Chapter Seven
LOLA
I hobble down the road, my legs ready to give out.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I mutter, checking my watch for the thousandth time. I’m supposed to be meeting Jade now, but I still am two blocks away, and no matter how hard I try, I cannot pick up my pace.
Damn Enzo and his blasted magic.
I would have stolen more strength by now if I’d come across anybody, but the streets are empty and quiet, and I don’t have time to stop at one of the taverns.
But if I show up to Jade this weak, she’s going to know something’s up, and I can’t seem to think of an explanation that won’t draw her suspicion.
The last thing I need is for any of the Tentacles to start looking my way.
As soon as Enzo catches even a whiff that I’m doing something he doesn’t know about, the Unbreakable Lie will make it even more impossible to get answers, up to possibly preventing me from ever being Nocturne again.
A raucous shout draws my attention as a woman drags a disheveled, pink-faced man out of a cabaret across the street.
“And don’t even think about coming home until you’ve sobered up!” the woman snaps in his face.
“But, Gisela—” he splutters.
She slaps him hard, and he loses his balance, toppling back on his rump.
“I mean it.” She turns on her heel and stalks off down the road.
Relief courses through me. If I can siphon this man’s strength, I can mitigate my risk of being discovered. Besides, no one is going to worry if a drunk man can’t stand up for a few hours.
Glancing both ways to make sure no one is watching, I stagger across the road. I don’t even bother to get the man’s attention—the less he remembers, the better. I press my voratium bracelet to the back of his neck.
“What the—” He swings an arm, but I hold my hand in place, drawing his strength through the metal and into my body.
Instantly, my limbs stop quaking and the swimming in my head recedes.
The man slumps sideways, arms going limp. I roll him onto his front and hit him over the back of the head with my briefcase.
“Sleep it off,” I say, checking his pulse to make sure I didn’t hit him too hard. Then I render the palm of my hand noncorporeal in order to make the briefcase vanish before darting around the corner to where Jade is fidgeting in the shadows.
“Lola!” Jade hisses when I reach her. “I was just about to come after you!”
“Sorry. Lost track of time.” I offer her a smile. “How was your gran?”
“Crotchety. Told me to come back with cake or don’t come back at all.” She grins. “So I went and stole one from Annie’s Bakery.”
“Annie’s are the best!” I gasp. “Why didn’t you bring me some?”
“I would have, except Gran threw it at my face.” Jade laughs. “Apparently she doesn’t like poppyseed.”
“Who in their right mind doesn’t like poppyseed?”
“Gran clearly isn’t in her right mind.” She snorts. “Come on.”
We skirt the edge of the beach to the pier, where we approach the water in shadow, whispering and laughing as we go.
With every step, flashes of the last hour spear through my thoughts.
My father offering a deal to track down the Thief.
Enzo tackling me to the sidewalk. Nic pointing a pistol at my face.
That buzzing builds underneath my skin like an itch.
The Unbreakable Lie warning me that I’m feeling too much, that Enzo is going to pick up on these emotions soon.
But no matter how many calming breaths I take, no matter how many times Jade makes me laugh, no matter how soothing the rush of ocean waves is against my ankles, I can’t seem to get Nic’s stone-cold glare out of my head.
Or hers.
I recognized Laurel from the memory Nic shared with me of their first kiss the instant I glimpsed her next to him. The heart-shaped face and long, flowing brown hair. The sparkling eyes and rosy cheekbones. But she’s a young woman now, her curves fuller, her mannerisms more refined.
Has he loved her all this time? Is that why he turned me away after his tournament?
Did he still care for her when he was whispering my name in a bioluminescent cave, when he was commanding me to worship him with his lips at my throat, when he was kissing me against an elevator wall?
“I’m still out of space,” Jade says, holding up her wrist, where her Tentacle tattoo glows faintly, each sucker flickering turquoise.
“I should have enough left for both of us.” I don’t show her my arm because she’d see my tattoo is already full, too, but there are a few empty chips on my bracelet that should work for now.
Grasping her hand, bracelet draped between our palms, I pull on more of Enzo’s magic. We vanish instantly and advance into the sea.
Without bodies or clothing hindering our progress, we jog through the water easily.
It sloshes over our heads, plunging us into utter quiet.
Schools of tiny fish dart through me, and coral claws in my peripheral vision.
An eel ripples past, electricity sparking under its skin, and my thoughts stray to the myths my father used to tell about the zenithic demons of the Deep.
We never believed in the Gods Above or their demon counterparts in the waters, but it was fun to tell their stories.
The god of pain, Yaurot, was said to have arms and legs like electric eels, and I imagine him now, slithering alongside me in this shadowy underwater stillness.
The husk of a pirate ship sprouts out of the gloom ahead, cloaked in undulating seaweed.
We pass through the hull and into a set of cells where the pirates who owned the ship must have kept their prisoners.
It’s even darker in here, and we move more by instinct than sight, traveling down a narrow walkway encrusted in barnacles to where the bow of the ship punctured through the side of an underwater volcano many years ago.
We forge into the mountain, where the extinct lava ducts wind around, pitching even farther downward. After several minutes, our tunnel inclines sharply, and we surface into a cavern.
A single, massive shard of voratium carved into the shape of the god of theft, Tharon—a half-man half-fish with glittering scales and far too many teeth—perches on the wall, glowing with infused soul-light bright enough to illuminate the small cave in a sea-green ethereal warmth.
Below it, intricate swirls outline a carved archway in the rock.
There is, however, no door—only more stone—because solely noncorporeal beings may pass through into the Thief ’s lair.
We shuffle hand in hand through the rock, and then I release her, letting our bodies regain their physical form, though I keep my palm invisible so the briefcase remains undetectable.
“Thanks,” Jade says breathlessly. “I’m starving. Want to grab some food?”
“Nah. I’m pretty tired. I’ll catch you tomorrow?”
She nods. “Sure!” Then she jogs off down the corridor.
I sigh and shuffle forward, my limbs exhausted despite all the strength soullight I ingested earlier.
One of my favorite parts about the Brig is the front hallway.
Enzo has always had an eye for decor. Infused voratium gems dangle from coral chandeliers, lighting the hall in a turquoise glow.
More has been embedded in the walls, but unlike the Liar’s Den’s deliberate curlicues, Enzo had it added directly into the stone like gold nuggets in rock, veins of it spidering out along the rough texture.
Stolen paintings hang in alcoves he carved himself, gorgeous renderings of underwater grottos in oils, merfolk swishing beneath ocean waves, mythic Gods of the Deep illustrated like whimsical phantoms with tentacles and teeth.
I hurry down the hall and branch off into my room—the largest in the place, with ceilings that track to the top of the volcano. When Enzo first brought me here, I told him this was too much, but he insisted. “Where else would we fit your aerial rig?” he asked, eyes agleam.
I gasped when the rest of the Tentacles carried in the ropes and hardware to set up the aerial hoop, something I’d confided to Enzo that I wanted to learn soon after I’d left the Liar’s Den. He even gave me a stack of instructional aerial books.
“To make up for . . . everything,” he said after everyone had left.
“You already apologized.” I ran my hand along the sleek steel of the brand-new hoop.
“And I will spend the rest of my life apologizing.” A muscle feathered in his jaw. “Welcome to the Brig, Lola. You should have been here from the start.”
Those words echo back to me now as I slide the door shut and cross past the hoop to my bed, which I left haphazardly unmade yesterday. Shoving the briefcase underneath the mattress, I set a shard of voratium against it and push a tendril of Nic’s magic into it to cast an illusion of invisibility.
A knock raps behind me. “Come in!” I cry, dropping onto my mattress as the door creaks open.
Enzo slips inside and leans against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other. “Hi there, Limerick.”
“Hi yourself.”
His adrenaline still thunders through my body from our encounter just half an hour ago, and I know he can feel my own turmoil. My hurt, my anger, my desperation.
“You okay?” His deep green eyes pierce mine as though he’s trying to see through me to the heart he stole, not so he can use it, but so he can decode it.
“I’m fine.”
He raises a brow. “I’m pretty sure even a toad could spot a lie that obvious.”
I snort, leaning back and stretching my legs in front of me. “Seeing more of my father’s men during our University of Aethera job sort of threw me.”
His lips purse as he nods.
“Thank you,” I say softly. “For what you did. Taking their speech instead of shooting them. It seemed to cost you a lot.”
He crosses to sit next to me and braces his forearms on his knees, staring intently at the floor like the answers to all his problems might be written there.
“I don’t talk much about when I was first cursed,” he says, his voice like crunching gravel.
“After it happened, I lost all my soullight. Didn’t figure out for weeks how to be corporeal, how to speak, how to feel again.
It was . . . Well. Let’s just say the prospect of taking all of someone else’s like that, even if only one type .
. . hit me harder than I was ready for.”
His words pull at the strings drawn taut around my heart. I sit forward, placing my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
He sniffs. “I will say . . . some of the Tentacles are worried St. James will get information out of those blokes another way.”
“How?”
“He could have them write it down, for one.”
I purse my lips. I should have thought of that, but I’d been so desperate to avoid violence I hadn’t been thinking much at all.
“Or,” Enzo says, “he could hire my brother to steal their secrets.”
I flinch at the mention of his brother, a gunshot echoing in my ears, but I force myself to stay focused.
“We’ll stay vigilant,” I say. “We’ll be careful.”
He nods, pursing his lips. “I suppose that’s our only option now.” I can sense more words hovering inside him, bottled up in his chest, and I hate that in spite of the Unbreakable Lie’s reassurance that I trust him, he’s still wary.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to what we once were.
“What have you been up to?” I ask, hoping he’ll mention Nocturne so I can persuade him not to track her down. Or maybe so I can prove to myself he’s not keeping yet another secret from me.
But he just shrugs. “Recounting the plats in the treasury. Soren and Isla are going to do a supply run, so I needed to see if they should hit a bank or two while they’re out.”
My stomach sinks. I want to demand an answer, to accuse him of hiding things, to point out the hypocrisy of his requiring my total loyalty and honesty without offering his own in return. But the Unbreakable Lie holds every shout, every barb, every retort captive behind my teeth.
“Speaking of which,” Enzo continues, utterly unaware of my inner battle, “I know the last time we talked about it, you said you were saving the Unbreakable Lie.” He holds up a hand as though expecting me to jump in.
“I still completely respect that. You won the tournament, and the game was your idea. You don’t have to share it with me. ”
“What are you getting at?” I ask.
“What if I paid you for it?”
“Paid me?” I frown. “You want to buy the Unbreakable Lie?”
He nods. “How much would you want?”
I consider for a long moment, hating the desperate hope glimmering in his eyes. He probably wants to use it to fool Nocturne somehow, or Nic. Perhaps me.
“You can buy it,” I find myself saying.
He brightens, eyebrows lifting. “Gods, thank you, Lola.” His cheeks flush with excitement. “How much do you want for it?”
“Just one thing.” The words are cotton in my mouth. “My heart.”
His smile fades, and his eyes dart back and forth between mine like I’ve struck him. His throat bobs as he swallows, and a rush of panic cascades through me from him, stabbing my nerves and tingling the tips of my fingers and toes.
For a tiny, heart-stopping moment, I wonder if he might agree. Wonder how I’ll be able to explain to him that I’ve already used the Unbreakable Lie—or would the Unbreakable Lie prevent me from even telling him? How would I respond if he gives me what I have desperately wanted for so long?
He sighs and pinches his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “You know I can’t, Lola.”
Every bit of air whooshes out of me.
“I could give you soullight on my own terms,” I say softly, though I know there’s no point to arguing—it’s not like I could even give him the Unbreakable Lie if I wanted to. “I’d willingly let you siphon emotion from me whenever you need it . . . Just let me choose.”
His chest rises and falls in short bursts.
“I’m not going anywhere, Enzo.” I tighten my grip on his forearm. “I promise you.”
When he finally opens his eyes, they are distant, as though he’s in an entirely different world. He shakes his head once. “No.” He pulls out of my grasp and exits the room without a second glance. The door slams shut behind him.
My fingers curl. I slam my fist into my pillow once, twice, three times, before shoving my face into it and screaming.
The moonshard is gone. Nic is further out of reach than ever. Enzo will keep me caged as long as I live.
I will never be free.