Page 82 of The Last One Standing (Rogue X Ara #4)

The ward’s fear wasn’t nearly as debilitating as it had been with Rogue. It was more manageable today, reduced to a ball of nerves in my gut, but hell, I dealt with worse on a daily basis.

Either alcohol dulled my survival instincts, or Stryath’s mate was granting me passage.

I wondered if Alden found the same book that Adonis had, the Blood and the Broken , the journal written by a madman that Adonis took as fact—the scribbles that led to the crumbling of kingdoms and the demise of thousands, including Alden.

I hoped that wasn’t all he’d found. Adonis had forced me to read that book years ago, and without context, I hadn’t understood any of it.

The stories were disjointed, thoughts disconnected, sentences ending abruptly, sketches drawn over passages.

The fact that it’d been copied and distributed was unfathomable to me, but the man, the seer and veil walker, had been famous in his time, prized for his work.

According to Adonis, it was only this journal written the way it was.

The ritual he intended to use was one of the readable pages, though I hadn’t understood it at the time.

The oil within the lamp sloshed with the force of my shaking, and I lowered it to my side.

I couldn’t lose it entirely without Rogue returning, though I knew he stood nearby, taut as a bowstring, using every ounce of restraint he possessed—close enough that the blood oath wasn’t splitting my skull into pieces.

I peeled my eyes open and stared at my feet, tucked within thick leather boots and two pairs of wool socks. I stared, afraid that if I looked around, I’d find him peering from the shadows, and if I met his gaze, I would fall apart, and we didn’t have time for that.

My heart ached, a deep, visceral hurt that had me hunching over to catch my breath for a moment. I wished Rogue couldn’t feel this, but I knew he would be—one of the many reasons for the guilt growing heavier in my gut.

The fact that he still hadn’t rushed over spoke volumes. He must be really close by, close enough to see that I wasn’t in physical danger, because there was no way in any hell he’d be able to do anything else.

Rogue didn’t deserve to feel this.

With another long pull of liquor, my insides turned warm.

Numbness wouldn’t be far behind, and then, we’d both be spared this feeling for a few hours.

I just had to toe the line between drunk and unconscious.

I couldn’t read if I was unconscious, only sleep, and not a single part of me wanted that.

It wouldn’t be dreams waiting for me, only memories and nightmares.

When I finally reached the end of the aisle, my heart sank. I stood face to face with the same wall we had days ago. Nothing had changed, and my bottle was nearly empty.

“Fuck, maybe it really isn’t this aisle,” I muttered, pressing myself into the stone to peer though the gap between the end of the shelves and the wall.

It looked the same as far as I could see.

No doors. No hidden rooms.

Just stone.

“What am I supposed to do?” I hissed at Alden. “I need help.”

I couldn’t squeeze through the gap to follow along the wall, and I couldn’t walk through stone. My only other choice was to turn around, but turning around meant coming back the way I came. It meant facing things I’d already seen, felt, lived.

Turning around meant looking back, and I couldn’t do that.

I didn’t want to look at anything at all, actually.

Leaning into the wall, I lay my head on it and closed my eyes. It was solid and cold, practically as old as the world, and I found myself wondering what it had seen and heard in its millennium.

Most likely, near to nothing.

This corner had been forgotten and left untouched for far too long. A hint of mildew hung in the air, the moisture higher here without fireplaces to dry out the humidity. If I pulled a book from the shelf, I would undoubtedly find mold speckling the decaying pages—an infuriating creation.

What purpose did book mold serve, other than to deprive the world of knowledge and entertainment?

Pointless.

Worse. Pointless would mean synonymous with inconsequential, and this was anything but. This was detrimental.

Damaging.

Ruinous.

My throat bobbed.

Book mold and I were one and the same. Great.

I rolled my head until my forehead rested on the stone, thankful for the chill against my flushed skin.

I hadn’t been thankful for anything less than warm in such a long time, it caught me off guard. It felt like years, but it hadn’t been years, had it? Had it even been a month since I’d escaped that pit of hell?

If these few weeks felt like years, I couldn’t fathom what a lifetime would feel like.

“Fuck,” I mumbled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

My fingers curled against the stone. My cheeks burned, a storm swelling outside to match the one in my chest.

I didn’t want to die.

But I didn’t want to live like this .

I understood why the blood oath formed the way it did. Rogue was a focus-stealing, breath-stealing, intoxicating presence, a stunning soul placed into a stunning body, and he felt safe. He was safe.

Even so, I could still feel Adonis’s grimy claws in my head. His invasion had been removed, but the scars remained, and I didn’t know how to rid myself of them.

I was beginning to lose faith that his death would be enough. He wasn’t here now, yet his hold was crushing as ever. I feared it would stay with me, an unwanted, permanent reminder that I was weak. Gullible. Tricked, kidnapped, and tortured.

The ghost of a large hand planted between my shoulder blades so slowly, a laugh bubbled up. They touched me like I was a feral animal, and they were afraid I’d turn around and bite them—maybe I would. I had.

I removed Adonis’s finger once upon a time.

It grew back.

My laugh crumbled into a cry that morphed into a scream of frustration.

I should’ve known right then and there. Not that he was immortal, but that he was an incurable disease. No matter how many times I escaped him, the infection returned. Even when he wasn’t here, he held my existence—my peace in a vise grip.

The hand on my back pushed.

“Wait, stop,” I tried to say.

A scream caught in my throat when I hit the wall. I pushed off with both hands, hissing when one of the stones sliced my fingertip. A dark drop stained the gray rock.

They shoved with two hands, and I stumbled forward, throwing my arms out to gain some semblance of balance.

I spun around, too inebriated to understand what had just happened. Behind me stood a wall, the opposite side of the one I’d been shoved against. I stepped closer and flattened my hand over it. My eyes widened.

It was real.

I patted my hands down my form.

I was real.

Sucking in a shaky breath, I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus. It must’ve been hidden behind a similar blood barrier to Vaelor’s nook.

I turned, squinting for a light source. The fireplace held only ash, so I resorted to a candle, using a spark at my fingertips to ignite it.

It took a few tries, but it eventually caught and illuminated the room enough for me to take it in.

It wasn’t large, but the ceiling was mindbogglingly high with a glass panel revealing the night sky.

Stars would’ve sparkled through the skylight if I hadn’t shrouded them in clouds.

Bookshelves stretched up to the ceiling with a rolling ladder, and I was suddenly overwhelmed.

Mounds covered the entire surface of her desk: stacks of books, loose papers, journals, quills and empty ink bottles, wadded up paper tossed haphazardly.

One of the pages caught my eye, however, the handwriting recognizably Alden’s. He’d listed out the vendors in Canyon, including their trade or product.

I dropped the parchment, and it floated back down to the others.

I walked around the desk and sat in the chair, lifting the light to the closest stack of books.

Each one pertained to history of some sort, ranging from the beginning to relatively recent—right up Alden’s alley.

Pages and pages of the notes he took while reading sat atop them.

He must’ve spent quite some time in here.

“Were you just perusing her collection,” I muttered, “or were you looking for the weapon in particular?”

Rain pattered on the glass above as I moved to the next stack, entirely fiction, almost entirely romance. The note stuck to the top read: for Ara.

I ran my fingers over the letters, the ache in my heart returning. The rum didn’t last nearly as long as I’d hoped.

I jerked to my feet, the chair nearly toppling over, but I snagged it and brought it down on all fours again.

With blurring vision, I tripped over the wastebasket and caught myself on the edge of the desk, toppling a stack of books in the process. They coincidentally hit the edge of the wastebasket, which flipped and sent balls of wadded paper flying into the air.

I inhaled until my lungs couldn’t take anymore and exhaled slowly. “I can practically hear your laughter from here.”

After grabbing the candle holder, I attempted to navigate the mess without damaging any more books, but stopped in my tracks when a metallic glint caught my eye. A silver-foiled design peeked out from beneath the pile. I couldn’t see much of it, but it almost looked like the tip of a blade.

My heart thundered in my ears.

I knelt to pull it out and nearly sobbed at the cover.

It wasn’t the Blood and the Broken .

It was better.

I sat on the floor and turned the now-empty basket upside down to set the candle holder on.

The leather binding of the book had dry rotted, the spine cracked, and edges flaking.

With bated breath, I opened to the first page, and sprawled in neat handwriting was the title, Death’s Guide to Legendary Weapons.

This must have been one of the author’s earlier books before his mind slipped, because it was nothing like the book Adonis had shown me. It started with a detailed and cohesive explanation of how he acquired the knowledge.