Chapter 37
There was a moment where I was sure I’d lost my mind—rage was too mild of a word when I understood how deeply I’d been played. Veyyr had always been the villain, fuck, he’d told me that we hated one another.
But I’d never believed him.
Not really.
“You bastard!” I screamed at him as he stood next to her, as he fucking helped her round us up.
It wasn’t just the rage of betrayal, but the deep pain of grieving someone I thought I’d known, as if he’d died right in front of me.
He wouldn’t look at me. Not even a glance.
The Veyyr I knew would never…and yet here he was. Nevering. The screams ripping out of me turned to something more akin to Thren’s howls and then…
The world blacked out completely, as if a light and noise cancelling hood had been slipped over my head, Thorn’s magic wrapping around me so tightly I hoped it would just kill me and be done with it.
And when it was removed, I was pinned to a stone wall, my wrists in silver woven shackles above my head, barely able to touch the stone floor with the tips of my toes.
“FUCK!” I screamed the word as I twisted and fought, taking my wrists to a raw state—I didn’t care. Trapped, I was trapped and chained like a fucking animal and Thorn had won…she’d taken my friends.
“Rana?”
A soft scuffle against the wall on my right. Her voice was hollow and muffled. “I’m here.”
“Lucky?”
“Oh, I’m fucking peachy Tracker, love being fucking fooled by my best friend. Think you can get us out of here?”
I yanked at the chains again, blood running now, but would it be enough? Without the leverage of my feet on the ground, I couldn’t even break a wrist and slip through the shackles. Because Thorn knew me and what I was capable of, just like Veyyr had.
I refused to think about Veyyr’s betrayal.
“Let me think.”
“Think faster,” Lucky said.
Rana sobbed on the other side of the wall. “I should have done something, I’m sorry!”
“Hush this isn’t your fault, Rana…what about…what about Thren and Sorrow?” Gods, let them be okay.
A cluck from above my head drawing my eye. An iron cage held Sorrow tight enough that his feathers poked through, the bars pinning him tight. “I’ll get you out, buddy.”
Another cluck. “Hurry.”
Yeah, hurry.
“Thren?”
There was no answer from my riftwolf, and I reached for the bond I had to her, brushing up against her mind. She was unconscious, but not far.
Taking a risk, I reached for Veyyr’s bond to me.
And found nothing.
So I Tracked him.
Three stories up by the feel of it, and nothing but absolute calm from him.
Harrison was closer… “Harrison?”
“Yeah? You’re here?”
“I…she’s not my mother anymore, whatever she is, she’s not that. And I would rather…with my real family…I can’t believe,” he sobbed the words and my heart broke for him. He’d gotten his father back, only to have his mother swoop in and fuck us all over. Veyyr allowing it to happen.
“Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “She took him.”
Rana was openly weeping, her sobs rippling the air. “If I was stronger, I could have tried to stop her.”
I dared to Track Thorn herself. She was further away than Veyyr—miles away.
The minutes ticked by and the panic dug deeper into me. I didn’t know how to save them. “A bargain maybe. I can bargain with her, and then she can let the rest of you go—”
A chorus of no’s answered that which I shut down. “She only wants me, for some reason, and you…you all can get out of here, go somewhere far away and be a family. You can look out for each other.”
There was a silence.
Harrison whispered the answer I wanted and didn’t want at the same time. “Not without you.”
I closed my eyes wishing there was some way out of this, some secret magic, some spell…anything. But I had nothing. Nothing in my arsenal would get me or my friends out of this.
I kept a bead on Thorn, tracking her as she drew closer. “She’s on her way.”
We were going to be out of time if something didn’t shift. I tried Tracking Veyyr again, tried tugging him to me, because maybe he was under a spell too?
Nothing, not so much as a budge in our direction.
A scrape of stone on stone and a bloom of light had me blinking, unable to see.
The smell was sweet and spicy, familiar.
Not Thorn.
The black cloak ate the darkness as he stepped between two chunks of stone that he’d pushed apart, a torch held high, showing off blue-green eyes, the curve of his mouth.
“Someone need rescuing?”