Page 87 of Heart of Night
“You could have trusted me to get myself out. I wouldn’t have to sneak back into this fucking shithole had you not gotten yourself trapped.” She’s speaking to both Tori Astorian and Myron now, even when her eyes never stray from her mate. “Erina could have never bullied Ayna had you not gotten yourself caught and imprisoned and strung up on a fucking torture table.” There are tears in her voice—tears of anger—but she wipes them away with the back of Astorian’s palm as she leans her face against his hand.
“You’d have done the same.” It’s a weak defense, but I’ve known Clio long enough to be convinced he’s right.
“I wouldn’t have gotten myself caught.”
Astorian raises a brow. “Then why did I have to come looking for you in a foreign realm and find you in a servant’s uniform.”
Clio kisses his hands over and over again like that alone will set him free, will heal him and un-break him where he’s obviously broken in so many places he struggles to keep upright.
“Your brother would have had my head if I’d let anything happen to you.”
“Just as he would have mine if anything happened to you,” Clio retorts with a smile, tears streaming down her face.”
“Much as I hate to break up the reunion,” Kaira interrupts, “we need to get out of here before anyone can have anyone’s head.”
“You completely missed the point, Kaira.” Myron stalks closer, eyes darting back to Silas every other step until he stands right next to Clio.
“Find one, find both,” he says to Astorian, who inclines his head at him, deep respect shining in his unusually reddish-brown eyes. I can’t see much else of his features other than that; beneath layers of blood and grime, they must be as flawless as any other fairy’s. His longish hair is tangled and knotted, caked with blood, and shaped into stiff tresses that could be of any color beneath the dirt. The cuts and bruises on his bare chest seem older than those on Silas’s skin, and thank the Guardians that at least one of them is awake and coherent.
“Find one, find both,” Astorian echoes, and a deep understanding seems to pass between the two males that only those who’ve shared a lifetime—or deep trauma—can ever achieve.
I promise myself that I’ll ask Myron to tell me the whole story once we’re out of here and safe, but first we need to get the others out and actually survive.
I wish, for once, things were easy.
Forty-Two
Myron
Every muscle in my body is stretched taut as I hold myself in place while Astorian and Clio have their moment. A few breaths—I can grant them that before I lose my patience. We need to get him and Silas to safety before figuring out if there is anything left of Royad to save.
My chest hurts at the thought of being too late. Two hours of torture is a lifetime of pain. Two hours without intending to let the person survive is what I imagine Hel’s realm to look like if he decides to toss you into his punishing fires.
“The bars are still painted in that bitch of a drug.” Astorian nods at the steel separating him from his mate, his hands firmly wrapping hers despite the sword in her grasp. Even in this most heart-wrenching of moments, she hasn’t let go of her weapon, that’s how much of a warrior she is.
I bite back a curse, debating the options we have. “So, we can’t rip them out with our hands.”
“Not that you’d ever be strong enough, Crow,” Astorian retorts, but there’s no contempt in his eyes now. All I see is the gratitude of a male not to be forgotten and left to die. “But I’d suggest you not give up that magic of yours in a feeble attempt at breaking those bars.”
I search the cell for a weakness as I notice Ayna scan the room and draw a string of water from the bucket in the corner of my empty cell where it sits just out of reach for Astorian as if to taunt him. They never gave me a full bucket like that—not to drink or to wash. Just the bare minimum to survive and that was laced with the drug. Damn those humans.
It’s almost too late when I realize what Ayna intends to do by slinging the water around a bar, and my hand lands on her shoulder, my magic flinging out to cut off the water from her reach a beat before it touches the bars. “You don’t know if the touch of your magic might have the same results as your physical touch.” Who knows what unholy ways Ephegos and Erina invented to render our powers useless? We haven’t learned nearly enough about it and have too much to lose to simply risk it.
Ayna’s wide eyes inform me she didn’t think through the potential consequences of throwing our magic at bars treated with a drug that takes said magic away.
“We can’t afford to lose our magic.” It’s Kaira who agrees first, even when her own powers are minuscule compared to the vastness of Clio’s and my own untested ocean of power that I have yet to fully get under control. And definitely not Ayna’s. It’s all that stands between her and freedom once I send her out of here with Silas and Astorian.
“You need to focus on what surrounds the bars.” Astorian drags his hands back through the fence, reluctantly stepping away from his mate and knocking on the wall at the edge of his cell.
By Shaelak, he is about to fall over if he doesn’t get healed. But first, we need to get him out.
“I could melt the rocks around the bars if I had my powers. Wouldn’t be the first time.” He exchanges a look with Clio that’s so full of history that my chest aches all over again.
“Maybe I could wash them out with water,” Ayna offers, her magic grasping the water that’s now a puddle on the floor and forming it into a string once more.
Or I could simply blast the wall out altogether, but I don’t say that since it won’t help our secrecy, and if that’s gone, they might not prolong Royad’s suffering and shove him right to Hel’s doorstep instead. My hands are shaking as I watch Ayna pit her magic against the side of the stone, etching little grooves into the surface with the water she wields, but it’s too slow, and every time the water comes close to touching a bar, my heart stops all over again.
“Let me help.” It’s the most diplomatic way I can manage to break it to her that she’s not strong enough to get him out—not yet. She will once she figures out what she can do with those Crow powers that should set in at some point if Shaelak was truly gracious to her.