31. Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty One
Evandra
I stood frozen at the top of the stairs leading to the main deck, my breath caught in my throat like a snare. The quiet hum of Riftreach—the soft hum of the city below, the distant hiss of the geyser—faded to a dull, suffocating silence. And then I heard it. The words that shattered everything.
“Just let her down gently,” Julian said, calm as ever. Measured. Unmoved.
As if he hadn’t just detonated something inside me.
My fingers locked around the railing. The wooden banister dug into my palm, grounding me only barely. My knees wobbled. My breath hitched.
Then came the next blow.
“I have to commend you, Drake,” Julian continued, his voice slipping into something almost smug. “You played your part brilliantly. Pretending to care for her, drawing her here—you’ve done exactly as we needed.”
Pretending.
My vision tunneled. The world tilted; the lanterns along the walls smeared like wet paint across the stone. I staggered back a step, the stair creaking beneath my heel. The sound of it—small and sudden—snapped like a twig in a quiet forest, loud enough to betray me.
But they didn’t hear.
They just kept talking, and I—I couldn’t.
I turned and fled, boots slamming the steps in a way that didn’t even feel like my own body anymore. The air felt too thin. Too sharp. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. All I could do was run.
Lanterns blurred past me in streaks of gold and green, the Riftlight warping with the speed of my panic. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I had to get away. Away from that voice. Away from him.
Drake.
The warmth of him was still on my skin. I could still feel the weight of his arm from that morning, the way he’d held me like I was something breakable and beloved. The soft murmur of his voice. The way his lips brushed my shoulder like a promise.
A promise built on lies.
My breath broke in ragged gasps. The faces of the people I passed blurred together. A boy with a satchel. A woman lighting a pipe. A pair of rebels laughing near the market bridge. They all looked up as I passed, but I didn’t see them. Didn’t register them.
Because all I could hear was his voice in my memory.
“I’ll never lie to you.”
He had looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that mattered. Like I was his. And maybe I had been. A mark to hit. A girl to catch. A pawn to move across a board I never even knew I was standing on.
I stumbled into the sewers before I realized where my feet had carried me. The scent of rot and rust hit like a slap, but I welcomed it. I wanted to choke. To hurt. To feel something that wasn’t this twisting, flailing grief burning through me like acid.
I collapsed against a slick brick wall, my legs finally giving up their performance.
Then I bent over and vomited.
My stomach emptied itself into the muck, again and again, until there was nothing left but bile and broken sobs. The pain was a distraction. Almost a comfort. At least it was real.
Unlike him.
The sobs came in heaving waves, echoing through the tunnel like a haunting. I clutched my knees to my chest, trying to hold myself together as if I could press the pieces back into something resembling whole.
But I wasn’t whole.
I was never whole to begin with, was I?
I’d built a fragile, desperate thing out of the scraps of my life—my mother’s lies, my father’s silence, the Rift’s whispers—and then I’d given it to him.
I’d let Drake see me. Touch me. I had loved him. Even if I hadn’t said the words out loud, I’d felt them thrumming in every glance, every breathless kiss, every soft “goodnight” when we collapsed into each other’s arms.
And it was all a game to him.
The ache twisted deeper, crueler. His smile flashed in my mind—boyish, knowing, crooked at the corner like he was always one heartbeat from teasing me. I thought it meant safety. I thought it meant him.
But it was just a mask—a beautiful, practiced performance.
Gods, how had I been so stupid?
I thought of my father—how he had lied to protect me, how I’d hated him for it.
And now Drake—who I had trusted with the rawest pieces of myself—had done the same. But not to protect me. Not to spare me pain.
No.
He’d lied to use me.
‘You’ve done exactly as we needed.’
What had I been? A target? A key to something? Bait?
I pressed my forehead to the wall, letting the cold seep in. I didn’t want to cry anymore. I didn’t want to feel anymore.
But it was too late for that.
Somewhere, water dripped steadily from a pipe—a quiet rhythm in the dark. I breathed with it, trying to still the shaking in my limbs. I didn’t know what to do.
I couldn’t go back. Not to that room. Not to that bed where his scent still lingered on the sheets. I couldn’t see him. Couldn’t look into those silver eyes and hear another word that might be true—or worse, almost true.
I was unraveling—thread by thread.
The Riftborn needed me. That had been true yesterday. It would still be true tomorrow. But everything else—my place here, my worth, my strength—it had all been tied to him. To the way he made me feel like I belonged. Like maybe I was chosen, not cursed.
But I wasn’t chosen. I was manipulated. Used.
My fists clenched. My nails dug into my palms hard enough to break the skin. Good. Let it bleed.
I don’t know how long I stayed there.
Time didn’t pass the same way in Riftreach. There were no clocks, no sun—just the steady beat of the caverns and the weight of silence.
I wanted to scream, to punch, to rage at the cruel unfairness of it all. But the only sound that came from me was a ragged sob as I gasped for air. My thoughts swirled and tangled, choking me. I barely heard the sound at first—the faint, deliberate echo of footsteps on the sewer stone.
My heart lurched. Drake. Of course he’d followed me.
He found me. “Go away, Drake!” I shouted, my voice hoarse and breaking as I buried my face in my hands.
But the footsteps didn’t stop. They grew louder.
Heavier. Not like his usual stride. And then I heard something else—something that didn’t belong.
Whispers. Raspy, too fast. Like words spoken backward, layered over themselves. Wrong.
“Drake?” I called again, my voice now trembling. Silence.
Then: “What do we have here?” A voice slithered from the dark, cruel and rasping, like rot come alive. Another voice followed, whispering over my skin.
“She reeks of the Rift. She’s dripping with it.”
I scrambled to my feet, my knees wobbling. My hands fumbled at my hips—only to grasp at air. Empty sheathes.
No blades. I’d left them behind.
Two figures emerged from the shadows, their eyes glowing crimson. One hunched grotesquely, his body twisted into something barely human.
The other was rail-thin, bones jutting from his tight, gray skin like a walking corpse. Vyper’s cronies. The ones I’d seen with him in my vision.
A jagged grin split the hunchback’s face. “A Seer… alone. What luck.”
“The master will be most pleased,” the skeletal one hissed, fingers twitching like claws.
“Don’t touch me!” I shouted, trying to force my will through the Rift, to push into their minds like I’d practiced. But panic clawed at my focus, and the connection failed.
“Where’s your guard, little bird?” the hunchback sneered. “I can smell him on you. Dragonblood,” he snuffed the air crudely. “You let him mark you.”
I took a step back and slipped, falling hard. My shoulder struck the stone, sending a bolt of pain through my chest.
The skeletal one crouched beside me, his lips curling. “So much power in one so small. It will make a lovely offering.”
“Please!” I screamed. “DRAKE!”
The hunchback chuckled. “He can’t save you now.”
He reached into his pouch and pulled out a fistful of something noxious and powdery.
Before I could react, he brought it to his cracked lips and blew it into my face. And just before the darkness took me, I saw it again. Not their faces—but the mirror. Glinting behind their shapes like a watching eye.
The serpent curled in silver. The void beneath the glass. It was here.
I awoke to the sharp ache of my body suspended, my vertebrae grinding painfully against a cold, unyielding steel frame. My breath shook as the memories surged forward—the sewers, the grotesque men, Drake’s betrayal—all of it crashing down like a wave.
The heartache in my chest solidified into an icy wall, shielding me from the rising tide of despair. I tasted bile and bitterness, the lingering flavor of broken trust.
I blinked, my left eye creaking open, though the right refused to comply, swollen shut and throbbing with dull pain. Someone had been rough with me. My vision adjusted slowly to the dim torchlight flickering across rough stone walls, casting jagged shadows like specters watching from the corners.
Chains rattled softly above me as I shifted, testing my restraints.
My wrists were encased in cold, jagged manacles, biting into my skin and leaving raw, bloody tracks.
The steel cross I was bound to kept my arms stretched painfully high, my shoulders burning with every breath.
My toes grazed the ground, just enough to prevent full relief, leaving my weight to drag heavily on my wounds.
Each movement sent a sharp, stinging reminder of my captivity.
The room around me was small, suffocating, and reeked of damp stone and old blood.
A table sat to the side, splattered with crimson stains, its surface littered with tools of cruelty.
A metal-tipped whip coiled like a serpent.
A bone saw rusted at the edges. A scalpel, its blade gleaming in the dim light, still bore traces of its last victim.
My stomach churned, bile rising in my throat, but I forced it down.
Fear clawed at me like a living thing, but the bitter emptiness in my chest smothered it. I was tired of feeling small. I’m tired of being a pawn in someone else’s game. My hands clenched into fists, my nails digging into my palms. I would not be weak. Not again. Not this time.