Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
“I’m glad you did.” When his fingertips brush my shoulder, my body goes rigid, but I don’t have it in me to pull away again. “Don’t do this alone. It’s too dangerous. And the sword—”
“The sword is all that matters. It will take me to Mordeus and it will kill him.” I will destroy him for what he did to me. For what he turned me into. I curl my fists at my sides, determined not to fall apart. Exhaustion is creeping back.
“We never stopped looking for the sword. We need it more than ever now that we believe Felicity might be trapped in another realm. But while you’ve been gone, we’ve learned Mordeus hid the sword—spelled it so only he could see it. Even if it was right in front of our eyes, we wouldn’t know it.”
I reel back as if I’ve been punched in the chest. When I try to draw breath, nothing comes. How am I supposed to face Mordeus without the sword? I’m not strong enough. I was never strong enough to make a difference when it came to him.
“I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear.”
Finally, I drag air into my lungs, but the panic rumbles inside me, crushing all my plans. “I’ll find another way.”
“Do you understand why we need to work together? Your sister’s been as obsessed over finding you as I have. She will be so glad to see you again.”
To see me and then watch me die in days. To see me and be that much closer to danger because of Mordeus’s connection to me.
I can’t let that happen.
I point to the opposite side of the room, where cabinets line the walls. “I’m feeling weak,” I say, and it’s not a lie. “The healer left a healing tonic over there.” Also not a lie, though the only tonic there is for Kendrick. “Would you get it for me?”
“Of course.” He strides to the other side of the room, and I reach for the door.
“You won’t remember any of this.” This time when I walk away from Kendrick, it’s harder than every step I took toward Mordeus’s dungeons.
Chapter Five
Felicity
I feel the spell holding me under and fight against it. Fight with my mind and my magic until I’m working my sticky eyes open and seeing flashes of the room around me. The stone walls. The figure watching me from the corner. The thin mattress under me.
My mind is a collection of puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. My childhood in the palace. Running through the fields with Kendrick. My mother’s adoring smile. The paralyzing fear of knowing how quickly my father will kill me if he ever finds me. Misha’s breath on my neck before he kisses me good night. Misha spitting words at me as I’m dragged away.
I’ll let you rot in my dungeon for a few days before I listen to more of your lies.
The last has me gasping for a breath that pulls me back into my body. Back to myself.
I jump off the bed and fall into a heap of weakness on the stone floor.
A figure in the corner moves toward me. “Easy now. The body grows weak after months of sleep.”
Who is he? Where am I?
Misha will come for me, something says from the corner of my mind, and I have to shove it away. Misha hates me.
Misha wants to marry me, another part of my mind protests.
That. Isn’t. Real.
The figure takes another step forward but he’s still too cloaked in shadow for me to identify. “Go back to sleep. It’s better there. I promise.”
“You got into my head,” I say to the stranger, but the words slur together, slow and sticky as molasses. “You planted a whole life there.” And it wants to pull me under again. To pull me back into that dream reality where I have a family and a future and a home.
I didn’t realize quite how lonely I was until I was made to know a life where I wasn’t.
“I was merely showing you how things could’ve been,” the stranger says. “Perhaps how things could still be if you let them.”
Kendrick bleeding out at my feet. “I’ll pass,” I say, voice raspy, like I haven’t used it in ages. Sleep and dreams call to me, promising refuge. How long have I been a prisoner of these dreams? How long have I been a captive? Months, like the stranger said?
“You’ll pass?” His dry laugh echoes off the stone walls of the room—no, cell. “Yes, because your life pretending to be anyone but yourself was so much better?”
Better? No. It wasn’t better. And the idea of sinking back into that world where I had my mother’s love, where Misha adored me for being myself and no one else? Yes, it’s so tempting to return to that. But my survival depends on me resisting it.