Page 38

She stops all movement. With a clatter and a crash, the pot she was holding drops to the stove—luckily it wasn’t very high to begin with and it leaves only a small splash of red sauce on the tiles.

Jura runs to me, throwing her arms around my shoulders.

She goes limp as soon as mine wrap around her waist, her knees giving out.

But I’m more than happy to support my somewhat dramatic friend.

“Clara! No. No. It couldn’t—” She pulls away and grabs my face, eyes widening. “It is. It is you. I thought you were dead.”

“Told you it was her that escaped.” Gregor leans against the doorframe.

“You said you thought I was dead, too.” I glance over my shoulder at Gregor.

“Well, I did, until I heard about the escapee.” He shrugs. “Couldn’t be anyone but you to escape Halazar.”

“Word has already spread that widely?” I separate from Jura, my heart sinking.

“Someone escaped Halazar, how could anything else be the talk of the city?” Jura has a point.

“The boat crews down at the docks said they saw someone swimming in the water in the distance—coming from Halazar,” Gregor adds.

“By the time they called the enforcers, the person was gone. It was all rumors, but I guess the enforcers confirmed the talk. The city has been a mix of high alert and gossip ever since.”

Damn it. I don’t know why I’d been foolishly hoping that if I escaped the academy I’d somehow be safer in the city.

But Ravin said that guards were searching Eclipse City, too…

The best protection I have still might be my fake nobility and engagement to Kaelis.

As nauseating as it is to even think about.

“Gregor has been going out every day looking for you around the old club since.” Jura squeezes my hands.

My attention settles on that lovable mountain of muscle, my face easing into a grateful smile. No wonder he found me… He knew where I’d go. After a year of surviving on my own, I’d almost forgotten how incredible it is to have people look out for you.

But before I can say anything, the stairs sag with slow, uneven steps.

“What’s the commotion?”

“Late again,” I tut with a heavy layer of sarcasm even though my heart is about to burst. “What am I going to do with you, Twino?”

“No,” he breathes. “It couldn’t be…”

“It is,” I assure him loudly. Twino rushes down the stairs as quickly as he can manage, and I move to meet him in the hall.

Much like Jura, he stares at me with wide eyes and parted lips.

Emerald silks offset the rich brown of his skin.

Good to see he hasn’t lost his sense of style amidst the chaos of whatever’s happened to them. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I have.” The tap of his cane accompanies the quick shuffling of his feet.

Thin, twisted locs fall from the low bun at the back of his neck.

I hold out my arms, embracing him tightly and offering him a moment to stabilize himself following such quick movement.

When he’s steady, he pulls away, and I get a good look at him.

He’s just the same as I remember. Probably keeps the same habits, given he was up at this abnormally late—or early—hour.

“I was right,” Gregor says to Twino triumphantly. “Pay up.”

“Please don’t tell me you two placed a bet on me being the one to escape Halazar.” I narrow my eyes, glancing between them. My focus sticks on Twino. “And please don’t tell me you bet against me.”

He rubs the back of his neck, looking guilty. I let out a gasp. But before I can playfully chide him, another person interrupts.

“The prodigal child returns at last,” a soft voice says from midway up the stairs. I look up. I’ve always looked up at Bristara—the matron, owner, and original founder of the Starcrossed Club.

She’s a towering figure of a woman. Imposing, even though her muscle has lost some definition over the years. Her salt-and-pepper hair is pulled into a tidy bun at the nape of her neck, and she peers down at me over horizontal spectacles with her sharp lilac eyes.

“Hello” is all I can manage to say. I’m left feeling like a child who’s been out way past curfew.

“Welcome home, at long last, Clara.” Bristara’s eyes drift to Silas. He stands a bit taller. “And who is this?”

“He helped me get here.” I instantly know she doesn’t approve of Silas being in this sanctuary, and I can’t keep the defensive edge from my voice. Disappointment from the woman who raised me since I was sixteen is heavy.

“I should…give you some space?” Silas shifts awkwardly.

“I think that’d be best.” Bristara is a master at keeping her emotions from her voice.

A feat I always admired…when that coolness wasn’t directed at me.

“The first door is a small study. You may make use of it.” Her attention shifts toward the back of the house, motioning to the last room in the hall.

“The rest of us will sojourn to the lounge.”

“I’ll put on the kettle.” The normality of Jura saying so helps calm me. Even though this place isn’t the Starcrossed Club that I remember, the people who were the closest to me—who were the soul of the establishment—are here. It already feels like I’ve been down this hall hundreds of times.

The decor of the lounge is reminiscent of every detail I’ve seen in my dreams for months.

Velvet drapes in deep purple line the entire left wall.

A black rug patterned with falling stars cushions my feet as we make our way between two wingback chairs, reminding me surreally of the rug in my room at the academy.

The chairs form one side of a square that’s completed by two parallel sofas and a large marble fireplace opposite that Twino sets about lighting.

Cups dance with Coins, Swords duel with Wands, all around the frame of the fireplace.

A globe chandelier of crystal etched with stars casts the room in a warm haze.

I know instantly who’s behind this design.

“Good to see you haven’t lost your aesthetic sensibilities,” I voice my earlier thought to Twino.

He straightens and preens, running a hand down his long emerald robe. “Did you ever have any doubt?”

“I’ve had doubts about many things this past year, and many more after seeing what’s left of Starcrossed,” I say gravely as I sit.

“I’ll get Ren.” Gregor moves for the stairs as Bristara enters the lounge. “Ren!” Nothing. “Ren!” Still nothing. “ Ren, get up! Clara’s back.”

There’s a thundering from above that rumbles down the stairs and appears as a blur of fire-red hair, skidding to a stop in the hallway.

I breathe a small sigh of relief as I meet eyes as green as Twino’s shirt, framed by freckles.

His clothes are loose on his wiry frame and he rubs sleep from his eyes, blinking, staring at me, rubbing, and blinking again.

“Clara?” He bounces over and pulls me into a tight embrace. Ren was the most recent addition to the group. But the moment I knew Twino’s relationship with him was serious, he had nothing but my support in joining.

“In the flesh.”

“What? But I thought—How?” Ren’s questions are punctuated with yawns. He always was the first to bed and first to rouse, sleeping like the dead between sundown and sunup. He sits with Twino opposite me.

“Literally what I was going to ask.” Gregor joins them.

“Close the doors, if you please, Jura.” Bristara settles herself in a leather wingback at the end of the table in the center of the sitting area as Jura enters from a pocket door that connects the kitchen.

She has a silver platter laden with tea accoutrements and a small plate of her famous lavender cookies—no doubt sourced in part from the courtyard garden I saw earlier.

Ren has quite the green thumb. As soon as she sets them on the low table between the sofas, I help myself.

Jura does as Bristara instructs and then sits next to me.

Feeling more myself than I have in almost a year after a sip of tea and a bite of cookie and with all my friends around me, I return to the most urgent matter on my mind. Someone is missing. “Arina?”

The five of them share a look that has the cookie falling from between my fingers, clattering across the plate, instantly forgotten.

“The night you were taken…enforcers stormed the Starcrossed Club within an hour of you leaving.” Bristara is the one to speak. “We tried to fight, but there were too many and they came prepared.”

A sinking feeling pulls me deeper into the cushions. It is all my fault. I know it is… If only I hadn’t gone, if only I hadn’t played into their trap runs through my mind, echoed by Bristara’s disapproving look.

“They didn’t even bother taking the club guests alive.” Gregor’s hand balls into a fist.

“Arina?” I repeat, softer, weaker, yet more frantic. I want to hear what happened to them, but my sister…I must know what happened to my sister.

“It was all we could do to escape. We tried to get as many out as we could, but it was chaos.” Jura ducks her chin.

“Arina…We haven’t seen her since right before that night.

We thought she was lying low for the first bit after, maybe couldn’t risk leaving the academy, but she never came back with the haul she was getting from the academy. Never said anything else.”

“I heard she ran. Silas told me she was sent to a mill; that was the ‘official story.’?” I can hear the desperation in my own voice as it quivers up slightly at the end of the statement, nearly making it a question. Though everything I want to ask is left unsaid. They already know.

“We heard as much, too.” Twino’s tone gives away nothing, and that causes my panic to rise further. “So we looked into it.”

“And?”

Twino looks to Bristara. The rest of them follow, pained expressions that tell me everything. The silence that fills the air is as grim as death.

“ And? ” I repeat.

“According to rumors that reached our ears, and what records we could find, she died.” Bristara remains expressionless as she delivers the news.

The color drains from my face. Despair strikes me like a thousand panes of glass shattering. Blood rushes through my ears, deafening me. My fingers grow numb again. And yet, my heart doesn’t seem to beat at all. It was halted by the one scrap of hope I have left.

“Did you find a body?”

“No.” Twino shakes his head.

“Then there’s a chance,” I insist.

“Clara…You know Arina,” Gregor says softly, pain lacing tightly between his words.

Even though it’s been a year, his eyes shine with pain.

“She was precocious, bold, arrogant, and had a streak of doing whatever in the four suits she wanted. If she was alive, we’d know—either because we’d hear of it, or she’d come back. ”

“Maybe not, if she thought coming would be dangerous.”

“Not for this long,” Bristara says grimly.

“They could have her captive.”

“You know Oricalis, they don’t take people alive.” Every word Bristara says is a separate blow.

“They kept me alive.”

“Curious, that.” Her eyes narrow slightly. I can’t deal with Bristara’s skepticism. Not now.

“ There is a chance. ” My words are like a dagger point at the throat of any who’d dare say otherwise.

Bristara and I lock glares. But, finally, she says nothing.

“Arina is just as strong as I am, and you all know it. Until I see her bones, until her ashes pass through my fingers, there is a chance she lives.”

“We have looked for her,” Jura offers. “And we still keep an eye out, of course.”

“Good. I have a lead of my own to follow.” I stand. “And it’s back in Arcana Academy.”