Chapter 36

“Shhh,” a voice whispers from behind me. “If you make a sound, your throat gets slit right now. Don’t do anything rash.”

My blood freezes in my veins. This is… not great. It’s one thing to be grabbed by a drunken, unarmed creep, and quite another to be held at knifepoint, unable to even see my assailant.

“What do you want?” I ask, careful to keep my voice down.

“Are you Catarina Ansaldi?” the voice asks.

I grimace. He knows my full name. That’s a bad sign. He probably knows other things about me, perhaps even that I am quite capable in a fight. If he’s not going to be underestimating me, my chances are going down significantly. My best bet right now is to see if I can get him talking and stall him long enough for Rhys to come back, assuming this guy didn’t already take him out.

“That depends on who I’m talking to,” I say in a conversational whisper.

The man scoffs. “Do you really think I’m stupid enough to tell you who I am?”

“I just mean that, you know, my friends call me Cat, not Catarina. But I have a feeling you and I aren’t going to be very good friends, are we? So for you, Catarina is fine.”

He snorts. “I heard you were funny. Unfortunately, funny isn’t going to get you out of this, Catarina. You’re going to come with me, and you’re going to do so calmly and quietly, or I’ll be leaving you here on the ground in a puddle of your own blood.”

The knife digs into my skin. Reluctantly, I start to walk with him, though I’m careful not to go too fast.

“You heard I’m funny?” I ask. “What else have you heard about me?”

“I’ve heard that you have a tendency to lose your guards. I feel bad for the one you ditched tonight. I know they fired the last one you ran away from.”

My pulse quickens. So he didn’t take Rhys out. My stalling isn’t pointless. Rhys is going to be back any second, as long as I don’t get too far away before he does. I have to keep talking to give him a chance to sneak up on this guy.

“What can I say? I hate being followed around everywhere. Khysmet always has me tailed wherever I go. It’s so frustrating to have such a controlling lover, you know? Have you ever dated someone who wants to know where you are at all times?”

“You know, I could have sworn I said something about staying quiet.”

“Hey, I’m whispering. How much more quiet could you want me to–”

Just then, I hear a rustling from somewhere close by. My assailant hears it too, and turns toward the sound. All of a sudden, he’s jumping back and to the side away from me, and I feel a whoosh of air across my back. I stumble forward and turn around to see Rhys, brandishing his sword, which I’m guessing he just swung at the guy while he was right behind me. A violent shiver runs up and down my spine. Thank the gods it’s Rhys who’s watching over me, because I wouldn’t trust any of the other guards to try that shit.

Once I turn around, I can finally see my assailant, though he’s clad in a heavy, hooded cloak that obscures all discernible features. Rhys chases him across the clearing, taking swing after swing, but the man nimbly dodges away from every strike. I take one of my own knives out and get in a ready stance, following behind the action without getting too close. I desperately want to jump in and help, but I don’t know if I can do anything without getting in the way and making things all the more difficult for Rhys. Instead, I focus on trying to triangulate my location in the hopes that the man might run my way while trying to escape Rhys’s blade.

All of a sudden, I see the hooded man throw the knife he had pressed against my throat mere moments before. Rhys flinches and recoils as It sticks hard in his lower abdomen.

Everything sharpens in an instant as my adrenaline spikes. I prepare to run in and pick up the gauntlet the second that Rhys goes down, ready to rip this fucker limb from limb now that he’s down a weapon. But before I can jump in, Rhys manages to clip the hooded man with the tip of his sword. The man loses his footing, and Rhys is on him in a second, swinging at him one, two, three more times, cleaving his flesh and causing blood to spray through the air, then thrusting through his ribs. The hooded man drops like a rock, motionless and clearly dead. It’s only after this that Rhys finally falls, first to his knees, then to his side.

I’m beside him in a second, rolling him over so I can better access his wound. The knife is stuck in deep, almost all the way to the hilt, having pierced through his leather armor like it was made of paper. There’s a lot of blood – more, I’m sure, because of the exertion he expended taking the hooded man down. I have no idea how bad it is or what might have been hit, since I don’t know the first thing about Sungian physiology. For some reason it only occurs to me now to scream.

“ELIZA!” I shriek at the top of my lungs while I lean down and start putting pressure on the wound. I know better than to take the knife out. Rhys moans uncomfortably when I touch the area around the knife.

“Don’t worry, Rhys, it’s going to be fine,” I reassure him, unable to keep the panic out of my voice completely, but trying my hardest. “You’re going to be fine. We’re going to get you help, okay?”

Eliza bursts out of her caravan and runs to me.

“Cat? What the fuck happened?” she demands, going pale as she sees the bloodstained scene not far from her front door.

“I need you to run and get a healer," I demand urgently, not bothering to answer her question. "The last time I was here, I remember there being one not far from the north entrance of the clearing, but ask whoever you see. Tell them that they will be compensated at ten times their usual rate as long as they get here right fucking now with everything they need to treat an abdominal stab wound. And on your way out, send one more person this way. Go.”

Eliza nods and instantly runs toward the torchlight to carry out my orders.

“Stay with me, Rhys, okay?” I beg. My already pounding heart pumps even harder as I look down to see that my hands are soaking in a puddle of his blood. I take my knife and cut a wide strip of fabric from my dress and use it to try and stem the flow as much as I can.

“It’s going to be okay,” I tell him and myself. “Rhys, can you hear me? Can you say something?”

Rhys moans weakly. It seems to take him significant effort to concentrate enough to form words, and when he does speak, it’s slow and shaky.

“I can hear you just fine,” he says. “You might not have noticed this, but my hearing is not really my biggest problem right now.”

Panic makes the laugh that erupts from me sound more like a choked sob than anything. Before I can respond to him, though, someone comes running toward us from the direction Eliza went moments ago, a young Warbler named Ivan. He looks like he's going to be sick when he sees the amount of blood on me, Rhys, and the ground around us, not to mention the lacerated body nearby.

“I need you to go to the west entrance,” I instruct, voice shaky and panicked but sure in its content. “You’ll find a carriage waiting there driven by a short green Sungian man named Felix. Go up to him and tell him, ‘I need to tell King Khysmet that Cat says Rhys is very badly injured.’ Got it? He’ll take you to the castle where you need to go in and find the first servant you see and tell them the same exact thing. Just keep repeating it as many times as you need to. Then you can just come back in the carriage with the king.”

Ivan nods and hurries away to find Felix.

I turn back to Rhys, whose eyelids are starting to flutter shut.

“Rhys, stay with me. Help is on the way, okay? Everything is going to be okay, you just have to stay with me.”

My words are getting more and more frantic, and I can’t stop them. I look down at the wound to check if the bleeding has slowed down at all from the pressure, but I can’t see clearly because my vision is starting to distort from the tears pooling in my eyes.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say, just babbling thoughtlessly at this point. “I promise you’ll be fine. Just stay with me, Rhys, please stay with me.”

“Cat,” he says in a quiet, pained voice. Then he coughs, and his body spasms feebly, probably lanced through with pain. His eyelids flutter open again and he meets my gaze.

“Cat, I’m not fucking going anywhere, okay?” he says. “Don’t piss yourself.”

The tears pooling in my eyes start flowing freely and liberally down my cheeks. Hearing my nickname from his lips only now, after all this time, is like a lance through my heart. His call back to our time in the tunnels, though, makes me laugh even through the crushing weight of fear pressing down on my sternum.

“Are you kidding?” I say. “This is a billion times more terrifying than a giant spider. Of course I pissed myself.”

He grins, weakly but genuinely. “Come on, Cat. Stop freaking out. I’m going to be fine.”

I scoff with a small choked sound. “What the hell are you trying to comfort me for, asshole?”

He chuckles, then winces and hisses air through his teeth as doing so causes his abdominal muscles to clench. He takes a couple deep, ragged breaths as he rides out the pain.

“This is probably as good a time as any to tell you,” he says, “that getting to dick around with you as your bodyguard has honestly been the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid.”

My chest squeezes like it’s being crushed in a vice. I have to wipe my eyes on my arm so that I’m not dripping salt water onto his open wound.

“First off, no, now is a horrible time to tell me that,” I inform him as sternly as I can through the sobs that are starting to catch in my throat. “Tomorrow is much better. Wait until then to tell me that.”

He shrugs. “Tomorrow I might not feel like it.”

A sort of manic giggle bubbles out of me. Why does he only decide to be funny when there’s either giant spiders everywhere or a gaping hole in his stomach?

“And secondly,” I continue, “you still are a kid. You’re only like twenty.”

He musters enough strength and concentration for just a moment to fix me with a glare. “Fuck you. I’m twenty-three.”

“So young,” I say wistfully.

He scoffs weakly. “How fucking old are you, then?”

“Twenty-six.”

“So ancient,” he says reverently.

“You’re damn right. Respect your elders, buddy.”

He chuckles, again wincing at the pain.

I’m about to tell him that using humor as a coping mechanism is a shitty idea when he has an abdominal wound, when I hear a shuffling nearby and look up to see Eliza holding a lamp and leading two Sungians over to where I’m crouched beside Rhys, one carrying a medical bag and the other a folded stretcher. The first shoos me out of the way brusquely and takes my place at Rhys’s side, taking a closer look at the wound, motioning for Eliza to hold the lamp so she can see. The other kneels down next to his head and has him open his mouth so she can place something in it, telling him to keep it under his tongue.

“We need to get him back to the office,” the first says. “Get the stretcher ready.”

From then on, all I can do is follow behind and watch as the healers carry him back to their practice. Along the way, I strongly remind them that money is no object, and they should use the best stuff they have. When they carry him into their building, though, one of them immediately shoves me back out of the room and closes the door in my face, leaving me out in the night air.

I don’t know what to do now. Without Rhys to talk to, to focus on, I have nothing anchoring me to this moment. I walk over the bench right outside the building, plunk down heavily, bury my face in my bloodstained hands, and dissolve into quiet, shuddering sobs.

The world around me fades into a sort of dim blur. Eliza sits beside me and pats me on the back, but I barely feel it. I think she might say something, too, but I don’t hear a word. I am oblivious to the passage of time as a black fog settles over all my senses. I don’t know how long I sit there doubled over with my head in my hands. Eventually, though, something cuts through the haze, a singular point of clarity that breaches the veil of darkness that so thoroughly smothers my entire being.

I hear Khysmet’s voice calling out to me.

I shoot up onto my feet so fast it makes Eliza gasp and almost fall backward on the bench, and I look around for him frantically. When I see him stepping out of the carriage, I sprint toward him and launch myself into his open arms. He grunts and has to take a step back from the force of impact, but he stays standing, solid and sure, and wraps his arms around me tight.

Everything is still hazy, but it’s a haze that smells so familiar and feels so safe. I think he says something, maybe asks Eliza a question, but I can’t make it out. I just feel the soothing thrum of his deep voice emanating from his chest, reverberating through my skin all the way to my bones. I melt against him all the more, grabbing at the back of his shirt with desperate, bloody fingers. The more he keeps talking, the more my racing heart slows, and the more the tension that I’ve been holding in my body since the knife now in Rhys’s abdomen was first pressed to my throat starts to finally ease.

Then for a moment, Khysmet’s arms loosen their hold on me. I panic immediately, whimpering and clawing at him, but he just puts one arm under my knees and lifts me up, then carries me over to the bench where he sits down and cradles me in his lap. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and bury my face in his neck. He holds me so, so tight, rocking back and forth gently and making little soothing noises. I sigh deeply and let go of the rest of that tension, curling up into him and letting his voice carry me to someplace where the pain clawing at my chest can no longer touch me.

END BOOK 1