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Natasha
THE DAM BROKE.
Everything she’d been holding back, all her fear and terror at what she was doing, how Loiner was manipulating her, it all welled to the surface and washed over her at once. Fears for her future, disgust at the way she’d treated Rane and what she had been attempting to do to the dragons when she was caught, it all mixed together into a blend of hatred and self-damnation.
“What the hell is going on, Natasha?” Rane snarled, uncaring of her state. “Start talking. Now.”
“It’s Master Loiner,” she said through the tears.
“Is it? Because you’re the one I see in front of me right now,” he said, hatred thick in his voice. “You’re the one trying to sneak into my room with an envelope of papers that look very much like attack plans on Winterspell. This one here is a note that talks about eliminating the Coven and Circe in a surprise assault, killing them all before they can respond.”
“Oh God,” she moaned. “I’m so sorry. I had no choice.”
Rane crossed his arms. “What have you gotten yourself into, Natasha? Start from the beginning. Tell me everything, or I swear I will make you pay for this, personal feelings for you or not.”
“Please,” she whispered hoarsely. “You have to believe, I never wanted to hurt you.”
“These,” he growled, shaking the papers violently. “These tell a different story. So, explain. You’re running out of time.”
He was practically trembling, working to restrain his anger. She’d used him, and now he knew it. Natasha wasn’t sure how he would act, but it was clear that for the moment at least, he couldn’t believe just what she’d been using him for. It must be gnawing at his insides, eating him apart to finally discover what she’d done.
“I...I was blackmailed into it,” Natasha admitted, bowing her head in shame, not wanting to look at him.
“What do you mean? Why would someone do that to you? How would they do that to you?” he growled.
Natasha took a long time in answering, struggling to accept the real truth of it all. “I guess,” she said, sniffling hard, working to compose herself. “I suppose I did it to myself, technically.”
The self-admission of guilt seemed to surprise him, as if he hadn’t expected her to be able to admit it. But Natasha knew who the real one at fault was. The only one to blame.
“Go on,” was all he said out loud, not interested in anything but straight answers.
“Winterspell is built on politics, Rane,” she explained to him. “The Masters who head up the various schools, or who have been around a long time, they wield a lot of power. In many of them, that breeds a desire for more power, including a spot on the Coven, or even the title of Circe, head of all Winterspell.”
Rane chewed on his lip. Judging by the look on his face, Natasha suspected he had an idea who one of the other players in this was. It wasn’t that surprising, because Loiner had crossed paths with the dragons since the day Damien had landed in the main courtyard. The woman hated sharing the spotlight and feared the dragons were after her power.
“I tried going it alone. It was fine; as a Novice, nobody cares about you. You haven’t proven yourself worthy of attention. Even graduating into Initiate status doesn’t garner you much attention, unless you do so faster than most others. But as you progress, nearing the end of Initiate level, the Masters start to take notice in you. To help propel you along.”
“Get to the point,” he growled.
Natasha flinched, but nodded. “After my progress slowed, I allied myself with a Master who had approached me. Since then, over the past two years, she helped ensure my progress got back on track, that it wasn’t being derailed.”
“What a fucking terrible system.” Rane said, disgusted at what she was saying.
“Are you any different?” she asked, half curious, half suspecting that they were more similar than he wanted to admit.
“We’re not talking about Dracians here,” he growled, all but confirming her suspicion. “We haven’t done anything wrong.”
Still, he was correct. “I know.” She sighed and continued her story. “But I was involved in it, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.”
“How did that lead you to framing us?” he wanted to know.
Natasha looked at him, and she felt sadness pouring into her soul at what she was going to say next. He didn’t deserve what she’d done to him and telling the truth would hurt him more than anything else. “She told me to get close to you. To use your trust of me to find out what you are up to.”
Rane frowned. “I’m not up to anything.”
She knew that wasn’t exactly true. He was up to something, but Natasha was fairly confident that whatever it was, it wasn’t nefarious. Certainly not along the lines of what Loiner assumed they were doing.
“Not you specifically, but the dragons as a whole. She’s obsessed with finding out what you’re planning.”
“We’re planning how to stay alive, something that bitch is making harder to do because she keeps tempting us into wanting to squeeze her neck,” Rane snapped, his anger directed elsewhere for the moment.
Then her words sank home, and his gaze snapped back to Natasha. “She...ordered you to befriend me?” he asked, voice sounding weak.
Natasha’s heart broke as pain washed across his face. “Rane...yes, maybe at first I was acting like I wanted to be your friend because she made me. But I promise, I swear to you, that it wasn’t—”
“Enough,” he said, cutting her off, stealing her air once more to stop her from speaking. “Just stop.”
Natasha tried to gulp down air, to speak again, but she couldn’t suck anything in. No air was getting past his barrier. Her lungs worked, but nothing came. It wasn’t long before they began to scream at her, desperate for oxygen to feed her mind, her body.
Rane sat down, his gaze distant and unfocused. She tried to free herself of his bonds, but they were too strong. Her struggles were in vain, the only thing they accomplished using up more of her preciously dwindling supply of air. The corners of her vision dimmed as her situation grew direr by the second.
“You used me,” he said, looking up at last.
By now Natasha’s eyes were bulging wide. The room was dark, and she felt herself starting to swing toward unconscious. She feared that if she got that far, she would never come back. Perhaps out of guilt, perhaps to hear the rest of her story, she wasn’t sure, but for whatever reason, Rane eased the blockade, giving her air to breathe at long last.
She gasped and sucked in huge lungfuls of beautiful, wonderful air, barely able to focus on what he was saying as Rane started talking again.
“I thought you cared,” he said. “I let you in, I told you things that...that I hadn’t told many others. I felt something for you,” he growled. “But it was all a damn lie. A trick. Just another bit of your magic cast upon me, to think that you cared for me as well.”
“I did, Rane! I do!” she gasped, still short of breath, but wanting him to hear it from her mouth. She needed him to believe that, to believe that she hadn’t faked things as they grew closer. That all that was genuinely her. “I came to care for you. You have to believe me. That’s why I’m here.”
His jaw dropped open and he laughed in disbelief. “You’re going to have to explain that logic to me. Because framing someone for something he didn’t do, is not how you show you care.”
“Don’t you see though?” Natasha said. “I didn’t betray you. That’s why Loiner came to me to make me do this. She was pissed at me for not using you more, for not finding out what you and the dragons are planning. So, she forced me to come plant something fake! I didn’t give you up!”
“There was nothing to give up in the first place!” he fired back hotly. “We’re not planning anything. We’re not up to anything. We just want to survive. Our planet was destroyed, Natasha. Our species wiped out. Imagine if the rest of your planet, all the humans out there, suddenly died.”
Natasha fell silent, unable to picture how such an atrocity would affect her.
“That’s not even the worst of it. Imagine that slowly, they turned on you. Loved ones, friends, family. All of them trying to kill you as the disease spread. They tracked you down, killed without discrimination. Wiped you out, until only a few of you remained. What do you think you would do if you fled somewhere? Would your first instinct be to try and take over, to oust the people who gave you shelter and helped protect you? Because mine wouldn’t be.”
“I’m sorry, Rane,” she said quietly. “I...I didn’t know what would happen.”
“Bullshit,” he snarled. “You knew exactly what would happen. You’re smart; whatever else you may be, you’re that. Don’t try to act like you didn’t know exactly how this would all end. You were just too busy trying to protect your precious self to do something about it.” He snorted. “Now that would have proven to me that you did care. Being willing to sacrifice yourself for me, for the dragons. I might have believed that.”
“I see.” She slumped her head. “Well you have the papers now, so you can destroy them. I’ll go, and we’ll just leave it at that.”
Rane laughed at her, forehead wrinkling in surprise. “Let you go? Why on earth would I do that?” he said, his voice becoming a vicious snarl by the end.
Natasha swallowed nervously, the depths of her predicament coming into stark clarity as Rane got up and left the room, leaving her pinned to the wall. The air grew thinner around her mouth, and in seconds she was struggling to breathe once more.
He’s preventing me from having enough oxygen to scream or cast a spell but leaving just enough so that I don’t die.
She was trapped there, in his quarters, pinned to the wall. Helpless.
Loiner would come get her eventually though. She’d told Loiner she was planning to do it tonight, and when she went missing the next morning, the Master would start a search party for her...
No, she won’t. Doing that would be tantamount to admitting to knowing where I was, and why. Loiner would never implicate herself in something like that.
Natasha was on her own, and she was in a world of trouble. Completely at Rane’s mercy, whatever he decided to do to her.
