“So you came all this way, you followed me, just to kill me?” I ask, still searching futilely for a way out. Any way out that isn’t my death or her death or this entire cavern crumbling in on itself. Panic seizes my chest. I want to survive. I have to survive.
“No, Zephyra. I’m not going to kill you.” Her voice lowers—the eye of a hurricane, the moment of calm before the world fractures—and her gaze burns through mine. “I’m taking you to the High Sorcerer of the Four Seas.” She grins. “He says it’s time for you to come home.”
My stomach plummets through the ground, straight to the center of the earth. Magma erupts in my veins. Memories—hundreds,thousands—snarl me in vicious knots, and I… I can’t move.
The High Sorcerer.
He says it’s time for you to come home.
No, no, no.I gasp, and the cavern begins to tilt. Spin. A haze of bronze and copper and blood. My blood. Jacin’s blood. And then—shackles.
“Do you know why I love you, Zephyra of the Syl?”
I lift my shackles between us, clanging them together with a snarl. “Because I can never leave you? Because you own me now?”
“Because you look me in the eye with more hatred than mortally possible. Yet,youthrew yourself at my feet.Youbegged me for this.” He grabs my wrists and drags me closer, every bone in my body succumbing to his unspoken demand as I buckle to the ocean floor. Beneath him. Always beneath him. “I love you, Zephyra, because your loathing does not and cannot exist without love. For you, they are intrinsically linked. So when you say, ‘I hate you,’ I know what you really mean is ‘I love you.’”
My chest heaves with violence. The manacles cutting into my wrists begin to quake with my rage. But they will not open. I will never be free. He touches my cheek, and I turn. Bite down hard enough on his thumb that blood spills between us. “Fuck you.”
The High Sorcerer of the Four Seas smiles, and it’s so much worse than punishment. “I love you too, Zephyra.”
No. She can’t be… Vesper can’t be here because ofhim. It’s too much. Too cruel. Too terrifying to be real. “Vesper, no” is all I can manage to say. My knees buckle. My head swims. I try so hard not to collapse, but my body sways, and I feel just as I did for those eight long years. Small. Insignificant. His toy.
He manipulated me. He tortured me.
But I ran away.I escaped.
“He can’t have me,” I whisper, though I don’t quite know who I’m whispering to. Vesper. Myself. Vila. My eyes flick to the cord, to the white-hot thread, and I ache for Arion to return. To fix this with his magic or brawn. But there is nothing on the other end. He’s gone.
He’s gone, and Vesper is here.
Vesper is going to drag me back.
“He can’t have me.” I glare back at her, even as the bronze of her trident sears my vision.
Bronze hair. Bronze skin. Bronze eyes.
Him, him, him.
“You don’t have a choice.” Vesper withdraws the weapon enough that Gavriall stops bleeding fresh blood, then tips her chin. “You will come with me. I will take you back to him. And then—” She cuts herself off with a sharp hiss. “Hopefully, he’ll kill you himself.”
He won’t.
Hewon’t. I retreat a step, and my survival instinct roars to life. My knees bend to regain the balance I’ve lost. My eyes snap to the entrance, then to her trident. I can try to snatch it from her. Or I can try to dampen my skin with salt water. Transform and use my power to pummel her. I don’t want to, but as she said—I don’t have a choice. “I’ll kill you first.”
She bares her teeth like a barracuda. “You can certainly try, but do you really think he sent me here without the ability to stop you?” She slams the hilt of the trident on the ground, and magic erupts in a dazzling ray of bronze. The earth groans. Rumbles. The rock splinters. She sees none of the damage. Her gaze doesn’t leave my face.
“He gave you magic?” I breathe.
That doesn’t—that doesn’t make sense. I sacrificed everything. My entire life and soul. And all the sorcerer did was slap on a pair of shackles and lock me inside his castle. He taunted me. He tormented me. He sliced me, bruised me, dug his wicked claws into my brain and made me hurt and hurt andhurt. And never once did he give me anything else. He certainly never gave me magic. Not even after he said,I love you. Not even after he cradled my cheek, peered into my soul, and called mehis.
“He wants you home,” Vesper says simply, oblivious to the fact thathomeis a fucking cage. And her gaze—there’s a flicker in her dark blue irises. A shadow. It wasn’t there on the streets.
She said we should be kind to you because there were ghosts in your eyes.
Ghosts. Vesper has ghosts now.
My pulse thunders.And then, she began to say, as if there was more to her plan. As if the sorcerer agreed to more.He has only ever dealt in bargains, I realize with a start. No. Fuck.No.“Vesper, tell me you didn’t… didn’t make a deal with him.”
