Chapter 81 Nikolai
Nikolai
Istalk between the cool blue walls of the labyrinth. The glass is fully clouded, as impenetrable as the cursed passages that have held me captive for years now.
I could have made her stay—should have made her stay in the safety of her village. I had a dozen illusions at my fingertips that could have blinded her, forced her back. I could have bloody told her to stay. Except I couldn’t.
Saying goodbye felt like reaching down my own throat and ripping out my lungs.
“You weren’t strong enough.” My shadow slinks after me. “You can’t be what she deserves. You brought her back here to break her fucking heart.”
“I’m protecting her,” I hiss.
“You’re lying.”
“Lying is what I do.”
I turn a sharp corner, only to find a looming slab of glass blocking my path: a dead end.
This entire path was a waste of time. Cursing, I retrace my steps.
The walls have already shifted. Even with the hints the book has spilled, the labyrinth never fully reveals its secrets to me—just like I can’t reveal mine to Taera.
“Can’t? Or won’t…” My shadow’s face bends and cracks, showing too much.
I recoil. “Shut up.”
He smirks. “You can’t make me disappear anymore.”
He’s right. I’m fragmenting.
My shadow’s laugh echoes down the corridor—a laugh that is mine and not mine.
“I can ignore you,” I mutter.
“Like you’re ignoring her?”
A jagged fistful of amulets bites into the palms of my clenched hand. I squeeze until pain shoots up my arm.
I’m trying to make it easy for her to resent me, to give up on me. I warned her from the beginning not to trust me—gave her a dozen reasons not to. Taera, stubborn as the desert, ignored them all.
Taera helps bring the fractured parts of me together. Maybe that’s why my thoughts can’t stop clinging to her. Or is this just another excuse to drag her deeper into my ruin?
I crave her magic, I crave her, but I’ve finally translated the book from the Library of the Labyrinth—the one in the ancient language that I had to learn from a shadow in a mirror.
The book is a relic, too. It fucking feeds on faces.
There’s no way I’m letting Taera anywhere near this nightmare.
I won’t let myself anywhere near her until this is over.
Or so I keep telling myself… until she asks. Then I start giving her whatever she requests. Clinging to the scraps of physical affection I can still offer her, even if I shouldn’t. I should protect her.
But I don’t want to protect her.
I want to possess her.
I want her to be mine. I want to have those gorgeous eyes—bottomless brown like the twilight sand—fixed on me.
I ache for her, and it’s tormenting me, as consuming as the labyrinth’s pull.
I don’t even remember my feet carrying me through its arched entrance this time.
I’m getting reckless, searching for the end, for a way out.
All for her.
If my quest were just for my sister, I might be able to stop. But it’s too late for that. The compulsion is darker now, twisted into something I don’t recognize.
I can’t let go.
The Halls will be at their most volatile, and their most powerful, on the night of the masquerade ball, when the sand tides crest at their highest point.
I can already feel the swell of the desert’s magic as it grows closer.
That’s when I have to finish this. And if I can spare Taera until after the masquerade—keep her away from what needs to be done—perhaps I can become the beautiful lie she’s fallen for.