Chapter 32
JO
We navigate the horses straight through the unmanned entrance into the small town.
The dirt roads are empty and storefronts lining the main street are vacant, their doors left open on their hinges.
There’s no familiar smell of food cooking coming from the local tavern or sounds of life anywhere other than from a wandering goat munching on a piece of parchment the winds have scattered across town.
Fredrich is the one to break the silence. “Did the vendor at the port say if anyone was left behind?”
“She just said that soldiers from the capital descended on the town nearby,” Acker answers.
“What were they looking for?” Irina asks.
“Not what,” Fredrich says. “Who.”
Heirs, I realize with a startling spike of dread.
“But why take the whole town?” Irina asks.
Beau told me that there were defiant communities of Edmond’s reign within Kenta.
Unbeknownst to the crown, these towns protected Heirs who were charged with bogus crimes and developed a way to find others in need of hiding.
She’d discovered them during travel in the army, seeing through the townspeople’s auras as well as their illusions that a lot of them possessed magic.
It was the beginning of her journey of unraveling everything she was led to believe while under her father’s thumb and gain an idea of sorts of what he was up to.
We stop in front of the tavern.
Acker dismounts from his horse before helping Irina down. “There’s likely to be rooms up top,” he says. “Wells, do a sweep of the town. See what you can find in terms of food for the horses.”
Fredrich lifts me from the horse’s back, planting me on my feet, and I follow the three of them into the desolate tavern.
It paints a bleak picture of what might have happened here.
Chairs and tables are overturned. Flies buzz around the uneaten food and drink still left out.
Acker disappears through an open doorway behind the bar, likely to survey the rear of the premises.
I round the counter and am relieved to find multiple glass bottles of wine underneath the counter, and given the circumstance, a glass of wine sounds nice right about now but my bound hands prevent me from grabbing the drink for myself.
Sensing my predicament, Fredrich lifts a bottle from the shelf and uncorks it.
He raises a brow, asking without words if it’s okay for him to do the honors.
I tip my head back and he rests the glass rim against my mouth, tilting the bottle carefully until he’s sure I’m not going to let half the wine escape down my chin.
The first swallow is small, but my sips quickly turn into a gulp, and I pull back to swallow.
Fredrich wastes no time downing some himself.
“Excuse me,” Irina says, drawing our attention.
Fredrich grins. “My apologies.” He retrieves an overturned glass from where it had been left to dry next to the wash basin, sliding it onto the bar in front of her. Then he grabs another bottle and uncorks it, glass clinking against the tumbler as he pours her a helping. “On the house,” he jokes.
Acker walks back through the doorway. He lowers his hood, and it gives me an unfettered view of his face, and it’s as if I’ve finally take a sip of air after holding my breath since I woke up this morning.
I’ve felt off-kilter all day, the nightmare haunting my waking thoughts.
It’s getting harder to differentiate where my memories stop in my dreams and where my own mind begins to play tricks on me.
But seeing the easy and steady expression on Acker’s face instead of undiluted fear comforts me somehow.
He accepts the bottle from Fredrich’s outstretched hand and tips his head back to take a drink. I can’t help but watch his throat working as he downs the wine.
Wells’s voice draws our attention to the front door. “The stables are empty. I’m going to move the horses inside. Just in case anyone comes looking.”
Acker nods his approval and wipes the excess liquid from his mouth with his hand. “They likely took the horses and feed to be used on the front lines.”
“Supplies are that low?” Fredrich asks.
Acker’s mouth thins. “It’s not great.”
He continues to keep his gaze averted from me as he explains the supply issues the Kenta have been struggling with in recent years and months.
He looks at the open tavern doors, the dirty bar, and at any and everything that’s not me before he says he’s going to see if he can find any food in the kitchen.
Fredrich finds a liquor bottle that’s to his liking and takes it with him as he follows his friend through the door and into the back of the tavern.
Left to ourselves, I meet Irina’s gaze across the bar. I can’t tell if her passive facade is real or put on, but I make note to be careful not to turn my back on her. Sometimes a threat can appear weak when in reality it’s actually quite the opposite.
I would know.
My gaze slides to the open tavern door behind her, waiting for Wells’s figure to return. The silence seems to expand until the pressure of it causes a ringing sensation in my ears, only for me to realize it’s just Irina gliding her finger around the rim of her glass.
“We have a lot in common, you know?” she says.
I’m caught off guard by her assumption. Curious, but not enough to inquire further, so I don’t acknowledge her words. I don’t want to think of Irina in any capacity. I’ve had enough of her to last a lifetime. A placeholder wife to Acker, taken to keep his father happy. A warm body, I presume.
She’s not dissuaded by my lack of response. “He was my first love. He was my first heartbreak, too.”
If she expects me to feel sorry for her, she’s sadly mistaken.
Although she’s not wrong about that being something we share.
I just don’t want to give her any validation.
And I don’t have the energy to feed into whatever rise she’s trying to get out of me.
She must realize as much, because she vacates her stool and stalks out of the room.
I listen to her fading footsteps as they ascend the stairs to the floor above.
And then, I’m well and truly alone.
The open door of the tavern gives a temptingly framed view of the empty street beyond.
Two windows on either side lend a partial view of the buildings across the street, and I inch out from behind the bar and toward the door.
Looking back at the kitchen door, I listen carefully to Fredrich and Acker’s movements in the room beyond.
“We need her skill set,” Fredrich says.
Whatever Acker says in return is muffled, but I catch the tail end of it. “—are secure.”
I keep my steps light as I move toward the tavern’s entrance.
The wind nips at my cheeks as I pause on the threshold.
My heart picks up speed at the freedom just inches away from my fingertips.
But then I look down at my hands and realize I’m fairly useless in shackles.
I run my gaze over the vacant street, to the rooftops of the buildings on the other side, and the sky above. It seems snow is likely.
“What are you looking for?”
A surprised yelp leaves my mouth at the nearness of the voice behind me.
I spin in place, finding Fredrich standing alarmingly close.
His gaze is upturned, as if he’s attempting to see something through the doorway that I can’t.
When his gaze drops back to me, he’s grinning, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“I may not be able to shield from the cold, but just about everything else is easy to block out. When Irina illusioned us at the port, it’s likely your bird friend lost sight of us pretty quickly.”
He doesn’t say his name, but we both know who he’s referring to.
He reaches around me to pull the tavern door closed. “Come on,” he says with a jerk of his chin. “Let’s get you settled.”
Acker isn’t around as Fredrich escorts me up the stairs. We move down the corridor to the last bedroom, its door already open. The floor creaks as I step inside. The room reminds me of the brothel we stayed at on the journey to Kenta, but thankfully the bed looks clean and unused.
Fredrich turns toward me. “Let me see your hands,” he says.
I raise them, as instructed, then watch as he inserts a small skeleton key into the lock of the shackles.
It doesn’t release my hands from the bindings entirely, my fingers still woven together with rope, but a low groan leaves my mouth as my wrists are exposed to the fresh air for the first time since we left Maile.
I begin to thank him, but before I can form the first syllable, he’s dragging me toward the bed by my arm.
I try to jerk from his hold, but he outmaneuvers me, forcing me down onto the mattress with little more than a sharp push.
He threads the cuffs around a bar of the metal headboard and wiggles his fingers for me to give him my hands again.
“You can eat shit if you think I’m going to let you chain me to this bed.”
He just stares at me expectantly, his hand outstretched … waiting.
I contemplate the merits of fighting, but the simple truth is I would lose ten times over against him and never land a single blow, and it would only serve to shame me further.
Sighing in defeat and shifting my gaze to the space over his shoulder, I lift my arms to the headboard.
I feel the cuffs close around my wrists, anchoring me to the bed, and the click of the lock engaging solidifies my entrapment.
“Wasn’t my decision,” he says, somewhat repentantly.
Oh, I know exactly who’s decision it was. “Tell him to do his own dirty work for now on,” I say, snarky.
I watch Fredrich leave out of the corner of my eye, quietly shutting the door behind him, and I return to fantasizing about what I’m going to do the moment I’m free of these bindings.
Then I make it my mission of the night to do just that.
I wait until I can no longer hear any footsteps in the hallway and the light from outside my window dissipates fully before I begin working on freeing myself from the bindings.
Sawing my teeth across the rope visible between fingers, I slowly loosen the stranglehold on my hands, little by little.
I have to take breaks to breathe, letting my arms go slack for moments while I rest. I do this for what feels like hours, my jaw and shoulders aching fiercely, but sheer fury propels me to keep going.
I maneuver my bite back and forth. Again and again, feeling for the slackening in the rope with my tongue until finally—finally—the binding gives way.
A burst of relief escapes my throat, but I’m quick to snap my mouth shut and cut it off out of fear of getting caught.
My hands shake, both from exertion and excitement, as I wiggle them free from the rope, my anger morphing into something predatory as sensation slowly trickles back into my fingers.
I recall my dagger, the familiar hilt comforting as it appears in the palm of my hand.
One last hurdle.
It’s too dark to see the shackles around my wrists properly, but they clink as I stretch out my hands.
They’re sore and slightly numb from being bound for so long, but I’m too anxious to have access to my magic, just in case the Bond forces me into Acker’s presence.
Shifting the dagger in my hand, I feel for a link in the chain that secures my wrists to the bed and position the tip of the blade through the open center of the metal.
I grit my teeth as I wedge the tip of the blade through the loop, pushing with all the strength I can muster between the awkward angle and my weakened hands and wrists.
It doesn’t budge. The blade nor the chain. Neither of them has any give.
I adjust the hold I have on the dagger and try again, holding my breath as I do my hardest to jam the blade through. Still, nothing.
Taking a moment to re-evaluate, I try to rotate the blade as I press it through the metal loop instead of shoving it with just brute force.
And it works. The metal gives just enough for the blade tip to slip into the small gap where the ends of the link have—finally—been pushed apart.
But as I twist the blade further, I hear a terrible crack, the wood hilt splintering from the pressure.
I freeze. My heart hammers in my throat as I realize what I’ve done.
This dagger is the only thing I have of my father.
We made it during one of the summers we spent in Kenta.
Not that I remember it. I don’t remember much of that time at all; other than the few memories I’ve pieced together from my dreams. And those are warped and hazy, so I’m never sure of what’s real and what my mind has conjured.
I feel for the crack with the tip of my fingers and the sadness that it elicits only serves to further fuel my anger. At this point, the damage is already done, so the least I can do is enact my retribution.
After I finally escape these shackles, that is.
Clenching my teeth, I tighten my grip and twist the blade with enough force to spear the chain apart.
I catch the slackened links in my hands to stop them from making too much noise as I pull them back through the headboard, freeing my arms at last. The cuffs are still locked around my wrists, but I have free range of motion as I sit up and inspect my dagger.
I run my thumb over the fissure that runs the length of the handle.
The hilt is fully fractured, rendering it a hazard to wield.
I’m just as likely to injure myself as I am anyone else if the tang slips free during an attack.
But it’s still useful enough to carry out one last item of business.