Whereareour jailers for that matter?
I turn on myself, pushing my hearing as far as it’ll go, which is quite far seeing as how I can hear the distant splash of what I imagine is Justus’s water.
The prison is eerily quiet . . .
Although I’d like to believe it’s silent because they’re gone, their scent lingers in the air. Not to mention, where would they go?
Back to Isolacuori, my mind says, but my mind is a highly optimistic fiend.
Besides, wouldn’t they have taken Antoni with them? Leaving him here seems remarkably foolish. As long as he has breath in his lungs, Dante could’ve used him. Then again, Antoni wants to kill both kings, so perhaps his use has waned.
A nearby creak, and not of the metal chain type, makes me whirl on myself. A door is shutting farther down the corridor—or is it opening? I squint but it’s so very dark and far away that I cannot see.
Could be Justus, my optimistic self tells my realistic one. When I catch the drip of water, I wrangle my heart into a steadier rhythm.Definitely Justus.
I take one step forward but stop when Antoni begins to pull at his chains again, his hair dripping with sweat that mixes into the blood coursing down his fingers.
One swipe of my fingers on his shackles, and he could be free. But then what? He’ll either attempt to make a run for it and get caught again, or he’ll come after Lore.
I suddenly hear Antoni yelling at Dante not to lay a finger on me. Even though he despises Lorcan, he still cared enough to try and protect me.
I eye Dante’s chamber, knowing my minutes are sparse, but however hard I try to take a step in that direction, I cannot abandon the sea captain. That’s not who I am. So I press his door wider.
He goes as still as a corpse—an upright one—and stares wildly my way, his gaze growing whiter and wider when he finds nothing but air. His chest lifts with ragged breaths as he tries to break the bones in his hand to pull his shackles off.
“Antoni?” I murmur.
He jumps.
“Don’t speak. And don’t move.”
Although his shoulders turn sharper beneath his ragged shirt that’s as grimy and gory as the rest of him, he does as I ask. It takes me six heartbeats to sever the bangles around his ankles, and twice as many to slice open the ones around his wrists. Why? Because my touch renders him invisible, so I need to let go and reassess where to slice to avoid injuring him further.
Once done, I step back. “Where is everyone?”
“Gone,” he snarls.
“Gone where?”
“They didn’t stop by for a chat, Fal.” His tone is so cutting that it shears the heavy air.
“Don’t speak to me this way.”
His lips twist. “Sorry. You’re right. You don’t deserve my anger.”
He got his nails ripped from his fingers, so I possibly do deserve it, but it’s still nice to hear him calm down in regards to me. “I’m getting us out of here, so hurry to remove your shackles for you’ll need your limbs to swim.”
“Swim?”
I turn and smack into a wall.
And not one made of black stone, but one made of air. My heart all but rockets from my parted lips.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I want to croak Justus’s name to check if it’s him, but what if it’s a soldier or Dante? What if the Faerie I hunt made Meriam cloak him so he could be ready for when I returned because he heard about her sigil and—
“You promised to head back, Nipota.”
