44. Chapter 44
AMARIA
Those idiotic roses were still blooming when I finally broke.
One second I was standing at my window watching the last of the golden light pool across petals he'd grown with her hands in his—and the next I was running.
My door. The hallway. The stone beneath my bare feet, cold and biting.
The Suppressor outside my room called for me, scampering after me. Too slow to keep up properly. I didn't hear the words. Just sound. Like a little dog yapping at your heels.
Red petals. Her laugh. His face when the grass turned green—open, unguarded, relieved. Like her touch was the cure and mine was the thing he needed curing from.
I took the servants' stair. Down. My hand scraped the wall for balance and my feet hit each step too hard, too fast, the impact jarring up through my shins. I didn't know where I was going. That wasn't the point. The point was away. The point was not standing in that room for one more second.
I heard Maxx's voice and pounded on the door with my fist. Once. Twice. Hard enough to split skin across my knuckles.
He opened it slightly tipsy, glamour flickering, a playing card stuck to his cheek.
"I'm leaving," I said. "Now. I need you to get me out."
His eyes tracked my face. My bare feet. The blood on my hand.
He pulled the card off his cheek, flicked it into the dark behind him, and said, "Give me thirty minutes, Flameheart."
The door closed. I stood there a moment in the corridor, barefoot, bleeding, my heart slamming against my ribs. Then I turned and started back toward my room, one hand on the wall to steady myself.
I was halfway back to my room when footsteps caught up with me. Serenya—already reading the wreckage written across my posture. She caught my arm. Her grip was iron.
"Amaria. Amaria. How are you going to handle the tether?"
"I don't care."
"You will care when you're screaming on the floor two corridors from—"
"Then find me something that makes it stop."
Her mouth pressed shut. A long breath through her nose. She released my arm and walked in the other direction without another word.
Thirty minutes later, I stood in the shadows of the east corridor with a vial of Wraith Root in my bodice and ten minutes before everything went wrong or right.
The hallway outside my room was quiet. My Suppressor stood at their usual distance—eyeing me warily.
A laundry cart appeared at the far end of the hall.
Maxx pushed it, dressed in servant's livery, his glamour so perfect I almost didn't recognize him. He was whistling—off-key, annoying—and steering the cart with the casual incompetence of someone who'd never done an honest day's work.
The Suppressor's attention shifted.
Maxx's foot caught on nothing. The cart tipped. Linens spilled across the marble floor in a cascade of white fabric.
"Oh, for—sorry, sorry—" He dropped to his knees, gathering towels, making a mess of the mess. "Slippery floors. Very slippery. Someone should really—"
The Suppressor sighed. Stepped forward to help. Turned their back on the alcove behind them.
Dreadscale moved.
No magic. Just a massive arm wrapping around the Suppressor's throat from behind, cutting off air and sound in one brutal motion. The Suppressor's hands clawed at his forearm. Their feet kicked. Then they went limp.
Dreadscale lifted the unconscious body like it weighed nothing, bored. He didn't need an escape plan—the King's walls meant nothing to him. He could have flown free days ago. But he was still here, stuffing Suppressors into laundry carts for me.
I didn't deserve that kind of loyalty.
They buried the body under towels and wheeled the whole thing into a linen closet.
The dampening field lifted.
My magic rushed back—like blood returning to a dead limb. Maxx's glamour gathered, sharpened, and then became solidified enough to touch.
"Ten minutes," he said. "Maybe fifteen before someone notices they're missing. Let’s go."
His glamour rippled across my features, reshaping me into a servant no one would look at twice. He set a second glamour in the window seat—me, or the illusion of me, reading a book with my back to the door.
"It'll hold for an hour. Anyone who glances in will see you sulking."
I pulled the Wraith Root from my bodice. Serenya had brought it to me an hour ago, her mouth a hard line. "Three drops for surface pain. The whole vial silences the tether completely." She'd hesitated. "But when it wears off, everything comes back at once. All of it."
Her fingers lingered on the vial when she passed it over, grief settling into her expression.
"Be careful with him," she'd said quietly. Not with the Root. With him.
I ignored her. I'd be on a ship by then. That was the plan, anyway.
I uncorked the vial. The smell hit first—earthy, bitter, like rotting soil and copper. I tipped it back and swallowed everything.
For a moment, nothing.
Then silence.
The tether went dead. The constant awareness of Eryndor—his location, his emotions, the phantom pressure of his presence—vanished.
I gasped.
This is what it feels like to be alone.
I'd forgotten. In all the weeks of being bound to him, I'd forgotten what it felt like to live inside my own body without company, without another soul intertwined with mine.
It felt both terrifying and wonderful.
The laundry chutes were in the servants' wing.
We moved through back corridors and narrow staircases, avoiding the main halls where courtiers and guards might notice three people who didn't belong. Maxx's glamour held—servants nodded at us, stepped aside, didn't look twice.
The chute entrance was hidden on the lower levels. A square of darkness that dropped into nothing, ending somewhere near the loading docks where carts waited to haul dirty linens to the river for washing.
"I'll go first," Maxx said. He peered into the blackness. "If I scream, don't follow."
He didn't scream.
Serenya went next, clutching her satchel with her beloved Codex, and disappeared into the dark with a muffled yelp.
I looked back the way we'd come. Empty corridor. Flickering torchlight. No alarms.
Almost there.
I jumped.
The landing was softer than expected.
I crashed into a pile of dirty linens—silk and cotton and something that smelled aggressively of lavender perfume. Maxx was already climbing out of the cart, helping Serenya to her feet.
"Loading dock's through there." He pointed toward a distant square of grey light. "Carts leave every fifteen minutes. We hide in one, ride it out the gate, drop into the river before they reach the washing station."
We buried ourselves in the linens.
The cart started moving.
I lay in the darkness, surrounded by the smell of sweat and perfume and the musty dampness of dirty fabric, and let myself believe it was working. The Wraith Root hummed through my veins, keeping the tether silent, keeping me invisible to the male who could track me by pain alone.
Almost out. Almost free.
The cart stopped.
Voices. Boots on stone. The creak of wooden wheels halting.
I held my breath.
Then the linens ripped away.
Eryndor stood over the cart, and he looked wrecked.
His skin had turned sallow. Sweat soaked through his shirt, plastering the fabric to his chest. He was leaning against the cart's wheel like it was the only thing keeping him upright, his breath coming in shallow gasps, his hands shaking.
He'd tracked me. Through the agony I couldn't feel. Followed the pull of his own torture like a compass pointing toward suffering.
"Let me go." My voice came out hoarse. "I'm almost out."
"Almost out?" He laughed—a manic edge to it. "An hour." Blood on his lip. Hands white-knuckled on the cart. "You ran. The tether tried to rip me in half. And you felt nothing."
"That's not my problem."
"No. It wouldn't be."
He wiped blood from his upper lip, his eyes dropping to my collar. Before I could react, he snatched the vial tucked inside my wrap. Uncorked it. Sniffed.
"Wraith Root." He seethed. "Really, Amaria?"
He let the empty vial drop to the cobblestones.
"The bond doesn't disappear because you drug yourself. It just finds somewhere else to go." His voice cracked. "Who do you think was feeling that pain you displaced?"
The words hit but I didn't let them settle.
"Eryndor," Maxx hissed from the darkness of the cart. "Guards. Ten seconds."
Eryndor didn't look at him. He gripped the edge of the cart, knuckles white, and nodded toward the open gate.
"Look."
I looked.
The loading dock opened onto a courtyard. Carts lined up. And at the checkpoint—guards with spears.
They weren't just searching. They were stabbing.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
A spear drove through the center of the cart ahead of us. Through the linen pile. In the same spot Serenya was curled in ours.
The air locked in my throat.
Serenya. That spear would have gone through Serenya.
"I stopped the cart," Eryndor rasped, "because I knew you wouldn't check. You were too busy running to look at the ground."
He leaned in, his voice dropping in lethal anger.
"Serenya would have followed you onto that spear. Is that the kind of freedom you wanted?"
I couldn't speak. The image was stuck in my head—that spear punching through linen, through Serenya's soft body, because I'd been counting steps to the harbor instead of watching for threats.
Serenya, who'd always held me when the darkness took over.
Who'd handed me the Wraith Root with grief in her touch and said be careful with him when she should have said be careful with me.
Who'd climbed into that cart because I asked her to, the same way she'd followed me into the Dead Zone, the same way she'd followed me into this palace—not because she believed in the plan, but because she believed in me.
And I'd aimed her at a spear.
I am the Rupture. The words tasted different now. And I do not bow to the King. No. I just get the people who love me killed while I'm busy being brave.
"Hey!" A shout from the gate. "You there!"
The guards were turning toward us. Exposed.
Maxx shifted, ready to fight.
"Don't," Eryndor snapped. He shoved the cart backward, hard. "Take the service lift to the kitchens. Blend in. If you're seen, you're dead."
"What about—" Serenya started.
"Go!"
Maxx didn't hesitate. He wheeled the cart into the shadows just as heavy boots echoed on stone.
Eryndor grabbed my arm.
"I'm the distraction."
He yanked me into the harsh light of the loading dock, putting his body between me and the retreating cart.
"Your Highness." The guard's spear lowered. "We heard there was a commotion in the corridor."
Eryndor stood tall, though tremors ran through his frame—the pain he was still holding for me. His voice came out bored. Imperial.
"A servant lost their way. I was retrieving my wayward guest."
He looked down at me. The mask was perfect, cold and unreadable, but his eyes were burning.
"We are returning to our quarters. Do not disturb us."
The guard bowed. "Of course, Your Highness."
Eryndor turned, dragging me back toward the stairs. Back toward the cage.
Behind us, the shadows were empty. Maxx and Serenya were gone.
Because of him. Not me.
Dreadscale would be waiting for them. I knew it without knowing how—the same way I knew he'd stationed himself somewhere between the service lift and the kitchens the moment the plan went live.
Not because anyone had asked him to. Because Serenya was in that cart, and Maxx was the one pushing it, and Dreadscale did not leave the things he'd chosen to protect unwatched.
He pushed me into the stairwell. The heavy door clanged shut, cutting off the light. The moment we were alone, he slumped against the wall, the prince falling away. He slid down until he hit the steps, grunting.
"You drugged yourself." He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Gods, Amaria."
I stood over him. My escape plan in ruins. My best friend alive only because he'd been paying attention when I wasn't.
The Wraith Root was still humming in my veins. Still keeping me numb.
I couldn't feel what I'd done to him. I could only see it—the grey skin, the blood drying on his lip, his trembling hands.
He'd walked through fire for an hour while I felt nothing.
He'd stopped a cart I would have driven straight into a checkpoint.
He'd played the prince so my friends could disappear into the shadows.
And I'd called it not my problem.
"Next time you want to leave..." He wasn't looking at me. "Have the courage to feel it."
I opened my mouth to try and defend myself. To say I hadn't known, that I was trying to save us, that the plan would have worked if—
Nothing came out. Because the plan wouldn't have worked. The plan ended with a spear through Serenya's chest and me on a ship feeling nothing about it.
The Wraith Root was still humming. Still keeping me numb. An hour ago, the silence had tasted like freedom. Now it just tasted like the thing that almost got her killed.