Chapter 51b
CHAPTER
Sabine
Azrian’s lips on hers felt like fire and storm all at once.
She drank him in, greedy, desperate for what she’d spent months only dreaming.
For a suspended moment, there was only sensation.
His tongue, coaxing her mouth open. The heat of his thigh pressed between her legs.
His faint groans when she made a sound, low and involuntary, into his mouth.
Any fantasy her imagination might’ve conjured paled in comparison to the real thing.
The thought arrived like a knife between the ribs.
Real .
Was any of this truly real? This was compulsion. Old magic, written into her bones and woven into the marrow of her soul.
Sabine wrenched herself back. She felt the loss like a wound, raw and immediate. The distance between them was only inches, but it might as well have been an ocean.
Hurt flashed in Azrian’s eyes. It took everything she had not to bridge the distance between them and take him in her arms again. “Did I—”
A noise outside her window interrupted him. It was not so much loud as wrong, a staccato crack that didn’t match the rhythm of the night.Then another report shattered the air, this time closer, a percussive echo that sent a shudder through the glass panes.
For one breathless instant, they were frozen in place.
Then she found herself flat against the cold plaster of the wall.
Azrian covered her mouth. His other swept the air in a quick knot.
With a flick of his affinity, he killed every candle in the room.
The sudden darkness rang with the memory of their shared heat.
They listened.
A split second later, the shuddering percussion struck again. The synchronized crash of boots. It vibrated through the floorboards, into the bones of the house itself.
Sabine’s lungs contracted. Azrian released her mouth, but his grip shifted to her shoulder, anchoring her as he crossed to the window.
He peered through a sliver in the drapes, then pressed his back to the wall.
“They’ve brought a full detachment. If I say run, you run. Find Caelen. Do not stop for anything.”
“I’m not leaving you,” she growled, hating the way her breath shivered.
Azrian bent his forehead to hers. “You are the only thing in this world I cannot bear to lose,” he said, and for once, the words held no armor.
She nearly didn’t recognize him, stripped of all artifice.
She desperately wanted to reply, to tell him she couldn’t survive losing him either.
Even if it was just a trick of their soulmark magic.
But the world crashed in before she could.
A shouted command echoed in the corridor, followed by hurried footsteps.
Azrian strode to the door. Crouched low. Pressed his ear to the seam. Sabine’s hands trembled from the adrenaline. She slid to the floor and hid behind the chaise. Her breaths grew shallow, but she forced herself to count them anyway.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
She would not let panic grip her now, when a clear mind mattered most.
The sounds outside grew sharper: a chorus of boots, muffled voices, then the thin, slicing wail of someone in real pain. Sabine tried to steady her breathing. Counted five more.
Steps grew closer. Closer. Closer.
Then, stopped.
The handle twisted. Azrian stepped in front of Sabine. The door cracked open. He raised his hands, ready to weave.
But the figures that walked in were not the Emperor’s guards.
It was a hooded man, cloaked in midnight velvet. “Do not speak,” the man whispered. “You must come now.”
Sabine had heard the man’s voice before, cultured and even, with a slight drawl. Could it have been…
The door opened wider, and a shaft of hallway light revealed not only the hooded shape, but Lady Delarine herself, hair streaming loose for the first time in Sabine’s memory.
The hooded man drew back his cowl. Beneath, his scalp was shaved to a fine stubble, a smudge of ash marked the center of his brow, and one pale and one dark eye stared back at her in the dim light.
She’d definitely met this man before. “You’re the Child from—”
“Call me Oris,” the Child interrupted her.
So he’d been the man in Lady Delarine’s office the night before her blood vow? But…
Lady Delarine cut through. “There is no time for formal introductions. You must both come with us.”
Sabine opened her mouth, but Lady Delarine forestalled her. “Now, child.”
Behind them, the crash of boots grew louder. Sabine glanced over her shoulder at Azrian. His attention was fixed on the advancing threat. His own threads coiled around his hands in a subtle, hungry shimmer.
Lady Delarine strode to the wardrobe and, with a practiced motion, swept aside the row of velvet gowns.
She pressed her palm against the back panel, and a seam appeared before it split open with a sigh.
The hidden door revealed a narrow staircase spiraling down into complete darkness.
The hooded man cupped his hands together, gathering threads that flared like sparks, and wove them into a lattice, then pressed it to the top of the steps.
A dull, red glow unfurled along the floor, lighting their way in a path of embers.
The air was close and hot, scented with old dust and the mineral tang of ancient stone.
Sabine’s lungs protested, but she pressed forward
Above her, the crash of boots. Shouts of her name. The staccato shriek of glass shattering.
She did not look back.
The corridor spiraled downward, deeper than Sabine thought possible. At every turn, Oris checked for pursuit, then gestured them on, never speaking. The walls grew damp, then cold, then so cold that Sabine’s breath came in clouds.
Finally, the passage opened into the cellar. The group came to a halt, and Oris turned to Lady Delarine.
“Take them back to the Temple,” the Duchess ordered. “Protect them with your life, if you must.”
She made to turn, but before she could leave, Sabine grabbed her wrist. “Wait. Tell me what’s going on.”
Lady Delarine didn’t turn back. “There is no time for explanations, child.”
“Then we will all die here. Because I’m not leaving without one.”
Finally, the Duchess faced her. “I told you I was plucked from Keshira to marry the Duke of Braythar. What I did not mention,”—she pinched off her left glove at the fingertips, sliding it off.
There, on the back of her hand, lay a soulmark, faded by time—“is that they didn’t only take me from my home; they also took me from my soulmate.
Kept us from ever bonding, forced me into a blood vow with another. It was pure torture.”
She turned to Oris. They held each other’s gazes. “So I sought out the Children. Funded them. Helped them rebuild their ranks. Provided them with the match they would light to spark the revolution.”
Sabine’s knees nearly buckled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There was no safety in knowing,” Lady Delarine said, grave with a lifetime’s lies. “There is only the work. And now, that work is yours.”
Sabine wanted to rage, or weep, or throw herself at the Duchess’s feet in gratitude or fury, but the moment was stolen by the renewed thunder of boots.
Oris gestured again, more urgently this time. “We must go.”
Lady Delarine nodded. “I shall remain behind, continue to play my role.” She slid back her glove, concealing yet again her largest heartbreak. “You will need allies in the Gilt. Go, now.”
She drew Sabine into an embrace, short but fierce. Then she turned to Azrian, and to Sabine’s shock, offered him her hand. He took it, and for a moment, the world seemed to steady. Then they were leaving the Duchess behind, rushing toward the loading dock.
The passage sloped steeply, the ancient stone slick with condensation.
Her slippers, never meant for more than parlor floors, slid twice before Azrian steadied her with a grip at her elbow.
Oris’s bare feet made no sound. They moved at a pace just shy of panic, the only illumination a flame cupped in the Child’s hand, neither wholly orange nor blue.
Azrian’s hand hovered near the small of Sabine’s back, all coiled tension.
“Over there!” a guard screamed.
The passage erupted into chaos. Sabine was yanked forward by Azrian even as Oris raised a hand behind them, the flame in his palm blazing into a sheet of white heat.
Guards, less than ten yards away, recoiled.
One staggered, clutching his face and screaming.
The air reeked of scorched wool and flesh.
Sabine’s heart hammered a syncopation against her ribs.
They ran. The corridor angled sharply, then spat them out into the black canal-side night.
The water below was glass, reflecting the torches and the moon, but the alleys above were a snarl of bridges and staircases, each a potential dead end.
Oris led them at a breakneck pace, bare feet slapping the cobbles.
Azrian matched the rhythm, his hand locked in hers.
She let herself be pulled forward, but already her thoughts gnawed at the angles for an exit.
Behind them, voices howled commands. Sabine’s ears rang with the racket of pursuit. She risked a glance back and saw but a blur of dove grey and silvered breastplates. Oris led them into a narrower alley, so cramped the walls brushed Sabine’s shoulders.
“Down!” he hissed, and the three of them dropped to a crouch just as a volley of ice shards shattered overhead.
The alley twisted. Dead-ended at a canal. Oris leapt. Cleared the gap to a floating barge lashed to the quay. Azrian followed. He turned to catch Sabine as she skidded down the embankment. The three of them huddled behind a stack of empty wine barrels.
Shouts of the guards echoed from the mouth of the alley. They would be trapped here in moments. Above them, the city’s upper terraces glimmered with a million windows, indifferent to the violence below. Sabine’s slippers were a ruin, her soles cut and bleeding, but she pushed herself onward.