Maybe my vision was wrong?—
A second later, molten gold energy seeps across my palm, flowing gently from the blade’s image to my fingertips.
I brace for the blade vision that might strike, but just as when I read the Chronicle, the molten energy streams outward instead of up my arm.
Golden light washes up across the Vividari insignia, sinking beneath the sparkling stone surface and vanishing from sight.
My heart hammers as the outline of a panel appears in the rock. Slowly and silently, the panel slides back into the wall, leaving a square opening three hand spans wide and tall.
Exposing a small, dark chamber.
The darkness within the little chamber is so complete that I can’t see what it contains, let alone tell how far back it extends. Inky-black light fills the space without spilling beyond the opening, giving the startling appearance of a void against the backdrop of starlight aroundme.
Telling myself I can reach inside it without harm, since I saw myself do it, I take deep breaths to calm my pounding heart and extend my fingertips into the darkness?—
“There’s a reason only a full-blooded Vividari should open that vault.”
A smooth baritone voice reaches me from the corridor’s entrance, clawing through my memory like a knife, jolting me away from the chamber.
That voice…
Coming at me through the starlight. But it may as well be ripping at me through shadows, dragging me back to a moment when I was pinned against a wall and a blade covered in iron dust sliced across my flesh.
I gasp for breath, poised to defend myself as the man who hurt me five years ago strides toward me along the corridor.
He’s dressed like one of Galla’s lords, decked out in an elaborately embroidered white tunic and long white pants. Clearly a highborn, although I didn’t see him among any of the highborn back at the celebration.
With deceptively boyish features, ruffled brown hair, and innocent brown eyes, he could lure me to trust him again like he once did.
I don’t have a weapon. Not even the ruby circlet. But I raise my hands and plant my feet, taking up the defensive stance I saw Cassia take when Galla’s lords had filed into the training room this morning.
The man slows his pace. “Easy, Thyra.”
He comes to a stop seven paces from me, also lifting his hands, but palms up and open. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
He doesn’t appear to carry a weapon. No sword at his back or dagger at his waist, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t concealing one. “My scar says otherwise.”
He sucks in a long breath between his teeth before letting itout. “A heinous crime I’ve long regretted. Perpetrated under the belief that you delighted in leaving us to our pain.” He grimaces. “Which I now know wasn’t the case.”
He takes a step toward me. “If you’ll allow me?—”
I jolt back a step, maintaining the distance between us, although the hard reality is that I can’t let him drive me too far from the chamber’s opening or he could seize its contents. I also have nowhere to go. At my back is a dead end. The only way out is past him.
At my movement, he stops again. “I’ve come to warn you, not hurt you.”
I can’t allow myself to believe him. I shouldn’t. But one tiny memory gives me pause.
In my vision, when I was pulling the hammer from the chamber, dark light had flashed across me, and my stomach had swirled with terrible dread.
“Warn me?” I narrow my eyes, watching for any sudden moves. “About what?”
“About the hammer.” His hands lower. “About why my brother really wants it.”
My mind whirls, and my thoughts split in three directions at once. The first is a churning anxiety about what this man means to Antony, the second, the startling fact that this man knows about the hammer, and the third…
A jolting realization about who this stranger is.
The only sibling I hadn’t yet been introduced to.
