at me. Ice drips down my spine.
“I—” I don’t get the opportunity to tell her that I don’t know how before a bolt of white-hot lightning slams past me and into the rocky formation of the prison’s clawed bars. Stone crumbles and dust rains down.
Stumbling back, I cover my mouth and cough even as I’m caught up in a pair of hard masculine arms. Glancing up, Theos’ hard jaw is all I see for a moment before I lift my gaze to the rest of his face. He looks down at me as he raises his palm and another bolt of lightning shoots out. I glance at the results of his efforts.
The remaining pieces of the cell’s door breaks off enough to form an open hole. Ariadne wastes no time stepping out from the opening created by Theos’ lightning. She appears to grow taller, prouder, stronger as she straightens on the other side.
A loud crash echoes down the hall and the three of us turn to see Kalix punching through the bars of Caedmon’s cell until the same thing becomes true for him. A hole large enough for Caedmon to slip through is opened. My eyes fall to their wrists.
“If you’re going to help us, we need to remove those,” I murmur. The shackles that encircle both of their wrists are obviously made of brimstone and likely the cause of why it was difficult for them to escape their cells.
I stare at the dark stone cuffs, frowning at the tightness with which they're bound. Brimstone naturally weakens the Gods—Atlanteans … fae … or whatever the fuck they are. The tightly bound cuffs are unnecessary.
As if she senses my attention, Ariadne lifts her hands and turns her wrist back and forth. “My father is a cruel man, as well as a cautious one,” she says thoughtfully. “I suspect had he placed these on you, I’d have tried to kill him long before now. The bolts through the wrists were harder to bear until about a year into captivity—now it’s easy. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to walk where I like, much less what it is to feel my full power.”
All at once, several things become clear. One, Ariadne and Caedmon truly hadn’t been able to escape. Bolts of brimstone through their wrists? No wonder they hadn't had the strength to free themselves from their cells when someone like Theos or Kalix—weaker Mortal Gods—had found it so easy. Combined with that is the reminder that she hadn’t said she’d kill Tryphone, merely that she would try.
It seems I can't escape the possibility of failure no matter what I do.
Ariadne gestures to Caedmon. “Worry not about this, we will figure it out. Now, let’s go.”