“If you stab me again, pretty little poison, at least aim higher.”
“You can’t blame yourself for everything that happens around you. You’re not poison, lethal darling. You’re the antidote.”
“Little vixen, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Clever, viperling.”
“You’re mine, honey drop.”
My mates’ voices layered over each other as I sped up. Their love, their teasing, and fond memories replayed like a sweet video.
But after all of that, as I neared the end of the tunnel, darker memories seeped in.
“Why didn’t you answer my call, Rune?”Darian’s voice hissed, echoing down the corridor.“Who are you with? Who are you fucking?”
My hand curled into a fist, and I kept going.
“Please, I just want to help.”Jonas’s voice.
A second later, the echo of his neck snapping against steel as he hit that door wrong.
I flinched as if I’d heard the crack for the first time.
Another step.
“You were just going to leave me to die.”Vel’s voice choked before she crumbled under my mom’s venom.“They saved me. The humans saved me?—”
The echoes of my memories, good and bad, multiplied until the corridor felt stuffed with ghosts who were only made of the past.
I forced myself forward, step after step, letting the memories crash and roll over me but not stick. I didn’t let them slow me down.
The longer I walked, the more detached the memories became. They started repeating, looping, and losing that emotional bite.
Eventually, the corridor opened, and the memories cut off abruptly.
I stumbled slightly at the sudden quiet.
Ahead, the space opened into a broader hall lit by higher, brighter runes, casting a soft green light on rows of iron doors lining either side.
It took me a moment to realize that they were cells.
I’d made it into the penitentiary.
I moved along the wall, keeping to the edges where shadows collected despite the runes’ glow. I didn’t look directly into any of the doors.
“Rune…”The voice slithered along the floor toward me.
I clenched my jaw and kept going.
“Why are you up there, little basilisk, and I’m down here?”
I ignored that, too.
The hall bent left, then right, and left again. The turns were tight enough that I had to angle my shoulders.
A shadowy presence waited ahead, around the next bend, quiet and still in a way that felt more dangerous than anything I’d experienced down here yet.
I slowed my steps to nearly nothing, rolling my weight from heel to toe, heel to toe. Every muscle in my body hummed with an instinctive desire to run.
