Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Emmeline
The room was as grey as the sky beyond the windows. Or perhaps it wasn’t the space that was drab. The sheets wrapped around her frame were a rich green, the curtains trimmed in small purple flowers. But it was all washed over with a dull filter, like someone had turned down the vibrancy.
As if the eyes through which she viewed it lacked light.
For a while, Emmeline laid on her side, facing the window above the bed and the grey sky waiting beyond, trying to remember where she was.
But her mind hummed with emptiness. A shapeless memory of pain lingered in the background, but she couldn’t quite form the outline of it, an illusion just out of reach.
Until a cough sounded behind her that had her nerves flinching like they’d been waiting for a reason to recoil.
She rolled over, and—
“Ow,” she whimpered as she arched her neck.
It all came flooding back then. The intruder in her room, the starfire flickering against the threatening message on her wall, a foreign object choking the air from her.
“Sorry,” a gentle voice said.
More carefully this time, Emmeline pushed upright, sucking in a small breath through her aching throat. She pulled a velvety knit blanket from the foot of the bed, wrapping it around her shoulders. The weight consoled her, giving her the grace to observe her surroundings and place the voice.
“Nico,” she wheezed.
Roremar’s brother sat in one of the chairs at the small dining table, his waves in disarray and shadows lining his eyes.
“Still hurt a bit to talk?” he checked, worried blue gaze flashing to her throat where she was sure the necklace of bruises shone like a beacon.
Tenderly, she pressed her fingers to the wound, needing to feel the pain herself. She nodded once, afraid what would happen if she tried to speak. Afraid of the heat stinging her eyes.
They are the one who should be ashamed. The words came back to her, but she couldn’t place them.
Nico jumped to his feet, grabbing a glass from the small kitchen occupying one corner and filling it at the tap. “Here,” he said, moving his chair to her bedside while she drank. “Roremar will be back soon. He asked me to keep an eye on you.”
“Where are we?” Emmeline asked, voice less croaky than before, though every swallow rubbed against her bruised throat.
She vaguely remembered being carried from the Academy, but it was all a blur.
Her gaze dragged across the soft sheets, the wooden beams lining the ceiling.
A bed, a seating area, a meager kitchen, and a few paintings on the walls, but not much else to define it.
“We’re at the apartment above Desmond’s parlor,” Nico answered.
Horror sliced through Emmeline like a freshly whetted blade. “Desmond’s?”
She couldn’t stay here. She suspected Desmond was involved in the murders. She could not be under his roof. Did he realize she suspected him? If he did, she’d be within his reach.
A hand shot to her throat, the bruises throbbing. Panic wrapped her lungs, magic pushing against it. It was all too tight, too close. The instincts she’d spent years burying were unraveling.
Emmeline shot to her feet, the blanket slipping from her shoulders with a soft hiss.
“Hey,” Nico soothed, standing, too. “Emmeline, what’s wrong?”
“I have to go.” She tried to step around him, but he was so much larger than her, and his hands braced her shoulders, his blue eyes working to catch hers.
“It’s okay. You’re okay here, I promise.” His voice was so earnest, so kind and desperate to help her, but she couldn’t accept it.
Those who help me wind up dead.
“No, I—”
The door flew open, and Emmeline half expected to see Desmond storming through, hunting for her, but Roremar took one look at her harried expression, at his brother’s hands holding her in place, and the bags in his arms thudded to the counter.
“What happened?” he blurted, racing over.
“I don’t know,” Nico said, voice piqued with the same panic lacing her shortened breaths. “She just woke up, and now she’s saying—”
“I can’t stay here,” Emmeline asserted, attempting to weave between the brothers, but a pair of steel eyes stopped her.
The same silver that had laid on the floor beside her last night. That had, for some reason, been her lifeline when terror dictated her every move.
Emmeline froze. Her breaths still rushed, but as Roremar silently held her gaze, the vice around her lungs loosened.
His hand slipping to hers didn’t make her flinch, her body pliant as he guided her back to the bed, willing to relinquish control for one damn moment.
“I’ve got her, Nico. Thanks,” he dismissed his brother without so much as an explanation.
When Nico didn’t immediately leave, Emmeline wrenched her stare from Roremar’s. Nico hovered beside the door, seeming to chew over a thought. The fingers of her free hand fidgeted against her throat again. Tracking the motion, Nico shook his head, then left, his boots thudding down the stairs.
The silence from his departure sat heavily on Emmeline’s shoulders, the air between her and Roremar thickening. She turned back to him, and his eyes—
That steel stare was heated, anger bubbling to the surface when it landed on…her neck.
She dropped her hand to her lap, chin lowering, and the motion seemed to snap something within Roremar. Jolting, he squeezed her hand, his rings cool against her clammy skin.
They are the one who should be ashamed.
That memory—it had been him. His words soothing her, his vow reminding her that it was not her fault. Her chest uncoiled further.
Don’t hide, he had pleaded from the floor beside her.
Don’t run from me, he had begged in a reading many nights ago.
She lifted her gaze to his.
“How are you?” Roremar asked, his voice gravelly with the anger still pulsing from him.
Confused. Was this connected to the murders? What had the message on the wall meant?
Scared. She wasn’t afraid of much. She’d built her armor so she wouldn’t be, and she’d fought off a number of predators in her life. But fear had wracked her bones at the attack—the combination of an intruder and the shock of seeing starfire bringing back memories of the worst moments of her life.
Furious. That last one—that was the newest. A beast, burning with the starfire she suppressed, sharpening its claws along her bones. Perhaps not ready to strike yet but waiting.
“I’m a lot of things,” Emmeline whispered, and Roremar’s shoulders sagged at her voice. “What happened exactly?”
“I might need you to fill in a few of those pieces, Huntress,” he said.
She stretched into the blurry parts of her mind to find the answers.
“I was patrolling the halls, too awake after my readings to go right to sleep.” The image of a bloodied Angel flashed through her mind, the crimson message dripping on the wall following.
She sucked in a breath, hand absently flying back to her throat.
Swallowing, relishing the pain, she went on, “I ran into the Temple Master. Spoke with him a bit, then went to my dormitory.” The scene played through her memory, her voice void of emotion as she forced the explanation out.
“The door was cracked. I pushed it open fully before going in.”
“There was no one there?” Roremar asked.
“They must have been around the corner by the bed. They weren’t behind the door. I was planning to get a dagger from the table just inside, but then I saw the starfire burning over the bed—and the wall—and…I panicked. Grabbed the vase to put it out, and they…”
She stopped. Roremar would know what happened next well enough.
“You don’t know where they went?” she asked, defeat swarming her.
Roremar shook his head. “No sign of them. I don’t know if they heard something that scared them off or what.”
“The balcony doors were open,” she recalled.
“Probably got out that way. No one was in the corridors when we showed up.”
Whoever it was was out there still. Could be waiting for her. Her attention drifted to the door. How close were they? Was she in his home right now?
Gently, Roremar’s hand brushed against her fingers at her throat. Voice rough, he said, “I’m sorry, Emmeline.”
Her eyes flew back to his. “Why?”
“Part of my job is to protect you, and I clearly didn’t do that last night.” His fingers rested against her bruises, not pressing them or hurting in any way, but simply feeling with her. “I swore I would, and I failed. I’m sorry.”
Roremar still had so many secrets from her, but Emmeline had gleaned one thing without a doubt: He was a protector. Of his brother, of Desmond, and now—somehow—of her.
And for a person who had walked hand in hand with loneliness for so long, who sat beside the void and embraced the silence, but whose heart had slowly eroded with the constant need to be so resilient on her own, it was a strange feeling. But not one she entirely hated.
“It’s okay,” she said, the words as much for herself as for him. It is okay to let yourself depend a little bit on someone else.
“I promise, we’re going to find who did this.” Steel eyes glinted, the shine of a blade ready to strike. His touch against her neck heated like the flame forging that weapon. “They are going to fucking regret it.”
At his words, the beast within her purred. And instead of coiling back into herself, she indulged his fury, let it flow through her veins as if it was her own and appease the magic pressing against her skin.
“I swear on the Fates,” she whispered.
The words were a vow sworn between them, powerful enough to be written in the stars.
But there were other worries she had to attend to. “What about my lessons?”
Roremar blew out a breath, shifting back against the wall, one hand still resting atop hers. “The Temple Master says you should probably wait for the bruising to fade before you return. Someone will cover for a few days. I picked up a balm to help speed along the healing.”