She heard James’s soft sigh as he sat on his side of the wall, and the faint crunch of him biting the apple. Normal human sounds that she’d once taken for granted but never would again.
“This is how Zarrah must have felt.” She chewed slowly on her bread. “I never really appreciated what she went through on Devil’s Island until now. What it was like to know that those you care about are in danger but being helpless to aid them.”
“She escaped.”
“She wasrescued,” Ahnna corrected. “As was Aren when he was trapped in Silas’s inner sanctum. But no one even knows we are imprisoned, James. No one other than Katarina’s family of ingrates, the wardens, and her dark guild even knows we are in Amarid. Carlo killed everyone else who might have carried the news. Even Alexandra will have been told we’re dead. Which means no one even knows we need to be rescued.”
“We don’t need to be rescued.”
Ahnna sensed James’s stubborn scowl, and despite herself, she smiled. “I believe you are exhibiting what is known as denial.”
“You mispronounced perseverance.”
She rested her head against the stone, watching the small rectangle of light in the ceiling fade into blackness as night fell. “Not knowing is the worst part,” she finally said. “Maybe the storms have held true and Taryn has not even returned to Ithicana yet. Or maybe Aren is already on his way to meet with Katarina to hear the offer that will be Ithicana’s damnation.” Her chest tightened. “Do you think she’ll come to brag about her success, or do you think I’ll spend days, weeks, months,yearswondering about a family that is dead and buried?”
“You can’t think like that. It will drive you mad.”
“To think about anything else feels like I’m betraying them. It feels right that I should suffer, because everyone I love is suffering.” She traced a finger along the mortar joining the stones that formed her cell. “Which is not to say that I’m giving up. Only that it feels right that I be miserable while I try and fail and try and fail.”
“Entirely reasonable.”
“Thank you for the validation, Jamie.”
His huff of annoyance filled her cell. “If you call me that again, I am going to fill in this hole myself.”
She moved her hand down to the opening, picking at a rough patch of stone with her fingernail. “Why? Everyone else who is close to you calls you Jamie.”
“Only those who met me before the age of six. And just because I tolerate the nickname does not mean I like it.”
“You shouldn’t have told me that…Jamie.”
“The idea that being trapped withyouwould be motivation to stay alive was a significant error in Katarina’s judgment,Princess.”
His tone brought to her mind the moment in the boat when he’d kissed her, the remembered sensation of his tongue tracing the scaron her face sending a pulse of remembered pleasure between her legs. It was hard to remember what she’d been thinking, pushing him away. Hard to recall the anger over what had been done and her fear of what was to come, though she knew that had been what had driven her. All she felt now was regret that she’d not allowed herself to give in to desire, because it felt as though she’d never get that chance again.
“Have I mentioned that I like it when you call me Princess?” And then, because she knew it would get a rise out of him, she added, “Although not as much as when you tell me I’m agood girl.There’s no one else alive with that sort of audacity.”
James laughed softly. “You haven’t earned that one lately.”
“I’ll have to remedy that failing.”
They fell into silence, listening to the shrieks and moans of those trapped in the other cells of the Furnace as the wardens fed and watered them. She laid her cheek against the hole, knowing that she should rest. That no solutions would come if she was exhausted. But the screams of the imprisoned grew louder, fueled by food in their bellies, as was the case every day. Cries for help. Desperate pleas for loved ones. Demands to be put down. Ahnna’s heart beat faster, and with the oppressive heat, it felt for all the world as though she had fallen into a hellscape from which there would be no deliverance.
Lifting her unbroken arm, she reached into the opening between her cell and James’s, and a gasp pulled from her lips as her fingertips connected with his.
“Are you all right?” His voice was low.
She shook her head, then whispered, “No.”
The heat of the floor seemed to grow hotter, and Ahnna imagined that whoever tended the great furnace below had added fuel to the flames. Making the cells hot enough to madden but not hot enough to kill.
“They feed the furnace six times a day.” James’s breathing was as strained as hers, both of them trapped in a box of steam. “It’s a regular pattern. The worst of the heat lasts for about the count of two thousand, but it’s worse after water rations due to the steam.”
Only half an hour. Yet having endured it so many times, Ahnna knew it would feel like eternity. “What is the count at?”
“I confess, you caused me to lose track.”
Ahnna dragged in breath after breath, feeling as though she were suffocating. “James?”
