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I search for strength, but all I find is terror and cold air whisking over my soaked body. I can’t stop shivering. A screech of marble on marble drives everyone’s attention to the massive door swinging open.

“Found this one in the arch tunnels, Centress Oreyla,” another guard in black says as he walks up to the woman who kicked me. He shoves Kelter to his knees, pressing a boot into his back and the end of a metal club against his neck until he folds. Kelter’s cheek mashes into the marble floor, his familiar silence now striking hard enough to bruise my heart.

And I find my strength.

“Kelt!” I lurch toward him, only inches from embracing, when the hand-stomping guard pulls me away and stands me up. Kelter’s head swivels to me, to my wet clothes, my bleeding neck, the dewy sorrow in his eyes reaching me in waves.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should have listened, waited with you in that room…for death.

I tilt my head back to take in the woman in the violet dress. Her face is set and unfeeling and has the look of someone whose mother never loved her. I don’t doubt I wear the same look, but I know every emotion is smeared across my face. She meets my gaze with her black eyes, and the faintest sharp inhale is given away by a movement in her chest. An almost imperceptible stiffening from head to toe follows—the reaction I always get when someone first sees my eyes. It’s the indigo. It throws them off.

She composes herself, hands smoothing the fine fabric of her dress. “Lock them up. No one kills them until we get back what they’ve taken.”

We didn’t take anything.

The shivers overwhelm me, rattling my body and chattering my teeth. Dizziness sends the courtyard spinning. I stumble. Time stands still, my brain fogged and failing.

I want to reach for Kelt and throw myself over his tall body balled up on the floor. His green-and-gold eyes peer up at me, each wordless moment so heavy, so loud in my head. I need his warmth, the safety of his arms, but black creeps into my vision. I’m too cold. I swing and sway. My knees give out, and darkness floods in.

Chapter

Four

I wake up with a start, raw fear crushing my lungs. I’m flat on a floor that’s not mine, staring up at a ceiling I’ve never seen before, pain in too many places to count. I sit up, my body stiff with cold, and a headache parts me down the middle. Rain drips and drops outside.

I glance at the shiny obsidian walls and ceiling, loose shards scattered where the floor meets the wall, at the discolored stone toilet in the corner and the pointless barred window behind me—too high to see anything but the sky, and arched, as if that somehow makes the room more inviting.

The guard in the blue jumpsuit leans against the door of the cramped room—barely a room at all—arms and ankles crossed,eyes on me. Like in the courtyard, he oozes an invisible darkness simply standing there.

With only dust and shadows for entertainment, the room offers little else for him to do.

Unless I’m his entertainment.

I strike first. “Who in the ass fuck are you?”

His bored demeanor vanishes. “Your mouth is as filthy as the rest of you.” The deep growl of his voice makes the prickle return to the back of my neck, like cold fingers tracing down it.

I want to run, but there’s nowhere to go.

“You have no idea,” I counter, because apparently my mouth does terrible things—like speak.

He switches his crossed ankles and tilts his head, his eyes so intent on me that my own travel down my body, finding no more than a camisole and underwear. My cheeks heat, and I scramble back, pulling my knees to my chest. The cold wall bites into my back, and shards dig into my bottom. I clap a hand to my chest in search of my necklace. Still there—purple stone, chain and all. I breathe.

It’s fine. I’m fine. He’s over there, and I’m over here. A whole eight feet away.

“Where am I?”

He stares, watching me shiver.

“Where’s my friend?”

Nothing.

“And my clothes?”

Thatinterests him. A smirk plays across his stubbled face. “They were soaked, and you were unconscious, so…I helped.” He shrugs, as if whatever he did was innocent, but everything about him tells me otherwise. The unmistakable taste of blood fills my mouth, and I try to disappear into the wall.

This is how it starts. This is how he’ll play with my head. A dark room. Cold, dirty floor. Take my clothes. Laugh at me.Then he’ll watch my slow decline into insanity. It takes weeks or months for most people, but it won’t for me. I don’t have much further to go before I’m already there.