“No,” I say between gasps of breath, my magic still tingling as it waits for my command. I swallow it down, willing it to dissipate as I try to focus on the gray stone beneath my feet. The cool temperature in the air. Anything to ground mehere.
“Someone did.” It’s spoken quietly, but there is nothing soft about the words. I tilt my head up to look at her, finding her gaze locked on my arm. “You’re bleeding.”
Looking down, I gasp at the blood seeping past the gauze, the dark blue color now staining the tunic. Myla closes the distance between us again, and I straighten as her smoky vanilla scent invades my next inhale. My shoulders press back against the wall as Myla reaches for the collar of the tunic. “What are—”
She pulls until the fabric rips, just enough for it to expose my shoulder and then the bandages that cover my upper arm. They’ve loosened from our training, revealing the jagged skin of the gashes between each strip.
Her chest rises with a deep inhale before her eyes snap to mine, and the look there freezes me in place. “Aria,” she says, her voice tinged with a rage I don’t quite understand. “Who did this to you?”
Chapter Ninety-Seven: Aria
Shesaysmynameagain, letting go of the tunic to wrap her fingers gently around my arm beneath the gashes. Her touch is gentle, opposite to the way her tone could cut glass. “Who hurt you?”
“Just another siren,” I answer, air growing thin under the scrutiny of her stare. “I’m fine.”
“Fine,” she repeats slowly, eyes narrowing when I slip away from her.
She lets me go easily but pivots to follow as I make my way to the other side of the cavern to sit on one of the larger rocks. Pulling my injured arm out through the ripped collar, I begin to carefully unwrap the gauze. While my quicker healing abilities have stitched the smaller stretches of separated skin back together already, the thicker parts where Lore’s claws dug into me have reopened enough for blood to slowly ooze out. But before I can dab at it, the old gauze is ripped from my hand as Myla squats down in front of me.
“You should have told me you were injured.” Reaching into an inner pocket of her vest, she pulls out a white piece of cloth that’s folded neatly into a small square.
“I didn’t think you would care.” I watch as she shakes the cloth out to make it larger before ripping it into two long strips. “What are you doing?”
“Do sirens normally attack each other like this?” she asks, ignoring both my statement and question. “Hold your arm out.” When I hesitate, her eyes meet mine. There is always a small bit of fear that rises when I have Myla’s full attention on me, but it’s usually because she regards me with either utter fury or disdain. As we stare at each other in the shadowed sunlight of the cavern, the look she gives me is different from any other I’ve seen before. It isn’t exactly soft, as I don’t think I could ever call any part of Myla that, but it toes the line of being…tender. “Look, if you don’t want me to touch you, that is fine. But you should staunch the bleeding with clean cloths so that we can continue with our lessons.”
Right.Maybe she is concerned, but it has nothing to do withme. It is concern that our deal might be affected if she doesn’t help. I lift my arm abruptly and immediately regret it, a breath hissing out between clenched teeth. Myla’s stare lingers as she watches me, her mouth opening like she might say something before she thinks better of it and looks at the marks on my arm.
The silence that stretches between us is stifling, and to keep my stare from wandering over her features like earlier, I answer her previous question while picking at the fabric of my tunic with my free hand. “Sirens can be vicious creatures—as you’ve repeatedly pointed out. Like any other being, there can be disagreements that lead to fights.”
“And what was the cause of your fight?” she asks, laying one of the strips of cloth over my thigh and wrapping the other around the gashes.
I sigh, unsure of how to word what happened with Lore. “The female that attacked me wanted something that was no longer hers to have, and she got mad when I told her ‘no.’”
Myla’s fingers suspend in the air between us at my words, but only for a moment before she continues wrapping the cloth around my arm. Her closeness, the way she doesn’t respond with more than a slight furrow of her brows, leaves me unsettled. I begin to ramble.
“She wouldn’t have gone far enough to kill me, if that’s what you’re worried about. Lore is possessive about the things she believes she owns, and I’ve always given in to what she wants. So this was just…” I trail off, unsure of what to say. Lore had neverattackedme like that before, but I had never given her a reason to think she wasn’t in control. I had never tested the boundaries of that possession before. How can I say with any bit of confidence that I know how she would react?
I’m so lost in my own back and forth in my head that I don’t realize Myla has stopped until she resumes moving again. Glancing at her from the corner of my eye, I take in her tight expression. Any emotion I thought I might have seen earlier is hidden behind her familiar mask of contempt, and I can’t help the way a pit opens inside of my stomach because of it.
She reaches for the second piece of cloth but hesitates, her gaze stuck on where it lays on my thigh. “In my kingdom, thebalance of power leans starkly to one side. While females of all stations and nobility are treated asless thancompared to their male counterparts, it is even more drastic in the capital. They are brutalized there.” She picks up the second strip and begins to bind it around my arm, her movements slow. “The word ‘no’ has no meaning to those in power, and even if it did, it is weightless when said by a female. There are those who believe they have the right to claim someone else’s autonomy. That it is theirs to do whatever they please with. And there is no justice given to the ones they harm.”
My stomach churns, a chord striking too close to home. Myla is royalty, but she speaks as if she understands intimately what it is to have free will stripped from her. I have always viewed her as someone impenetrable, untouchable. Even with the bits of information Navin had given me about her, I never believed Myla was anything other than a force to be reckoned with. But what if I was wrong? What if the anger—the toughness and that willful darkness that simmers beneath the surface—wasn’t hers because she chose them but because she was forced tobecomethem? What had she said to me before? Just because what is inside of us is dark doesn’t mean that it holds less value than something light.I hadn’t known what she meant at the time, hadn’t truly understood it. Was she saying that to me because she wanted to comfort me as I told her about my life in the Siren Queendom? Or were they words she wished someone would’ve said to her? My fingers slowly brush against her forearm, her gaze snapping to the contact.
“Is there anyone who can help them?”
“There is a vigilante known as the Shadow,” she answers, a roughness to her voice. She ties the ends of the cloth off, letting her fingers linger as one of them brushes gently over the curls gathered at my shoulder. “They hunt down those who harm others and do so without mercy. To be caught by the Shadow isto be tormented. It is a fate worse than death. Worse than being burned alive by dragons.” She pinches the ruby-red strands between her forefinger and thumb, dragging the latter over them as she tilts her head to the side and smirks. “Those in power are frightened by the Shadow. By what they represent.”
My heart flutters beneath my ribs. “And what do they represent?”
“A threat to the status quo.” Her eyes meet mine then, the look sending a shiver down my spine. “The Shadow reminds them that they are not infallible. The king and nobles only thrive when everyone else believes that they cannot fight back, when they are hopeless. I think the Shadow represents a kink in that power, and sometimes, that’s all it takes for people to make a stand of their own.”
I had once thought that a single person wasn’t enough to enact change. That their actions would be only a single drop in the current. I realize now that my way of thinking was a crutch. If I tried to stand up to my mother, to Allegra, to Nia and Lore, I could fail. By accepting their cruelty over me, by not acting at all in defiance of them, I wasn’t risking anything. But I wasn’t living either. So much of my life has been wasted in the shadows of my own fear instead of being spent doing something thatmatters.
Fingers wrap around my chin, warm and gentle, as Myla draws the gaze I had let drop back up to her. “Your ‘no’ should have been enough.”
A shaky breath passes from my parted lips, my stomach dipping when her eyes focus on them. “If only there was a vigilante to protect me,” I tease.
I’m rewarded with a flicker of a smile before she stands, walking back to the center of the platform. I mourn the warmth she takes with her. “You don’t need someone like the Shadow to rescue you, Little Siren.” Picking up my dagger, she flips it in the air and catches the blade between her fingertips, holding thehilt out in my direction. “Not when you can learn how to rescue yourself.”
