CHAPTER
1
He’d come for her in the middle of the night.
Footsteps sounded down the hallway of the eerily quiet prison where Vaasa could not hear even the waves. It had been like that for weeks—a veil of midnight draping every inch of space in front of her, the biting cold eating at her skin and muscles and soul, nothing to hear or see or taste orwant.
They had torn the wanting from her.
Screams pierced the silence, the final wails of sentinels as one after the other fell to the dirty ground. Vaasa pushed to her hands first, dragging her scraped knees beneath her as her bones ached from the cold. She couldn’t stand upright.
“Reid,” she choked out in a hoarse whisper. “Reid!”
Weeks.She had been trapped here for weeks, listening to pleas and moans of other prisoners that she hadn’t been certain were real; echoes behind iron and stone could have been people or just figments of her isolated imagination. All she had were empty, disconnected details; no semblance of a schedule, the randomization of each day preventing her body from knowing the time. She was sure this prison had been constructed to bring her to the brink: the piercing chill, the silence, the darkness.
The dark was not an unfamiliar sensation to Vaasa. A long time ago, she had made a home of it, had found a way to see shadow as a place to hide. But this dark was frigid. Empty. Infinite.
The door to Vaasa’s cell screeched open, and a figure stood in the gray-washed glow. Broad shoulders, long mahogany hair, orange and black eyes that finally met her own. This moment was both salvation and dying, heartbreak and healing, it was everything,everything.
“Reid,” she choked once more, her elbows wobbling and then giving out beneath her. Her chin smacked against the ground as her weight toppled forward.
“Here!” his deep voice boomed. “She’s here!”
Reid wasalive.
He had come for her.
Tears washed down Vaasa’s face as he rushed forward to her. She lurched, using the last of her energy to throw her body against his, to let him take her in his arms and steal her away from this wretched place. His warmth enveloped her, his body feeling so much bigger than hers as his arms wound around her waist and lifted her to her feet. Her torn slippers caught traction beneath her, but it was he who held her up, who carried the weight of her broken body.
“I have you,” he whispered against her blood-smeared cheek. His nose pressed to the spot just behind her ear. “I’m never letting you go again.”
Hot tears slipped down her cheeks. “I’m in love with you,” she whispered back, her voice only capable of that much. “I should have told you every day.”
Reid’s arm hooked behind her back as he gently helped her to the door of her cell. “You can, Wild One. You will.”
They turned the corner, and—
And then Vaasa was falling through the floor.
She wrenched her eyes open and saw nothing but black. The mist—it covered her vision, cloaked her entire face. Spinning around her in a glittering black void, Veragi magic stuffed itself down her throat and up her nose, muffling her screams. Strings of it tangled within her body, wrapped around her organs and pulled. She tossed her body to the right with as much power as she could muster, but her wrists were bound to the table. Vaasa screamed and pulled as hard as she could—
“Dammit!” a familiar voice swore.
The straps on her left wrist snapped with a hiss as her body spun off the side of the table. A hard, cold surface collided with her cheek, something slick coating her skin as the bone splintered in pain. The sensation exploded behind her right eye where she’d landed. Her shoulder felt as if it had been jerked right from its socket. The magic before her eyes extinguished, and her vision readjusted. Her right wrist was still bound to the table, and she hung from it, the rest of her body on the grimy floor while her cheek lay against the sturdy wooden leg of the table they’d bound her to. Blood trickled down her limbs in small streams from the thin hairline cuts carved into her thighs and upper arms. Small inflictions of pain that when added together became excruciating, though never enough to kill.
She opened her eyes and saw him: Lord Vlacik, staring down at her with his lip curled in disgust.
Vaasa struck.
Magic shot from her hands toward his icy blond head, a tendril of darkness flying forward like a thrown blade.
“Shit,” he cursed as he leapt to the side. “Chain her!”
Metal touched the skin of her neck, and she hissed in pain. Her magic winked out. Hands held her in place and forced an iron collar around her neck, clinking it closed. She bared her teeth and launched herself forward at the lord, but the sharp metal collar dug into her neck, secured to the table by an iron chain. She cried out as her body ricocheted backward.
“Get her back on the table,” Vlacik commanded.
Bile crawled up her throat, and she began to heave, hoisting herself on her side. There was nothing left in her, yet it came over and over—slick black waste, just like what she’d vomited up in Dihrah before Reid found her. She’d been on the verge of death then, and as she expelled unused Veragi magic now, Vaasa was certain she was closer to dying than she’d ever been.
