Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
SOFIA
S ofia was only half-aware when Fox returned without the chief commander, freeing her from her binds and carefully picking her up. Even with his slow and gentle gestures, the movement sent waves of pain through her body and she almost threw up on him. She thought he might have whispered something to her, but she didn’t hear it. She didn’t hear anything after that.
When she opened her eyes an indeterminate amount of time later, the pain hadn’t stopped. But the aches had settled into something bearable in their sharp presence. At least the aftermath was predictable and steady.
She was lying on the ground again, cheek pressed against cold stone. But the darkness was no longer impenetrable, and this time, it came with voices and the sound of movement around her.
“Sofia,” a voice whispered.
The voice, sharp with anxiety, roused her before she slipped back into unconsciousness. Someone was crouched in front of her and there was a dim light coming from somewhere above.
“Fox?” she muttered, mouth clumsy around the word.
“Sofia, don’t move,” the voice said again. “It’s Flor. You need to stay still. I don’t know if anything is broken, but I can’t?—”
The words choked off in a small sob and Sofia moved automatically, wanting to comfort, but nausea roiled through her and she ended up dry-heaving instead. A hand patted her shoulder softly and she finally managed to look up into Flor’s pale face.
Fox hadn’t brought her to her cell in the basement where his father had first thrown her. She was with the others.
Flor leaned against the same bars as Sofia, but on the other side, in her own personal cell. Her hair was matted with blood, red on red, and her face gaunt, as if they’d been captured for weeks instead of days. But she was here. And she was?—
“You’re alive,” Sofia’s voice scraped over the words. “I didn’t know?—”
Flor let out a soft huff of air, almost a laugh. “I should be saying the same of you. Micael practically fainted when he saw the soldier carrying you in.”
“Micael,” Sofia said, slotting the name on the list of those who had made it out. And then her stomach twisted. “Javi? I saw his mom. Is he?—?”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Flor was already shaking her head. “He wasn’t in the cenote when they invaded. He was looking for you, actually.”
“Hopefully, he doesn’t find me.”
“Carmen is okay, too. She broke her wrist in the process of trying to protect Viola, but you should have seen the punch she threw.”
Sofia smiled, lips cracking and she tasted fresh blood. “Dia?” She almost didn’t ask, not wanting to know if they’d been too late and when Flor shook her head, she regretted the question.
“But there was no record of her execution, either. We’re hoping she’s being kept elsewhere.”
Flor went through the list of the other survivors, and Sofia kept her breathing steady. It hurt too much to do more.
A rough hand brushed against her forearm, one of the few places she wasn’t bruised and sore, and she realized she had closed her eyes. She looked back up to where Flor was sitting, pressed against the bars.
“We thought you were dead. We assumed he had found a way to force you to free him and then just killed you.”
“Why didn’t you all leave? Why stay in the cenote after he escaped?”
“We left, at first. We packed up and moved into a secondary cenote a few miles east and Micael kept an eye on the base. But after a week of nothing, he assumed you were both dead—that he’d never made it back to Suvi.”
Sofia almost laughed. He wasn’t completely wrong.
“There is a lot to catch up on,” she said, even as another sharp ache vibrated up through her back and hip.
“Before that, I should look at your injuries.”
Sofia shook her head. “I already had a healer.”
“One of their healers,” she said, clearly not taking Sofia’s no as an answer. “Now, shirt off.”
“Trying to get me naked? I thought we tried this before. It didn’t work.”
Flor didn’t crack a smile and Sofia eventually complied. The shirt was sticky with blood and hard to separate from her skin in places. Flor poked and prodded where she could through the bars.
In the end, Sofia didn’t think she had more than a broken rib or two. Her legs and hips seemed unbroken despite the deep bruises along them. Her injuries were nothing to shrug off, but they wouldn’t stop her from running if she needed to.
When she needed to.
“I’m mostly worried about the open cuts on your back,” Flor said, apparently content with her assessment at last. Sofia pulled her tunic back on to cover herself. Something fell from the side pocket, pinging against the stone. A small round tin had been tucked into it without her noticing. She picked it up and gently opened the lid, assessing the white powder inside.
“What is that?” Flor asked, straining to look through the bars.
“I’m not sure.” She pressed a finger into the powder, bringing it to her nose and then her mouth.
“Dragon scales, you did not just put a mysterious power in your mouth.”
“It’s numbing powder,” she said, practically breathing out the words. She felt the tingling along her gums and let herself take a bit more, already dreaming of the relief the medicine would bring.
“That won’t stop infection,” Flor said, almost petulant at her previous concerns being ignored.
Sofia could only shrug. “The healer put something on the cuts. We’ll be gone before I need more.”
Flor gave her a blank look. “You got carried in here looking three-fourths the way to dead and now you have a plan for escape?”
“Not yet,” Sofia said, not meeting Flor’s eyes. “I need to work on that. But that’s not the most important thing.”
“Of course not. Escape can wait. Please tell me what is more important.”
Sofia almost smiled. She’d missed Flor.
“Listen,” she said, pulling herself closer to the bars and dropping her voice. She ignored Flor’s attempt to change the subject back to her wounds with a sharp hiss. “We saw dragons.”
Flor blinked, expression flickering from confusion to concern. “I should check your head.”
She wished she had the energy to grab her friend and shake her.
“My head is fine.”
“You have a black eye and blood in your hair.”
“I don’t feel dizzy.”
Flor stared blankly at where she’d been dry heaving just a second before.
“I don’t feel that dizzy. And that’s not why I’m talking about dragons.” She tried keeping her voice low even as she wanted to scream.
“You saw dragons.”
“Yes,” she said. “A cenote dragon and what I think was a sea dragon—it was farther away. Scales, Flor, I saw the damn thing up close. I felt its presence. I had a feather. The chief commander and the general both asked about them. They must have seen them, too. Or known about them. Heard about them.”
“The dragons.” Flor’s voice was flat.
Her friend looked at her like she’d truly gone crazy, and she couldn’t blame her. Maybe she had gone crazy. Maybe she’d been killed by the shapeshifters and the rest of this had all been a dream. A horrible and strange dream. It would explain why she couldn’t stop thinking about Fox.
“I’m not crazy,” Sofia said, wondering how many times she could say it before it made her sound more crazy.
“Who is we?”
“What?” she said, looking back at Flor.
“You said ‘we saw dragons’,” Flor said carefully.
With dread churning in her stomach.
“Fox Ocon.”
“The bastard that started all of this? The one that threw you in here, looking like—” she waved a hand at her. “You were gallivanting through the forest with him looking for dragons?”
“It was more complicated than that, but this wasn’t his handiwork. The general didn’t particularly like finding out I was still alive.” She fiddled with the small tin, knowing without proof that Fox had been the one to slip it into her pocket. Did it make up for him watching her tortured and interrogated? Perhaps not. But it meant something . It had to. “I have a lot to tell you,” Sofia said at last.
And she did. She told Flor everything, even the parts the other woman probably didn’t need or want to hear, but it was all she could do. She needed Flor to trust her. She needed Micael and the others to trust her.
Because they were going to get out of this, and she couldn’t do it alone. She needed her friends.