He raises his hand. I don’t stop him. Lucan brushes his fingertips lightly over the lines at my clavicle. I inhale sharply as a jolt passes through me.
He flinches, withdrawing his hand. “Did I hurt you?” I almost grab his fingers to put them back on me.
“No. I… All the scarring feels a bit strange.” It’s true. It’s also a lie.
The skin around the scar is riddled with dead spots—places I don’t feel anything at all or feel less sharply. Other areas, the tissue mended right. It causes an uncomfortable sensation of disappearing and reappearing touch.
But it’s alsohistouch. It does something to me. Sends a flush underneath my skin. I want him to touch…and keep touching. To run his hand across the scar and underneath my shirt. It’s an urge that I’ve never experienced before, and it’s as thrilling as it is terrifying.
“You can continue,” I manage, wishing I could say the rest. Maybe it’s the hunger making me delusional. Maybe it’s how this whole place feels more desperate by the day.
Lucan’s fingertips glide over my chest, right above my breasts, expanding to make room for his palm. His touch is so searingly hot my lungs ache with every thin, strained breath.
“Did you ever figure out what the light was?” he asks, eyes focused on his hand.
It’s hard to formulate an answer when he’s touching me like this. “No, I didn’t.”
“The light was one of the first things I saw when I came to. I remember it well,” Lucan says softly, lifting his gaze to mine. Ashiver races along my spine. He has yet to pull away.
“Me too,” I say softly.
“You honestly don’t know where it came from? It wasn’t a lie you told the vicar?”
“I…” My brows knit, the day fresher in my mind than it has been in years. “The dragon reached for me, its claw scraping against my chest, and then…light.” I was told later that the light consumed the creature, and it vanished. A feat of Etherlight unlike anything anyone had ever seen—a feat that was described as similar to the legendary Valor. “When I woke up next, I was in the Grand Chapel of Mercy being stitched back together by the renewers under Vicar Darius’s control.”
He nods and shifts his gaze back to my scar. “My consciousness faded in and out, but I was taken alongside you. They noticed me after retrieving you.” Lucan’s fingers press a little more firmly, almost as if he’s trying to touch something within me. “They told me I was alive because of you.”
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t.”
This time, I know it’s not my imagination that we lean in slightly. I want to ask him everything he remembers of that day, everything that happened when I was unconscious, but I doubt he was in the room when the renewers worked to stitch my chest back together.
“Like it or not, Isola, you’re something special,” Lucan whispers.
Mum said I was special, too. Not cursed, but special. The dragon attack, unleashing fire at the sundering pits, my eyes… It’s too much to ignore.Maybe I’m not Valor Reborn, but perhaps I do have a power that can help save this world.
I’ve just opened my mouth to speak when there’s a knock on the door. “It’s me,” Saipha says from the other side.
We both stand, and I hastily tighten the laces on my vest asLucan opens the door.
Saipha slips inside, stepping around me to stretch out on her bed with a groan as she grabs her stomach. I don’t think she’s even aware of the motion. We’re all so exhausted from hunger. “It’s quiet. I haven’t seen anyone—not even inquisitors—for a good fifteen minutes. If you’re going to go, I’d go now.”
I look to Lucan. He nods.
“Let’s do this,” I say, and we slip out together.
My chest tightens as we walk down the silent hallway, and I’m not sure which terrifies me more right now. The way I can’t stop thinking about the warmth of Lucan’s hand against my chest, or what will happen if we can’t find more food before the next test.
39
“This way.” I guide us down the residence hall steps, into the central atrium, and straight for the stairs where I saw the fleck of red.
Black dragon shield. As we descend farther, I scan for anything that might even suggest a black dragon shield, trusting Lucan to keep an eye out for others who might have followed us—or inquisitors. I suspect we’re hunting for a place we’re not supposed to be.
The stairway ends in a room lined with enormous wooden casks on either side that are twice my height in diameter. I ignored this room after a brief search on the first day because it seemed like a remnant of a bygone era. Alcohol is an extreme luxury. It’s not necessary for survival, so very little resources are allocated to it. Most production is private and funded by the super wealthy. There would never be enough produced in a single year to fill even one of these casks. Maybe long ago, when Vinguard had more fertile land around the Upper City, but not now.
So why are they still here?It must mean something.
