Chapter 28
CHAPTER
No!” Vaasa cried.
“Quiet,” Roman commanded in her ear. He tugged on her body and hauled her away from the cell. Feet slipping on the slick floors, Vaasa fought as he dragged her down the corridor, kicking her legs like a toddler. “Get ahold of yourself!”
Everything she had just seen played in her mind, wicked and strong and seemingly unending. Over and over, the vision swirled.
Her mother had loved Ozik, enough to give him access to her power. And he had murdered her in cold blood. That dark power consumed him—it must have fed on Vena’s magic the way it now fed on Vaasa’s.
Their escape hinged on her finding the necklace; she was certain. Dominik had hidden it in their mother’s sarcophagus. It was a place she could gain entry to.
“Promise me you’ll make sure she’s okay,” Vaasa begged.
“I promise,” Roman swore. “But we need to go, now.”
Vaasa’s instinct snapped into motion. She forced her body to turn and run, and then Roman sprinted behind her into the stairwell. Something sounded from down the stairs, and Roman froze. Guards. “Run,” he told her. “We can’t be here.”
Wrapping his hand around hers, Roman broke into a sprint, and Vaasa forced her feet to move.
They took the stairs to the fourth floor, Roman smoothly inserting the key and hauling them through the door.
It took only two steps until Roman pressed his back against the wall, waiting and listening.
Vaasa hoped she would hear the people on the stairs open and close a door, leaving the stairwell empty so they could escape.
Vaasa breathed in. Out. Roman worked on a door next to them, sticking keys in and frantically trying to turn the lock.
The footsteps sounded on their level, and Vaasa knew the people were coming through the door immediately in front of them.
Roman must have figured that out, too, because he unlocked the latch to what Vaasa assumed was a supply closet next to them.
He pulled her unceremoniously through it, landing them in a room with little to no light.
Immediately, she registered that the space around her was larger than any supply closet could be.
She didn’t know where they’d gone. She could hardly focus on the tight grip Roman kept on her hand.
She needed time to consider what she would say to him, how she would frame what she’d seen.
Darkness covered every inch of space around them.
Footsteps sounded outside the door. They came closer and closer.
And then they passed, going farther down the hall until Vaasa couldn’t hear them anymore.
Neither she nor Roman dared to speak. The silence was an echo onto itself, as daunting as the approaching footsteps had been.
“What just happened?” Roman finally whispered into the night.
Vaasa shook her head in confusion, her magic riling when she couldn’t see or escape. She hadn’t come upon an explanation yet, a way to twist this. Her heart pounded mercilessly in her chest. Her pulse thrummed in her own mind.
“Vaasa,” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” she hissed through her teeth.
“You’re lying,” Roman snarled. He stepped into her space, his body looming close enough that she could see the outline of his once-comely features.
Their breath mingled. Something in his eyes darkened as he looked upon her.
As questions furrowed his brow. Distrust wove into the harsh pull of his mouth.
“I watched it, Vaasa. I watched what that magic did to you—yet you live. Who is Veragi?”
Vaasa’s throat threatened to close, a lump sitting inside it at hearing the goddess’s name. She had taken Amalie over, had shown those images to Vaasa through Amalie. Emotions filled Vaasa to the point of bursting—Roman’s, hers. Her magic needed escape. “I don’t know,” she swore.
Roman raised his voice. “Honesty, Vaasa. You promised me honesty!”
She covered his mouth with her hands. “Be quiet!”
Silence coursed between them, the uncomfortable kind that set her on edge. This silence was deafening. It twisted her fear and amplified it.
She looked past his shoulder, her eyes having adjusted to the darkness, and made out the shape of a table. Vaasa’s hands dropped from Roman’s mouth, and she stepped past him, more of the room becoming identifiable.
There were iron chains attached to the wooden table, and a small counter space at the back of the room.
Vaasa crossed to it, looking at sharp tools crafted of metal and wood.
Torture devices. Vaasa turned away with her hand over her mouth.
She faced the center table and inspected those heavy iron chains.
Reaching out tentatively, she touched them.
The iron hummed on her fingertips, and she pulled away, recognizing the material as the same one Lord Vlacik had confined her in. Dread pooled low in her stomach. She knew this room.
She turned to Roman, who watched her closely, his eyes inspecting her in the darkness.
He had the key.
Bile rose in her throat. Water, water, water, Vaasa thought to herself.
Melisina’s voice filled her mind, a memory from the day she had hidden beneath a table and her coven had crawled under it with her.
Whatever form the magic takes right now, picture it as water.
It is trickling and flowing, slipping back down to its home.
She darted her gaze to the door, but there was no way out. Roman stood in the path. Something deep inside her cracked, a fissure rooted in the past.
He had the key.
“How long were you working for Vlacik?” she whispered.
Roman opened his mouth to speak but then snapped it closed. His fist clenched at his side, and then a hand raked through his hair.
Vaasa dropped her voice to a low demand. “How long?”
She didn’t believe an ounce of the guilt that racked his face. The part he was playing… it was that of the yearning lover. But that wasn’t true. Vaasa didn’t think he loved her at all.
Every moment she had lied to Roman, he had been lying to her.
Roman dropped his arm, and his voice turned sharp. Cruel. A brutal tone lacking any of the warmth she had once known of him. “For about two years, before you concocted some way to have him thrown from a window.”
Shock stole her breath. Her mind worked out the timeline on a wheel. “You were here before I was sent to Mireh. You were here when my parents died.”
He had been in the city before their deaths, and he hadn’t come for her. He hadn’t found a way to see her, to let her know that he was still alive.
“I clawed my way back to this city on a pirate ship,” Roman confessed. “Vlacik was the last connection I had here from my youth. Both of our fathers had died, and he was a lord with enough power to get me the connections I needed to survive here.”
Vaasa wanted to vomit. It wasn’t Ozik who had brought Roman back—it was Vlacik. “You knew what he was doing to me?”
“No,” Roman asserted with a strong step forward.
Vaasa backed up, trying to put as much space between them as she could.
Roman watched the movement and his mouth turned downward.
“I knew what he did to witches. After what I’ve seen, what I’ve been through…
” Roman shook his head. “I take no qualms with it. Whatever your mother passed down to you, it has been excised.”
A prisoner of war. Roman had been in Wrultho under Ton’s reign, had likely seen more brutality than Vaasa could imagine. What had they done to him? Who had this life turned him into? “He tortured people, Roman. Witches are people.”
“Every soldier tortures people, Vaasa. That is a fact of war, which is probably something you should get used to, considering you’re at the core of one.”
“He tortured me,” she whispered.
A small snarl escaped him. “And if I had known that, I would have killed him myself. I don’t know how you orchestrated—”
“I didn’t orchestrate his death!” Vaasa hissed.
“Then what were you doing there at the brothel? What the fuck are you and Ozik doing in the greenhouse every morning?” Roman shook his head in disbelief. “You’re looking at me like you can’t believe I deigned to tell you a lie when mistruths are all you have offered me.”
“You know Ozik is a witch, right? You watched what happened in that stairwell.”
“Of course I do.”
“So only some witches deserve to be tortured?”
Roman released a chuckle. “Ozik deserves a knife through his heart, and if I have anything to say about it, that’s what he’ll get.”
Vaasa narrowed her eyes. “How did you earn your position as lead sentinel?”
Roman crossed his arms. “That was part of Vlacik’s demands. He wanted me close to you.”
It was like a cold rush of water thrown on the back of her neck—of course.
How hadn’t she seen it? It was no accident when he’d found her in that hallway, nor when he returned to the very place she had once spent nights in his arms. He went there not because he wanted to see her, but because he wanted to take advantage of her.
He believed her desperate and lovesick enough to seek him out, to trust him.
He’d been right. She had been moments away from telling him everything, from indulging in that piece of her youth that she so badly wanted to cling to.
The little glimmer of love that had once grown so large in her mind because it had been taken from her, and she’d never been given the chance to leave it first. “You were telling Vlacik things about me? Spying on me for him?”
“Not a single thing that mattered,” Roman swore. “I told you that first night that I am here for you, and that hasn’t changed.”
“Are you one of Sutherland’s men?” she demanded. “Is that how you have access to this room? Is that the pirate you allied with in order to come back here?”
Roman stared at her for a moment, and then crossed his arms. “Yes. I was on a job for him until Vlacik had me reassigned here.”
Vaasa didn’t dare move. Her power jostled to life, risking exposure. Roman uncrossed his arms and stepped toward her, and she had nowhere to go. She stumbled, and her back hit the table.