As much as Katerina wanted to believe it, this didn’t sit right. No matter what Niko had confessed to in the arena, or what he’d become, she knew down to her bones that if he’d escaped this cell of his own volition, he would’ve come for her. He would never have left the matter of her freedom up to chance, or risked leaving it in someone else’s hands.
Her own hands shook as she lifted them, running her fingers over the cold onyx of the bars. The cuffs chafed her wrists, and she bit her lower lip, suppressing a pained whimper. “No,” she insisted. “If he’s not here, then they took him somewhere against his will. What if they?—”
What if they’ve already killed him, she was about to say. But before the words could pass her lips, a bell began to clang in the distance, harsh and urgent.
Ana went pale in the dim light. “That’s the alarm from your wing. We have to go now, or it’ll be too late.”
Katerina’s magic ignited within her, fueled by fury. “Let them come,” she snapped, fire flaring at her fingertips and the stones shifting beneath her feet. “Let them pay for what they’ve done to us.”
“Or,” Ana suggested, exasperation clear in every syllable, “we could leave before they get here. We’ve no time for heroics. I’m sorry, but wherever Niko is, he’ll have to fend for himself.”
Lips pressed in a grim line, Sofi took hold of Katerina, her grip like iron. “I’m sorry, too,” she signed with her free hand, using the shorthand she’d taught Katerina around a Drezna campfire long ago. “I wanted to save him. But now, we need to look out for ourselves.”
Another sound joined the clamor of the bells: a terrified shriek, followed by the pound of footsteps. Her fellow Dimis began to run, dragging Katerina with them.
“No,” she protested as they tugged her down the hall. “I can’t go, not without him. You don’t understand. He needs me?—”
“You’ll be no good to him dead!” Ana shot a desperate look at Sofi, who obliged by summoning her witchwind. It carried them down the hall faster than they could possibly have gone otherwise, and although Katerina fought to get free, she couldn’t manage it, weakened as she was.
Her heart ached as Niko’s cell receded into the distance, the footsteps growing ever-louder as her friends dragged her down the corridor and toward the stairs that led to the prison’s exit. What if Berezin and his henchmen were torturing her Shadow for their own amusement, as an appetizer before the entrée of his death? They no longer needed him intact, and the head of the Druzhina answered only to the prince, who’d publicly ordered Niko’s death. How would Niko feel when he discovered Katerina had abandoned him, that she’d fled like a coward to save her own skin?
She knew the answer. He’d think it was no more than he deserved. That he was damaged goods, no longer worthy of being her Shadow, and that she would be lucky to be free of him.
“But where is he?” Her voice rose, louder even than the clang of the bells, because what did stealth matter now? Tears streamed down her face, just as they had when she’d clawed her way out of the Underworld. “Please, please stop, Sofi. I can’t leave—not before I know where he is, what they’ve done to him?—”
Sofi paid her no attention. If anything, her fellow Dimi’s witchwind intensified, blowing out the torches that lined the corridor and plunging them into blackness. Aboveground, voices broke through the din of the bells, growing closer by the moment. Katerina could pick out a word here and there: “Escaped…” “Dismembered, the work of the Dark…” “Unholy union…” “Drugged, maybe dead…”
Oh, gods. Were they talking about the guards Sofi and Ana had subdued, or her Shadow?
The rough stones jolted her body as Ana and Sofi propelled her forward, Sofi’s witchwind brooking no refusal. She could see the outline of the bottom of the stairs now, and the corridor that branched off in another direction, toward the occupied cells, where torchlight still burned. The prisoners there were shouting, fueled by the chaos, hammering on the bars with their dinner plates. Whatever direction she and her fellow Dimis took now—head-on attack or concealment—they were leaving the wing where her Shadow had been imprisoned behind.
Desperation seized Katerina, and she threw caution straight into the face of the wind that drove her onward. “Niko!” she screamed over the pounding footsteps, the roar of Sofi’s witchwind, and the unrelenting cacophony of the bells. “Where are you? If you can hear me, answer me!”
She expected nothing, and for a long moment, that was what she got. Tears streamed down her face, salty and bitter, as her words hung in the air.
And then, from the inky darkness mere feet away came her Shadow’s voice—low and rough and unmistakable, a promise and a warning in one.
“I’m right here.”
Chapter Twenty-One
NIKO
He was everywhere, and nowhere.
His body stood in front of his Dimi, aching to touch her. To run his fingers over her and make sure she was all right, that these pricks hadn’t harmed an inch of her. To treat her with the tenderness she deserved after the ill treatment she’d suffered at their captors’ hands.
But his shades? They knew nothing of tenderness. They wanted to skewer anyone who had ever hurt her. To paint the walls that surrounded them with the blood of their enemies.
Revenge and ruin, Elena whispered in his head, as if she stood beside him. That’s all that’s left of you.
He didn’t trust himself, nor should Katerina trust him. Besides, he’d vowed to never put his hands on her body again. But there was one thing he could do, and he would do it, regardless of the clanging bells and the hammering footsteps. For this, he had all the time in the world.
“Hold still,” he said, his voice hoarse, and sent his shades outward, into the coal-black, shifting shadows that separated him from his Dimi.
“Where are you?” Katerina whispered, and Saints help him, he could feel her searching for him, not just with her eyes but through their bond. He had never tried to close himself off to her before, and with his black dog bound, he hadn’t had to. But now, unchained and free, with her magic simmering just beneath her skin, it was another story.
If he had nothing else left, he had her. She was pure. He wouldn’t let his evil stain her.
