Chapter 21
Cayden
I considered joining my family, but my pain was still too raw.
I needed something new. Xan’s people set me up in a half-renovated flat above the Westwater bakery.
With basic plumbing, no furniture, and a kitchen missing cook pads, the place was barely habitable, but still better than under a bridge.
For the first time since destroying him, I didn’t dream of the Prophet or the family I’d ruined. No screaming. No commands. No blood.
I woke late to crumbling stone and the sharp tang of metal.
A warped piece of what must’ve once been a red car braced the ancient wall beside me.
I stared at it far too long, letting the silence press in—letting the absence of nightmares feel wrong in its own way—until reality slammed back into place.
I lived. He didn’t. I could either master this world or drown in what I’d done.
Quinn needed me. Letting the darkness take me wasn’t an option.
The bakery was almost empty. After finding a table and ordering, I slipped a book from BT out of my pocket-void.
Everly had recommended it to Brit in our group chat.
I hadn’t even known romance was a genre before now.
But something about it drew me in. The entire thing took place in Quinn’s time, and the details were vivid.
It helped me feel more connected to her.
A woman with sandy-purple hair winked at me as she dropped off my bill. The price turned my stomach. I was nearly broke.
‘You awake yet?’ Rowan asked.
I scowled. Distance didn’t affect our connection, apparently. I chose to pretend it did.
‘Xan and I are going to try to remove Quinn’s collar even though we are miles away,’ Rowan said. ‘Would you like to join us?’
Rowan never stopped until I answered. Ignoring him hadn’t worked when the bond first formed. I sighed. ‘No. I’m busy.’
‘Get your head out of your ass. We need advantages, Cay.’
I dog-eared the page in my book and slipped it back into my void. The Westwaters couldn’t keep Quinn from me, rules or not.
‘Then find them.’
His disapproval dug in, and the look of betrayal on his face when I left last night hit me again. Guilt—foreign and sharp—needled me. But Quinn came first. Always.
Thirty minutes later, I tied my horse to the remains of a car on the east side of the Westwater borders.
Their security was at least double what it had been yesterday.
But it wasn’t perfect. The ideal moment to slip past arrived.
I cast my runes for stealth and made my move, easily passing through their first gate via the small guard door.
The next gate came and went just as easily. The Westwaters were no better than the Architect.
I took two more steps before a body slammed into my backside. A second weight smashed onto my shoulders, grinding my face into the asphalt.
I yelled and bucked, but a third body joined the first two. The weight left my back, and the two men on my shoulders each grabbed one of my arms and forced them behind my back.
“We will kill you next time.” A gruff, lanky Westwater tilted my head up. “I know your face now. Rules be damned. If no one finds your body, then it wasn’t us.”
My heart raced. Would Quinn think I abandoned her?
The man pulled a hood off his belt and put it over my head. Blind. Deaf. My heart hammered as the hood trapped my breath—hot, suffocating. Every gasp scraped raw.
Time slowed. My body was jostled and carried.
Someone punched me in the gut before my feet suddenly rose higher than my head as if I were being carried upstairs.
Suddenly, the hood was ripped away, and I was falling.
I hit the ground hard, and pain bloomed up my side.
I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t hit my head, but I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth.
It took me precious seconds of gasping and fighting back pain to realize where I was. The gate I’d first slipped through loomed. A few voices from the other side of the tall wrought iron barricade laughed.
I took deep breaths, sucking in the cold air as if it were water. Finally, I pushed off the ground into a seated position. It took me two tries to draw my healing runes. Tears slipped out of my eyes. Without my tattoos, my body was useless. Fragile.
Gradually, my pain eased. There were other gates. Enough of my confidence returned for me to stand and search for my horse. After stumbling around for a few blocks, I turned a corner and found his unhappily swishing tail. Another two steps brought him into view, and a person darted from behind him.
I bolted forward, cursing my lack of speed runes. My well-trained mount let out a whinny of recognition as I ran past.
Although I couldn’t see the guy, a set of pounding footsteps joined my own, and I followed. Two turns later, a hint of the Architect’s trainee uniform turned into an abandoned building. I followed, only to be walloped by a metal pole the moment I stepped through the door.
The pole smashed me into the wall. My shield flared green just in time to block the next strike. I dropped to the ground to keep from being bludgeoned while a dark glove of forest green formed around my fists.
I threw the pole off of me. A hand covered in sticky olive green reached for me. I didn’t need to see Brody’s face to know it was his hand. I could still see it from The Pit, clasping Quinn’s wrist as his sick green magic sank into my best friend.
The world turned red.
I rolled and drove both heels into Brody’s gut. The kid let out a painful gasp as I knocked the wind out of him. I smashed his elbow. The crack echoed, sharp and ugly.
Brody cried out in pain. His sticky, magic-covered hand twitched before he pulled it into his chest.
“She’s precious,” Brody sobbed. “I feel her pain. Why don’t you?” The tears stopped, and he straightened, looking down at me as if I were the one with a dislocated elbow. “Our tether is so strong.”
Brody hadn’t tethered Quinn. Even the thought made bile rise in my throat.
I lunged for him, but the kid scampered back.
He bolted. I hesitated—last time I charged in blind, I took a pole to the head.
The pause cost me. The kid dove through a square in the wall that I would never fit into and disappeared.
I waited, listening for his exit or reentry into the house. A distant thump and cry of pain sounded outside the walls, followed by retreating footsteps. Without my runes speeding me up, there was no way I would catch him.
Once I was sure he wasn’t coming back, I stepped into the room.
A few dirty windows filled the dust, and debris cluttered space with streaks of sunlight.
A molting couch from BT clung to a final leg and had one of the Architect’s standard-issue bedrolls spread out on its uneven surface.
My gaze immediately homed in on a familiar shape on a table in the middle of the room.
I knew too much about alters. At the center sat a filthy BT doll, propped like a god.
Around it: Quinn’s scraps. Her dress. Her pencil. Her life.
My stomach twisted. This was an obsession with Quinn at its center. I drew, creating a knife out of pure energy, and sliced up every item he’d collected.
I’d let him go, again. My bruises screamed, but not as loud as the thought of Quinn still haunted by him.
I couldn’t warn the Westwaters. They wouldn’t listen to me.
Brody was just a kid, but his magic was dangerous, and his mind was unstable. Facing him alone wasn’t a good idea. And it wasn’t something I needed to do anymore.
I let out an unhappy breath. ‘Rowan, are you with the Architect?’
‘Change your mind already?’ Rowan asked.
I didn’t justify that with a response. ‘Brody’s still going to be a problem.’
‘Shit. Where are you?’
It took him twenty minutes to arrive with reinforcements made up of only Abernathy’s men.
“Where are Ezra’s enforcers?” I asked.
Rowan clapped me on the shoulder. “The Westwater border’s a mess. Jamie’s kissing Xan’s ass to prove loyalty, and the Abernathys don’t want war on their doorstep. Xan hasn’t ruled it out.”
I grunted.
‘You’d know all this if you weren’t hiding away. Forget the Alun, come train with me.’
I looked hard at my friend—my only other one besides Quinn—searching for any hint of disappointment, but like a fucking dog, hope filled his face. I could swear his little tail wagged.
I pursed my lips.
Brody was long gone. The Westwaters had three layers of gates I had to get through, and I hadn’t even heard the guys that took me down coming. My side throbbed, and my head pulsed. I did not doubt that if they caught me the next time, that would be it.
The knot on my skull throbbed where Brody’s pole landed.
Everything about today had been a disaster.
‘Quinn’s safe?’ I asked.
Xan promised she was, but I needed to hear the words from someone I trusted.
Rowan pulled up Brit’s messages. Quinn was safe. Laughing. Fighting off the Westwaters with a stick. I could’ve known that already, but I’d ditched the chat like an idiot.
Under my Prophet, I never had choices. Now I did, and I kept making the wrong ones.
“I’m only training with you,” I said.
His ox-sized grin said he thought he’d won.
He hadn’t.
This was survival, nothing more.