Chapter 51
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
SANORA
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying on the steel while fire burned beneath me. It hadn’t been thirty minutes yet—if what Winifred had said was true—because I still wasn’t feeling the heat fully.
Maybe ten minutes?
The fire there must have been truly small. My skin was warming steadily, rising in temperature, but it was still tolerable. For now.
I was exhausted. Every muscle weakened with fatigue from fighting—fighting the ropes, fighting their voices, fighting the terror clawing at my mind.
My ears rang with the echo of my own sobs, and my skin burned where the ropes had rubbed me raw, where the knife’s edge had pricked over and over from my thrashing.
Still, they hadn’t stopped chanting.
They’d been at it without a single break since the ritual began, their voices weaving through the night air endlessly and loud.
I lay there, panting raggedly as the pain from my struggle settled over me, the blood soaking through my blouse from where the knife had pierced, the bruises blossoming under the ropes where they bit into my calves, arms and torso.
My voice was gone, my throat scraped so harshly that even if I tried to shout again, it would come out as nothing but a rasp. No matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t stop.
It hurt. Everywhere hurt.
It hurt to move even a fraction of an inch.
It hurt to breathe.
It hurt to make a sound.
My eyes burned from crying. My head pounded from the endless screaming. Pain had replaced everything else; it was all I knew.
And to top it off, I was being roasted alive.
Fuck.
I closed my eyes, hot tears sliding sideways into my ears. I had no fight left inside me—I could only lie there, waiting for either death or salvation, whichever reached me first.
I’d imagined dying before—Gods, I’d even fantasised about it. The ways it’d be, the places I’d draw my last breath. But that fantasy had shifted over the past few days.
It had gone from slipping away quietly in my sleep at a very old age—or dying drowned in too much money—to something else entirely.
One particular reason.
One particular person.
If I had to die at all, I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to be the way that would make Thrax mortal again. Without me, he’d wander this world empty forever.
Even the thought of it dragged more tears from my eyes. I didn’t want that for him. I didn’t want to die and take away the one thing he needed most.
I loved him so much that the thought of him still walking this earth after I was gone broke my heart into nothing.
He didn’t want me dead. He didn’t want my soul. Yet here they were, doing this as though he’d want it one day.
He wouldn’t even let me talk about it for fuck’s sake!
A few minutes later, their chanting slowed. The endless hum cracked and began to unravel until it fell silent.
The air turned eerily still. So still that the chirp of insects and the sound of other night creatures could be heard.
It should have been my moment to speak, but I knew nothing I said would reach them.
The quiet stretched for almost a minute before I heard soft footsteps coming closer. I didn’t open my eyes until they stopped at my side.
I blinked through my blurred vision, and the face of an unfamiliar man swam into focus. He raised a strip of white cloth—a blindfold—and lowered it towards my face.
I should have fought it, but I had no fight left. I couldn’t even twitch a finger as the blindfold slipped over my eyes, shutting out the silver glow of the moon.
The moon.
She was really watching this.
She was blessing this.
She’d rather I be killed than let Thrax have even the smallest chance—two percent, one percent—of being free of her curse.
When the blindfold was tied, I felt the man’s hand at my stomach, removing the knife.
And just like that, the chanting began again, this time louder, thicker, rising above the night and seeming to claw at my scalp. The man who had blindfolded me was still beside me, his voice the closest.
Was he going to stab me now?
What were they—
The sharp tip of the knife touched my chest, right above where my heart slammed like a trapped bird.
He was going to sink it through me.
Fear paralysed me.
They were really going to do it.
I was going to die.
The heat of the steel beneath me seeped up through my back, the fire intensifying like it knew the ritual’s climax had come.
Suddenly, the chanting stopped again, and one voice—one I would know even after death—rose above the silence.
“Unto Thee we render back this soul. Accept her, O Mother of Light, and hallow the labour of our forebears. Behold this sacrifice, wrought in reverence, sealed in blood. Take her unto Thy keeping, grant her a passage clothed in peace, a rest untroubled. Moon of solace, keeper of the night, sanctify this offering, as it was in the beginning, so let it be now, and evermore.”
The rest chorused, “Now and evermore.”
Silence.
The knife began to tear skin.
My body shook with fear, shock locking me into place—
“Evermore your fucking face, old fuckers!”
Amelia?
From my left came the whoosh of a sharp object slicing the air.
The next sound was a thud, the unmistakable impact of something sharp and deadly meeting flesh and piercing through it. The man beside me grunted, the knife on my chest clattering to the ground.
Air rushed back into my lungs. My heart pounded like it had been restarted, my chest rising and falling in greedy, ragged breaths.
I was still intact. I was still alive.
Someone had come for me.
Amelia.
If you’d told me before this that Amelia would come for me—risk herself, save me, when she had nothing to gain—I’d have laughed in your face.
But now, hearing her sharp, infuriating voice again, a bloom of joy cracked open in my chest.
“This is not the time for you to play, kid! Get out! You have no business here!” Winifred barked from my right as the man beside me crumpled to the ground with a thud.
I could imagine her smiling as she shot back, “You definitely made it my business when you kidnapped someone from my library and locked us up in my library.” Her voice grew closer with each step. “No one messes with me and my brother or my library and gets away with it.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Winifred’s voice hitched; I could only imagine the horror etched into his face as he looked at the fallen body. “Is that—you stabbed my cousin?”
Amelia faked a gasp. “Oh, you’re about to sacrifice a whole human over nothing, yet you’re red because I nipped your cousin a tiny bit? I’m allowed to play too, you know.”
His tone darkened to a growl. “Get out of here if you don’t want me to make you regret it.”
She sighed theatrically. “Boring old man.” I heard the scuff of her shoes as if she was turning to actually leave.
“What?” I muttered, hoping she was just being her usual annoying self.
“Oh, wait.” Another shuffle of feet. “If I’m going to leave, I have to take that girl with me.”
“This is your last warning,” Winifred snarled.
I couldn’t see her, but I was half-sure she shrugged. “Oh well,” she said lightly, and started coming closer.
Heavier footsteps pounded the ground, which I easily assumed belonged to the men as they moved, probably trying to stop her.
“Can you fight?” Winifred asked.
“Yes.” She paused. “And my brother can. Oh, look at him behind you!”
The next sounds were fists meeting flesh, grunts echoing through the cold night.
Amelia’s voice rose sharp and vicious as she fought.
I’d never imagined she could take down men, never once pictured her as someone who could fight, but now I heard her cracking bones alongside her brother.
I couldn’t even process the shock of it.
She cursed them out with every hit, her words as sharp as her blows. No knife pierced skin though, only the sound of fists breaking ribs, of bodies slamming to earth.
The air turned impossibly colder, wind whipping through the clearing as thunder rumbled far above.
Right. The moon.
Was she angry? That her plan had been disrupted?
As the grunts and the clash of fists went on in the background, a hand grazed my cheek. Fingers caught the edge of the blindfold and yanked it off.
Light spilled back into my world, and I squinted against it, my lashes sticking together with tears. When my eyes finally adjusted, Amelia’s face swam into focus above me, strands of her hair dangling so close they brushed my forehead.
Her dark hair hung loose and wild, glinting like black silk against the pale silver glow, nearly tangling with my lashes when I blinked. Her forehead was streaked with dried blood, smeared across her cheekbones like war paint. I was sure it wasn’t from this fight.
Had they attacked her in the library?
“Your hair’s getting into my eyes,” I croaked, my voice coming out jagged and crusty.
Her lips tilted into a smile. “You’re welcome.
” She unsheathed a knife and began sawing through the ropes binding me.
“As much as I’d like to know what you’d taste like roasted, I’m not about to lose to Winifred.
Not after they swallowed my library in smoke and knocked us unconscious in a locked room. ”
I huffed out a sound that could have been a laugh if my throat wasn’t shredded. “My bad for thinking you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”
“There’s no goodness in my heart if it’s not benefiting me,” she replied dryly, the rope around my torso loosening under her blade with each pull.
“And how is saving me right now benefiting you?”
She paused mid-slice, her eyes sharp as she glanced at me, like she expected me to already know. “Anything to get closer to the Soulless Man, duh.”
I shook my head, weakly, just as she pulled the rope away from my torso and tossed it away.
But it landed beneath me.
In the fire.
The sudden crackle beneath my back sent a jolt of horror through me. “Fuck!” I screamed, the heat of the steel doubling, burning deeper into my skin, searing it raw.