Sapphire
There is no key toopen the cage door.
“Here!”Dellilian is now inside the cage, holding the keys in her mouth. Her tail wags happily.
“Thanks, sweet girl.”
A five-pound, oversize skeleton key is dropped in my hand. And Dellilian ebbs away in a gust of smoke.
I unlock the door with a wobbly hand.It drops from my bloody, frozen fingers twice, but there is no voice on the other side. No one acknowledging my arrival. No one piercing the veil of this silent dungeon to let me know they see me.
I fight the need to curl into a ball against the hypothermic symptoms slowing my movements.
As the door cracks, I lift a torch from the wall to guide me inside the pit beyond the bars. It’s bigger than I thought. The shadows eat up the light of my torch as I can hardly see two inches in front of my own face. And it’s too quiet. Not the absence of sound, but a muffling of a haunted, residual noise, like gasps of pain inside a velvet coffin.
“Niklaus…” I whisper.
After everything we’ve been through, I have yet to be this terrified. Will he remember me after God knows what’s been done to him? Has he been harboring a sea of hatred for me since I vanished?
My hand quivers in the damp, icy air as I extend my arm to catch even the slightest glimpse of a man. Of Niklaus.
An exhale.
I freeze.
“Niklaus.” My throat swells from holding back a mountain of remorse. “It’s…me.”
Though I can’t see anything in front of me, I can sense a person a few steps away. I canfeela set of eyes on me.
Holding my breath, I take two large steps forward and lengthen my arm all the way out.
The shuddering flame illuminates a man standing upright, chained to a large pole. Arms bound behind his back. A metal cuff over his mouth, attached to the iron collar around his neck. Black hair swept away from his face in a bun on the back of his head.
My legs falter. It’s the eyes.
Everything about him has changed.
But not those silky, sapphire blue eyes.
The beard. How time has added creases and lines to his forehead and around his eyes. The protruding, hardened muscles of a stone masonry, roped with veins and flexing tendons. Sculpted from years of punishment and combat. The raised ink decorating his ribs and chest.
“Oh my god,” I weep.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. Niklaus, ten years older than the man I knew, just stares at me. The scrutiny. The mixed implosion of emotions makes me feel like a mouse that has unwittingly stumbled into the cage of a lion.
“I—I—oh, Niklaus…”
I come to my senses after seconds of breathing through the shock and regret keeling me over. He’s chained to a pole. How long as he been here? How long has been tortured and abused? He is covered in welts, bruises, blisters, and the most jagged, gutting scars I have ever seen.
I fumble forward with nerves ebbing and flowing like live wires crossing through each limb. My chest touches his chest. I’m so close, feeling the brush of his breath against mine as I loop my arms around his body to snap the key into the lock and turn it, hearing the click of cogs being unlatched.
Once the clunky lock topples to the ground, I unwind the chains in a hurry. His eyes bore into me without daring to look away.
The last of the chains clatter to the ground at our feet. And he steps off the post without a moment of hesitation. Metal cuff still attached to his mouth, though he doesn’t seem to notice. He advances on me. That glare unreadable. Steady and cold.
I hold my hands up in surrender. Tears swell over my bottom lashes as I look up at him helplessly.
“I am sorry. I amsosorry.” I can’t breathe. The loss of never seeing the man I left behind again blasts my senses. He’s no longer here.
