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“Where are you injured?” I asked, shaking the screams echo from my head. I needed to focus on something, anything other than the agonized cries around us.

“A broken leg, I think and some bruised ribs. Don’t worry about me, love. It is nothing that will kill me,” he said, shifting his body to rest his back against the bars.

“Good,” I snapped, pushing to my feet and walking over to my cell door. “I’m the one that gets to kill you, you’re not allowed to die on me before that.”

A breathy chuckle slipped from his lips. “There she is.”

“How well do you know Ammord’s High Priest and Priestesses? Do you know if they know who you are yet?” I asked, pressing my face against the bars and trying to see down the long corridor of cells.

“Well enough to know that if we do not give them whatever answers they are looking for, we will be dead within a few days. They do not care who we are, or if they can use us as a bargaining chip. And . . .” He let out a weighted sigh, pain braided through it. “And they know. When we fell back into Camp Bane, they already had a chain around your ankle . . . youscreamedfor me when they dragged you away.” His words caught in his throat as he choked them out. “You screamed my name as they pulled you from my arms.”

My heart clamped in my chest, his words sinking into my bones as the memory came flooding back.

That is how he broke his ribs, his leg.

Protecting me from the fall off Nithra’s back. Wrapping his body around mine so it wouldn’t break me.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I whispered, swallowing back the emotion building in the base of my throat—the guilt. “You shouldn’t have tried to protect me. It wasn’t worth it.”

“To me, love, it was.” His answer was firm and resolute and I didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead, I pulled my eyes back to the passage on the other side of the bars, squinting to find any way out.

They knew we were valuable. And they would use that knowledge to break us in every way imaginable.

“Fuck,” I breathed, raking a hand trough my hair. “So, what do we do? We can’t just sit around waiting for them to come for us.”

Dukovich was quiet for a long moment, the eerie silence stretching between us like a living thing. “No one, and I do mean no one, has ever made it out of these prisons alive. So we givethem nothing. No matter what they do to us, no matter how much they make us suffer, we do not give in. You hold onto Landers and you endure and pray that Hyacinth gets to you both before they decide you are no longer worth their time.”

My brows furrowed at his words and I turned to face him. The chains scraped loudly against each other as I crossed my arms. “What do you mean ‘gets to us both’? She would never leave you behind.”

“I mostly believe that.” He chuckled. “But I will not make it out of here alive. My betrayal of The Silliands was a direct betrayal to Ammord because of the alliance the realms share. They will kill me when they drag me from this cell.”

My chest tightened at his words, a cold dread seeping into my veins. It was then I realized that he had been telling me that this whole fucking time.

Not once did he say we would get out, that we would survive this.

He had only said I would.

“No,” I said, my voice sharp. “No. I won’t let that happen. We’re all getting out of here, together.”

“I made my choice when I left The Silliands and I knew what the consequence would be if I was caught.”

“Then why did you come?” I hissed, anger flaring hot in my gut. “Why would you ever come back to Ammord, to Camp Bane, and risk being caught?”

“Love . . .” he started, but I cut him off.

“Don’t ‘love’ me,” I snapped, tears pricking at the corner of my eyes as I furiously blinked them back. “I will tear this whole fucking prison apart with my bare hands before I let them kill you.” My voice cracked, the emotion and truth spilling out of me. “You do not get to force me to care for you just to fucking die.”

I sucked in a sharp breath at the admission as my chest heaved against the heavy darkness. I was thankful for it at thismoment. That he couldn’t see the fear of losing him carved into my face.

Rage built inside me, and I let it burn away every ounce of fear and despair. We would survive this nightmare.

And when we did, there would be a reckoning.

A reckoning that would shake the very foundation on Nimbria.

Chapter forty-three

HYACINTH