28. The East Wing Staircase #2
“She did well in the games, truly, but… she didn’t make it back from the third.” The silence that follows is thick as I try to find the right words. “She should have,” I eventually settle on. “But she didn’t. She fell to her death.”
I glance up to the banister above and her eyes widen.
“Which is why I panicked when you were falling,” I say softly, trying to hold her gaze with mine. I need to know she’s listening and understanding. “She wasn’t able to use her wings to save herself. Hell’s influence stopped them. Thank the angels, you didn’t have that problem here.”
I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince her or myself that there are no external influences here stopping our wings from doing what Silver says is “the most natural thing in the world to them,” so long as we believe it.
Given this girl’s wings had saved her, it’s me who still needs convincing.
Which begs the question. “Why were you up there?”
My heart sinks, already knowing the answer. She’d tied sheets together and looped them around the banister and her neck. And before she fell, she’d had that look about her that Lorelei had in the alley. She was giving up and craving the peace that some think comes with ending it all.
And yet… her wings had saved her, so no matter how much she thinks she welcomes or deserves death, a part of her, some deep-down instinct has to believe herself worthy of being saved.
She reminds me of Lorelei again when her face changes between one blink and the next. Inspiration or an idea that I know from experience I won’t like.
“The mast,” she mutters, suddenly moving to get to her feet.
I frown and reach out a hand to stop her. “What?”
“The mast,” she repeats, urgency in her voice. “That’s it. That’s how.”
Her fingers are at the thick cotton rope hanging loosely around the waist of her robe, and she tugs at it to free it of the loops.
She shoves the rope toward me. “Tie them,” she says. “Like before. On the mast. Tie them.”
My stomach drops.
“Go on. Please. Like when we were on the mast and our wings were tied,” she insists, gesturing to her back. “Tie my wings. They won’t move then. They can’t save me.”
Her wings twitch, feathers shuddering as if they can hear her thoughts.
“They keep saving me,” she snaps, voice splintering. “Every time I jump. Every time I try, they appear. I don’t want them to.”
I stare at the thick rope in my hands.
Then at the wings I would trade my soul for.
The irony is almost laughable.
Silver’s voice echoes in my head, low and patient, from earlier tonight.
“Your wings will save you on instinct, Scar. They won’t ask your permission.”
He’d stood on the edge of his roof and asked me to trust him.
Asked me to jump. For the hundredth time this week.
Then promised he’d catch me if I didn’t catch myself.
And I hadn’t been able to do it.
Fear had rooted me in place. My head betraying me even as my heart screamed at me to leap.
Now this girl is begging me to incapacitate the very thing Silver says is made to save our kinds.
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I say quietly.
“I do,” she insists. “Tie them. Please.”
Her eyes are wild now, desperate and hollow all at once.
“I can’t die,” she whispers, voice breaking. “They won’t let me.”
She presses the rope into my hands harder.
“Please. Just tie them and you can go.”
My chest aches.
She has no idea what she’s asking. Who she’s asking.
Because I, of all people, am the worst to ask. I would give anything to have wings that chose me the way hers choose her.
I look at the rope.
At her trembling fingers.
At the makeshift noose around her throat.
At the feathers quivering behind her back, unwilling to let her go.
I close my hand around the rope. “Tell me why, the truth of it, and I’ll think about it,” I say, my voice steadier than I feel.
She shakes her head, but I see something I recognize in her eyes.
Shame.
I shift closer, slow and careful, like she might shatter or scarper if I move too fast.
“Sit with me,” I say, moving us both down to settle on a step. She goes along with it, so I start with an easier question. “What’s your name?”
“Nyrielle,” she says, fiddling and pulling at her sleeves.
One of the sleeves lifts up her arm enough that I see the flash of something.
A tattoo.
Red raw and still healing.
“That looks fresh,” I say, moving to lift her sleeve so I can get a better look, but she flinches away.
It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen enough.
It’s a sigil, like the ones decorating some of the walls in Vulcaris and plenty of the cadets and workers around here.
Several of the designs, the ones I recognize, denote each of the deadly sins. This is one of those I don’t recognize.
A circular band with bars and chains going through it.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the sigil of chastity. Before here, and the academy, I lived in Chastitas. I figured the tattoo would remind me of home.”
Figured? So it hadn’t worked?
“You miss home?”
Most nephilim I’ve met prefer the Iron Isle to their past lives. Why does she hate it here? And why does she so badly want to end it all?
She shakes her head. “No. I don’t. Miss home, I mean. That’s not why I got the tattoo. It’s more of a reminder of where I’m from.” Her voice lowers, softer and quieter now. “I was actually going to get something from here, to symbolize how far I’ve come.”
I frown. “I don’t understand, Nyrielle. Why would you get a tattoo, have plans for more, and then suddenly decide you’re done with this world? No offence, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“Because everything changed. He changed everything.”
“Who?” I lean closer.
“The man who gave me this tattoo. He ruined me.”
My frown deepens. “How so?”
She takes a measured breath, eyes cast down. “He took something from me. The very thing people like me who grew up in Chastitas value over everything else.”
I swallow, because I know the regions of Virtus far better than those of Scelus, and I know she can only be talking about one thing.
Her virginity.
My fingers curl into fists. “When you say took…”
She nods.
I wrap an arm around her, hugging her tightly to me and we sit in silence for what feels like an eternity.
“He made me some drinks to numb the pain of the tattoo,” she eventually says, as though she’s thought about it and decided to trust me.
“But when he’d finished it, he made another.
Something different to the other drinks.
Something so strong it made me burn with need.
Need for him where I hadn’t felt any while he’d tattooed me.
” Tears begin to fall from her eyes. “When he led me through to his quarters…”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, not needing her to tell me the rest. Because inside, I’m burning up too, but in a very different way.
Murder. Theft. Rape.
Unrepentable.
There’s one inside this building right now, and as much as I hope I’m wrong, I have a good idea of who it is.
My stomach twists.
Unfortunately for him, there’s only one way I know how to deal with an Unrepentable.