“I presume you haven’t gone to all that trouble just to let me die of thirst.”
He tossed her a flask, the gesture so effortless she almost didn’t catch it. She drank, the liquid sharp and mineral-rich. It stung her cracked lips, but she forced herself to finish.
The silence grew heavy again.
At last, Kael said, “We’ll move at dawn. Sleep if you can.”
She thought to protest but it seemed pointless. Her body was already sagging toward the floor, the tremors now so constant they felt almost normal.
Before she slipped under, she looked up at him, one last time. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now. I’d rather not be toyed with.”
Kael looked back at her, and for a split second, there was a flicker of something—maybe pity, maybe recognition. “I’m not here to kill you, Princess,” he said, almost gently. “I’m here to set you free.”
It made no sense. But she held onto it and allowed herself to sleep.
When she woke briefly, the fire was out and the cave had turned even colder, but Kael was still there, unmoved, his golden eyes fixed on her like the morning sun.
Alina woke hungry, cold, furious at herself for having slept so deeply and thoroughly annoyed by it all. Strangely enough, she was not overly afraid. Maybe because for her whole life she had beenuntouchable and she could not even imagine anyone would dare to.
Her senses came to in a slow, miserable trickle. The world was in shades of mildew and blue ice. The fire had sputtered out, leaving only a few glowing cinders and the stink of burned moss. She pulled herself to sitting with some effort, her arms aching as though she had been wrestling wolves, and peered around. She was alone.
Or so it seemed.
Then, from behind a thick column of stone, Kael emerged, not at all surprised to find her awake. He had shed the spear in favor of a dagger at his belt, its blade dull and blackened except for a single nick of silver near the tip. His clothes were no longer pristine; mud and torn fabric marked him as a man who had run all night and fought for every mile.
Alina’s heart leapt into her throat when she realized the mouth of the cave, no longer veiled in darkness but painted with the faint, sickly glow of dawn, was completely unguarded.
Why was there no guard? These people seemed to be either over-confident or under-intelligent. She needed to keep her wits about her now, needed to think this through. What was outside of that cave? She had the feeling that they were deep in the wood, meaning there would be trees and underbrush enough to hide. If she managed to quickly disappear into the undergrowth, she had a chance at escaping. She didn’t know in which direction the palace was, but that would be a problem for later. Who knew what they had in store for her? There was a chance now, and she had to seize it.
Quietly, she changed her position and tensed her body.
She shot a glance at Kael, calculated the distance, and bolted.
The move was not graceful, but it was effective. She sprang to her feet, bare legs slipping on the moss-slimed floor, hands and feet pounding for the jagged oval of the exit. Her bare feet scraped and slipped with each desperate step.
Kael didn’t chase her; he simply watched, an expression on his face that might have been amusement, or pity, or both.
She made it three full paces before disaster struck.
A spur of rock snagged her already ruined sleeve and ripped it nearly clean from her arm, the pain sharp but nothing compared to the humiliation of being undone by a fucking cave. She wrenched free with a snarl and surged ahead, now so close to the opening that she could smell, through the stench of rot and minerals, the faint green promise of outside air.
She was, for a heartbeat, almost free.
Every muscle in her legs seized. Her arms snapped to her sides as if bound by invisible cords. She toppled, hard, to one knee, her face inches from the gritty, damp stone. She tried to scream, but her jaw locked; the only sound that escaped was a thin, choking gasp.
Her vision blurred—not from pain, but from rage. She tried to turn, tried to see what was going on, but she could not move an inch. She remained on her knee, on the ground, unable to control only a single one of her muscles. He had done that. Somehow, he had fixed her in place without so much as laying a single finger on her.
Kael slowly approached and looked down on her, face unreadable.
She glared back at him, hate crystallizing behind her eyes, but Kael only walked closer, his shadow stretching long and monstrous across the floor.
He circled her, a slow predator, and knelt so they were eye to eye.
“You needn’t hurt yourself,” he said, voice perfectly flat. “No one will harm you here.”
She would have spat at him, but she couldn’t even manage that.
Kael cocked his head. “Your body knows the truth,” he said, softly now, “even if your mind does not.”
