Chapter 54
Chapter Fifty-Four
Malakai
The streets were quiet by the time we left the temple.
While the battle I’d feared still echoed in my head, there was no clang of swords around us.
Smoke drifted through the brightening dawn, clouds thinning into a yellow haze, pink rounding the edges.
No buildings rumbled as they collapsed. No screams echoed as lives were taken.
But the moans of the dying could be heard across the city.
They were being tended to, though, so we didn’t stop.
Not with Cyph finally awake but stumbling between me and Mila, and Vale still weak on our heels.
Mystiques lay in the streets, comrades tending to them and—Bodymelders, I noticed with a drawn brow.
A small host of them walked through the city, healing where they could.
The number of Mystiques I saw upright was encouraging. How they’d defeated the Engrossians, I didn’t know.
But when we reached the palace, I found out.
I left Cypherion, Mila, and Vale to walk to the infirmary when I saw Ezalia, the Seawatcher chancellor, and her sandy mare. One look at the few arrows remaining in the quiver on her back, and I understood who we had to thank for this victory.
“They crossed through our territory while the queen led their diversion east,” she explained when I asked after her appearance here.
“The moment one of their less obedient warriors killed a Seawatcher, I declared it an act of war. We left two weeks ago to travel here with some Bodymelders. It appears our timing could have been slightly better.” She frowned, looking at the warriors spread across the lawn.
The less severely injured had been given sleeping tonics, unconsciousness taking over as their wounds were healed by the mountains.
“Your timing was magnificent,” I thanked her.
Her lips pulled into a thin line. “This is our fight now, too.”
“What about the coasts? Who will guard them?” I asked. Their posts were a defense of the entire continent, never to be abandoned.
“We will always monitor the seas as guided by the Angel.” She lifted her chin, sea-glass eyes blazing. “But avenging our own is our priority.”
I understood that sentiment all too well.
“Malakai!” a deep voice shouted.
Barrett charged up the hill to the palace, a nearly unconscious Ophelia draped in his arms. The sight knocked the wind out of me.
“What the fuck happened?” I stormed up to Barrett. “What did you do?”
Ophelia looked up at me as I shifted her weight into my arms. At this proximity, I noticed an echo of a beat in the Bind.
Dull magenta eyes blinked up at me, lids heavy and irises fogged over as life seeped out of them.
Crimson stained the front of her dress, spread across her chest, and matted the long strands of her hair.
I looked for the source of it, only finding one slice to her arm.
It didn’t appear deep, but—there was too much blood.
“Not him,” she exhaled.
Gently, I turned her face toward me. “What?” I whispered, but her eyes slipped shut again.
“Kakias.”
I glared at Barrett for only a second, spinning to carry Ophelia toward the palace.
I called for Santorina, and someone yelled that she was in her workshop.
The prince followed, eyes half-crazed and dirt smeared on his cheeks, like he’d actually been fighting.
We tore down the steps, my heart rattling its cage as loudly as ever.
“Tell me everything,” I barked.
Barrett recounted an absurd tale of seeing a flash of bright light that led him to the Rapture Chamber, where apparently his mother was completing a ritual he didn’t fully understand.
He claimed she’d used Ophelia’s blood to become immortal and tried to kill the woman in my arms. I ground my teeth together at his lack of detail.
He saved her, I reminded myself. That much was clear. And if Santorina could heal her now, I’d have to thank the bastard.
We burst into Rina’s workshop, the place overrun by frenzied warriors tending to the injured. The door to the garden was thrown open and people ran in and out, carrying blankets, bandages, tonics.
“Santorina,” I barely breathed. Desperation cracked my voice.
Rina’s head snapped up. Her gaze fell to Ophelia, who rolled her eyes to the side and tried to crack a smile.
“Hi, Rina,” she wheezed before her lids fell shut again.
“Fucking hell,” Rina gasped, horror dropping her jaw. “Put her there.” She pointed to a cot in the corner and asked Barrett to recount everything again. He rushed through it, giving only the necessary details of his mother’s magic and the wound on Ophelia’s arm.
Now that I’d gotten Ophelia into Rina’s care, hearing the explanation a second time made me nauseous. Immortality. We’d never considered anything of the sort. It changed everything.
But we’d worry about that later.
First, we needed to heal the weakened woman before us.
Seeing her on the brink of death, not knowing if she’d survive it—Spirits, anger flared through me.
She may not be mine anymore, but I would always protect her.
I made a promise to whatever hands of fate controlled us that I’d never see her like this again.
When Barrett finished speaking, Rina promptly told everyone to leave, wanting quiet as she worked.
As I stood, I brushed Ophelia’s hair back from her face. Until the stars stop shining, I whispered to the Spirits, begging them to bring her back.
A weak hand grazed my wrist, her attempt to grab me barely a flutter.
“Where’s Tol?” She blinked up at me, fighting to keep her eyes open.
My heart broke in that moment. Not because I was jealous that I wasn’t the one she wanted, but because I didn’t have an answer for her.
From my perch on the edge of the balcony of my father’s ruined office, legs swinging above the land below, the afternoon looked peaceful. On this side of the palace, overlooking empty mountains, you’d never guess the destruction the city had faced only days ago.
Boots thudded behind me, but I didn’t expect to see Barrett emerge from the doorway.
“Are you responsible for the redecorating?” He raised a brow.
I looked over his shoulder, at the papers and fragments of glass and marble still littering the ground, and laughed.
It was a sound I hadn’t made in a long time, but I’d been feeling lighter since sneaking sleeping tonics from the Bodymelders’ store.
In the aftermath of the battle, they hadn’t noticed.
“I’ll clean it up eventually.” I shrugged.
“Don’t do it on my account.” The prince—no, I supposed he no longer had that title now that he’d cut ties with his mother. The former Engrossian heir walked up to the stone ledge and swung his legs over beside me.
We sat in silence for a while, and I considered everything that tied us together.
From the tangible fact of our shared blood to the invisible scars of betrayal and abandonment left on our hearts.
We’d both been wrecked by our father, and Barrett had been—well, the woman who birthed him was hardly a mother.
“Do you think she ever truly loved him?” The words burst from me before I could stop them.
They’d been plaguing me for days. After Vale had told us of her scattered vision of Kakias and her inhumane ritual, what she’d wanted from Ophelia, gathering ingredients from around the continent, and Barrett told us what he’d seen, we’d pieced together Kakias’s repugnant plan.
Since then, I’d been wondering how my father had agreed to it, what she said or did to convince him.
Absently, I ran my fingers over his dagger where it hung on my belt. He may have been a warped man at his end, but there had once been good in him—or so I liked to believe. I didn’t want to consider what it said about me if only soiled blood ran through his veins.
Barrett contemplated my question. “I think she cared in her own way, yes. But I don’t think she was capable of love as we know it.”
Love as we know it. That was a concept I needed to relearn.
I’d seen Barrett with Dax after the battle, tangled together upon their reunion.
While he certainly knew love, I’d been too destroyed by my father and his mother to know what love truly felt like anymore.
I tried to hang on to the memory of it—the way I’d felt with Ophelia before we’d changed—but even the bright moments I could recall were fleeting, overshadowed.
“I don’t think he knew her plan,” I stated, curiosity bubbling in my gut. “At least, not all of it.”
“Really?” Barrett raised a brow.
“I think they both had secrets.” I looked over my shoulder at the ruined office and swore to myself I’d find out what my father’s were. “Thank you for saving Ophelia,” I added after a beat of silence.
I knew he didn’t do it for me, but if he’d wanted to spite me as badly as I once had him, he could have let her suffer more. But no, while he may be an Engrossian, sired by the wicked queen herself, Barrett was undoubtedly good.
“Of course.” He waved me off, but his expression turned pensive. He ran a hand through his black curls, similar to my own. “You truly love her, don’t you?”
A sharp pang went through my chest, heart rattling. I inhaled around it, looking over the expanse of mountains. Peaks jutted into the clear blue sky of the summer day and reached hopeful hands toward the heavens. I waited for the Bind to ache, but nothing came.
“I always will,” I admitted. I think he understood that it was in a different way than before. A piece of me would always belong to Ophelia. It would live with the boy and girl we used to be, in the future they should have had.
And it was inked in the promise of our Bind, unbreakable yet faulty. Our souls were connected whether we wanted to be or not.
“She’s our best hope,” Barrett said.
“Hope,” I scoffed. Another thing I didn’t have. But inadvertently, I remembered crystal blue eyes and a whispered conversation in a decrepit temple, and I thought maybe I could find it.