Page 54 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

thirty-three

Sleep left me all at once and my eyes opened to the darkness of the cave. A little light shimmered somewhere to my side, and I could have sworn a thought had nudged me awake just now—except my mind was completely blank.

Then… “Nilah, wake up.”

It hadn’t been a thought at all—just my voice coming from Vair’s mouth, and it was his fur that was glowing a little, too. The only source of light in the cave, which was…wrong.

My heart paused. I looked at him standing there near my feet, head lowered, tail against the floor.

“He’s gone.”

The view tilted a few times before it fell into place again when I sat up. I both understood the meaning of those words and didn’t. I looked around the darkness, the stone of the cave mixed in with the dark diamonds that sometimes pulsated with a little light of their own.

Empty.

The cave was empty save for Vair, and I was lying on the cloak all by myself .

“No.” My voice echoed in the tall ceiling—coming from my own mouth. I was somehow standing now, though I couldn’t tell you when I got up. But I was spinning around, eyes searching every inch of the cave for a little bird made of light.

It had to be here because Rune was here. It just had to.

Except it wasn’t.

Then I was running—barefoot. A dream, a dream, please let this be a dream …

Sharp pieces of stone drove into my feet, but I hardly felt the pain.

I was running, and though I didn’t see much of where I was going, my body seemed to know the way.

Vair seemed to know the way—all I had to do was follow his glowing fur and I’d make it.

However long it took to get out of this tunnel, I’d make it.

And I did.

When we first came through yesterday, I couldn’t be bothered to even look around because Rune was there and the Seer of Shadows had showed me those images of when he was six years old and my mind had been too full, my soul too broken.

Now, I had no choice but to see every little detail as I searched for Rune.

It must have been nighttime because the moon shone in the distance and gave off a little light. Smaller balls made of blueish white light were spread about, too—no shape, just small balls, and so I didn’t even suspect that it was Rune who’d made them.

The wind, cold and biting, blew my hair to the side as I stood near the rock behind which was the entrance to that tunnel.

I was on the jagged shore looking out at the sea stretching like a mirror of the dark sky.

From here it really did look eternal, as if to match its name—but I knew that it was only the darkness cloaking the edges of it.

The edges of the very realm that seemed intent on killing me slowly, in silence, one day at a time.

The air smelled of salt. I stood in the middle of a ring of towering pillars, thicker than tree trunks, the marble that made them pale compared to the near black color of the rocks.

They held no ceiling or anything. They were abandoned—just like I was now.

Whatever they were meant to be in the beginning, they were left incomplete—exactly like I was now.

The rocks beneath my bloody feet jutted out in uneven slabs. Most were small, some almost as big as me, reminding me of those black shards that had come out of the ground in the Hollow.

This wasn’t the Hollow, though. This was an abandoned piece of the shore with trees at its back and eternal darkness its companion.

Vair was beside me. Ahead, Raja stood alone, barefoot, too, her sword on the ground. She was looking out at the dark trees, their height half that of the pillars, their branches full of dark leaves that could have been hiding anything. Anyone.

But they weren’t hiding Rune.

A noise rang in my ears, taking away the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks just below the edge of the shore.

Rune wasn’t here.

I wanted to run.

I wanted to sit down and pass out until the world was right again.

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs .

Yet I could do neither. I could only stand there like a fool on borrowed strength, looking out into the darkness, waiting for him to pop up out of thin air.

Raja turned.

Our eyes locked and my stomach tied in a thousand knots. There were shadows leaking out of her fingertips. There were tears in her eyes and blood on her bare feet.

“He went to his father.”

The words were like small blades cutting every inch of my skin at once.

Raja turned, came toward me, and the lights she’d been holding up around us had already disappeared. I still saw the shape of her, still saw her tears glistening, catching what little light was there to catch.

And when she made to simply move around the rock that hid the entrance of the tunnel, I somehow got my legs to work again, and stepped in front of her.

“Why?” I asked and I sounded like a stranger to my own ears.

“The truth,” she spit, and when she closed her eyes to draw in a deep breath, two tears slid down her cheeks. “He went to him to search for the truth and to demand his memory back.”

“We have to stop him,” I said, but somehow my words were empty. Like I already knew what Raja was going to say.

“He wanted to go alone,” she said through gritted teeth. “He delivered a message before entering the palace walls—he wants you to wait in the cave for him to return.” She raised her chin. “He wants us to trust him.”

Trust him.

My eyes closed but no tears slipped out of them. They were dry as a bone because I was too numb to cry. A memory was replaying in my mind—that of Rune’s face, his eyes wide open, his lips moving as he brought a golden knife toward my chest. “ Trust me.”

That’s what he’d said to me at that table when Lyall ordered him to stab me through the chest. He wanted me to trust him, and I had.

By the time I opened my eyes again, Raja was gone. I’d felt her moving past me and into the tunnel, but I was still surprised to find that I was alone with Vair. And her sword lying there on the rocks.

I wasn’t sure why I was moving to it, why I picked it up.

I thought it would be heavy—it was a long blade, the handle made out of black leather, but it was feather light, no heavier than a kitchen knife.

My perception was warped in those moments, and I was aware of it.

I could have sworn that the wind was whispering in my ear, too, and that the anger in my blood was screaming at me to run.

My entire body was pissed off that I’d had all that anger in me, all that fear, and it had simply…stopped.

Because of those two words. Trust me.

Somehow, by some miracle, I turned around with the sword in hand, and I went back down the tunnel and into the cave.

Surreal. I sat at the very edge of the rocks, no longer concerned if the floor would cave under my weight.

I looked out into the darkness as the water sprayed me from ahead.

The ceiling of the cave extended a dozen feet farther than the floor here, but on the sides, the seabed went on and on, so much farther into the darkness, and there were rocks and small pools made out of the pouring water underneath—and who knew how far below the rocks it went?

Who knew what more existed in this never-ending abyss?

All these thoughts from my own self trying to keep me distracted. Trying to keep me from thinking about the one thing that mattered to me even in an infinite number of universes.

Rune had gone to his father while I’d been asleep because of me.

Because I hadn’t been convincing enough when I told him I didn’t care about the truth—because I did.

I fucking cared, and how was I to exist in my skin now, knowing that?

Knowing I was the reason, once more, that he might be going to his own fucking death?

That’s why these thoughts came. That’s why I was so caught up in the details. My own self trying to keep me from running back to the Midnight Palace because Rune had told me to trust him.

And I did.

But did I trust his father?

“He knows what he is doing,” said Vair—and I heard him, even though the sound of the water was very loud.

He sat with me at the very edge of the lip of the cave, looking out at the water and the darkness and the stars like he had nothing better to do. He hadn’t left my side for a second.

Raja was lying on her own cloak near the entrance, back turned to me, not moving a single inch, just like I found her when I came back and put her sword near her bag. She was still in the exact same position for… how long had it been since Rune ran away ?

I had no idea.

“You cannot run from the truth. It will haunt you until you find it.”

Vair again.

I looked at him, at his glowing fur, at his wide blue eyes. A lynx who sometimes looked more like a fox, and who used my voice to speak, even my eyes to see.

“He did the right thing, and you know it,” he continued.

I couldn’t bring myself to speak yet.

“The Ice Queen would have sat here and waited for his return.”

The Ice Queen. The one who started it all.

Or…did she?

“How long were you her pet, Vair?” Once more, I sounded…strange. The lynx sounded more like me than I did.

“A long time.” He dragged himself a little closer, looking up at me with his eyes wide. Waiting—though I wasn’t sure what for.

“And how long was she queen before her death?” I wondered.

“Eighty winters,” Vair said. “Why do you ask?”

“Eighty years a queen, and she died at the hand of a six-year-old boy.”

Silence in the cave, except for the sound of the pouring water my ears had grown so used to that I no longer could tell it was there. I didn’t wonder why I heard Vair’s voice so clearly, either—what did it matter?

Then the air cooled down suddenly, and the water stopped spraying me, and the sound of it dulled down almost all the way, too, like someone had turned down the volume.

“It never did make much sense. ”