Chapter Seventy-Two
ELARA
‘Well,’ Adrian mumbled, standing, ‘this seems personal and not much of my concern, so I’d better be off.’
An icicle whirled through the air, clipping Adrian’s ear as it impaled the wood of the door.
‘Sit,’ Isra demanded.
‘What the fuck, Isra?’
‘You may be a Celeste now, but you have just heard sensitive information about two very important people, information that in the wrong hands could be the end of them both. You do not leave this room until El or Enzo says you can.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I do apologize!’ Adrian bent forwards, a hand on his heart. ‘I forgot that they’re my keepers rather than my equals. And that I’m now a part of this heavenly group. Sorry that I might not want to be dragged into your latest clusterfuck of revelations!’
He yelled the last part in Isra’s face. Any amusement had left her as she leaned forwards until her face was a hair’s breadth away from his.
‘You may be grieving, but shout at me again and I’ll shove the next icicle so far up your back end that you’ll be a human kebab for the gulls,’ she snarled. ‘Celeste or not.’
Adrian paled.
‘Rich, Adrian, to have qualms about us when you’ve been kissing a Star,’ Enzo snapped.
‘For the last time, I didn’t bloody know she was a Star,’ Adrian hissed back.
‘What?!’ everyone else exclaimed.
‘Oh yes. We discovered that Adrian had a sweet tryst with Cancia less than an hour ago.’
‘What?’
Eli chuckled as chaos ensued, everyone talking over each other while he shook his head. ‘Oh, Adrian. You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.’
‘One thing at a time, please,’ Adrian hissed.
‘Everyone, calm down.’ Merissa’s clear voice broke through the din. ‘Adrian already knows the cost of a betrayal that great.’ Adrian nodded, slumping against the wall. ‘Please show him some empathy. He is leaving to bury his best friend and his sister. He can go.’
‘Thank you, Merissa,’ Adrian said softly as there were murmurs of agreement.
‘And it’s not him blabbing that we should be worried about,’ she added. ‘There is literally a person in this room nicknamed Silvertongue.’
‘That’s not why they call me that, sweetheart.’ Eli smirked. ‘But if you want to find out where my nickname comes from, pay a visit to my room tonight.’ He winked. Merissa’s cheeks flushed.
‘You are being awfully quiet, Eli,’ Leo murmured, frowning at him. ‘And you’re a Star. You’ve just gained vital information about a supposed enemy. How do we know you won’t soar to the heavens to tell your friends that they can kill two gods with one stone?’
‘Since you want to be prejudiced about this, Merissa’s also part Star,’ Eli replied. ‘You aren’t going to question her at all?’
‘Merissa has proven her loyalty time and time again,’ Elara bit out.
‘Ah, yes, by stabbing you in the back. Literally,’ he mocked Merissa, whose face was shot through with contempt.
‘Enough,’ Enzo snapped. ‘We’re in the middle of the damned ocean upon a rock. No one is going to run and tell anyone anything right now, so we may as well just try to trust each other. A word of this spreads, and I’ll know it was one of you five.’
He pinned each of them with a warning glare.
Elara wanted to scream. She had bargained with a devil and expected the terms to be fair.
‘El, are you all right?’ Leo asked quietly.
Elara shook her head, raising her eyes to the faces around the table.
‘No, I’m not all right,’ she whispered. ‘There’s always something. I meet my soulmate, but there’s a prophecy that we can never be together. We lift the prophecy, but he nearly dies. I save him, and now his life is tied to me. It’s not fair.’
She scraped her chair back, rising.
‘It’s not fair to Enzo, who has been through enough. Or me, who has had everything stolen from me. The Stars won’t let us rest.’ Eli cleared his throat. ‘Present company excluded,’ she added more softly.
‘We’ll find a way to fix this,’ Merissa said. ‘We always do. We just need to find out what magick he used and reverse it or break it.’
Elara sighed. ‘Blood magick. That’s what he used. He must have tampered with the tether before he gave it to me.’
She didn’t add that it wasn’t the first time he’d have used that kind of power, the memory of what she’d asked him to do when she was the Moon haunting her. Enzo looked at her as though reading her thoughts.
‘That explains why Enzo had that coughing fit when we travelled back from Neptuna,’ Adrian said. ‘You were drowning at the same time, Elara.’
Enzo nodded. ‘And I felt like I was.’
Elara passed a hand over her face. ‘It was too easy. And I was too fucking naive.’ She slammed her fist on the table. ‘I should have known there would be one last hurdle, that Ariete would never just allow us both to escape alive without some ulterior motive, despite what I did for that tether.’
‘You couldn’t have known, El,’ Merissa said.
‘But I should have. I’m supposedly the disgraced queen of the damned cosmos, and I can’t see when I’m being duped? How am I meant to lead you all? How is Enzo, if we’re tied together? Ariete has made us that much easier to kill.’
‘Right now, Ariete is the least of our problems. If only he knows what he’s done, and no one at this table is breathing a word of it to anyone else, then we can put this on the backburner for now,’ Eli said.
‘Ariete is lying low; this we already knew. There is no threat he possesses that is greater than the Dark. So we need to focus on our visit to Asteria tomorrow. We need to focus on stopping Piscea walking into this world.’
‘He’s right,’ Enzo said. ‘We focus on one crisis at a time. Imprison the Dark once more.’
‘And then Ariete is mine,’ Elara promised.