CHAPTER TEN

For the first time in my life I had trouble eating. Judging by the number of meals they’d brought me, I’d been here a full two days by now. The lights had abruptly gone out for the night a few hours after a dinner tray had been delivered to me, the food going cold and untouched—the sight of it alone made my stomach turn. My appetite had not returned this morning, and now a guard took away my breakfast tray and replaced it with a lunch tray. I greedily drank the water, but after trying one bite of the dry sandwich, I pushed it away and curled back up on the bed.

I blotted my eyes with the sleeves of the uniform they had given me. They felt bruised and sore.

If Carlo was my soul mate, then I would never have a click in this lifetime. But if he wasn’t, that meant they were still out there. I could have a click as soon as I turned eighteen. I was an Awakened—had drunk from the Golden Chalice. Even if I wanted to stay true to my original plan—which was to avoid next year’s Gathering, like Adrian had done—there was still a chance I’d be in the same place as my soul mate and make physical contact with them. Maybe we’d accidentally brush shoulders at the beach, or there would be an introductory handshake—any skin-to-skin touch and a click would be triggered.

There had to be a way to break it. Some kind of ancient way of undoing what had been done. What had we learned about our Awakening? My annoying selective memory came up with nothing. All I desperately wanted now was freedom. Freedom from this cell so I could find a way to free myself from the possibility of getting stuck with my soul mate for life.

There was no way my Hellenic textbooks had the answers I was looking for. I would have remembered something if it had come up in my lessons. Wait. Maybe the Court had stored information about this. Maybe this was the kind of information Royals were privy to. Kris hadn’t lived at Court since she was ten years old, so I’d have better luck asking either Vlad or Adrian. Both of them had grown up here and had gone to the Royal High Court Academy, and Adrian still lived here.

Yes. I would start with them.

Noise came from the entrance of my tiny cell. The door slid open and a woman in a dress the color of pomegranates stood there. She was older than my mom, maybe around fifty years old. Her dark-blond hair was gathered into a simple ponytail at the nape of her neck, and she wore a brooch of a diadem with lilies on either side of it. It was so unique and beautiful. I was mesmerized, at least until her head tilted eerily as she regarded me with unrestrained curiosity.

I scrambled up off the bed and stood in the corner of the room, my eyes never leaving her.

She hit a button on the keypad outside the room and the door closed. The two of us were now alone in the claustrophobic cell. My anxiety grew as she paced around the secluded area, pausing every now and then to eye me warily. I asked bravely, “What do you want?”

“Not what I want. What the Faction wants,” she answered.

“What Faction?”

To my horror, she burst into hysterical laughter. I wasn’t sure this woman was in her right mind. I gazed wistfully at the door, wondering if the guards had heard her and would come to take her away. “Oh, you really are clueless, aren’t you, little Awakened one? Never safe, no chance to run.” She paused, her twisted smile fading. “I’ll die here.”

“We’re safe here,” I spat out, trying to reassure her and curb her insanity. “The Court Guards won’t let anything happen to you.”

“No place is safe.” The woman fiddled with her fingers anxiously, cold sweat dripping off her forehead. “Once those stupid Myrmidons learn that the inevitable cannot be avoided, that keeping the secret child alive and hidden all these years was for nothing, it will cause a distraction. Enough to grab the file from the archives and run.” She let out a lamenting sigh, “Oh! It was supposed to be easy. You weren’t supposed to be in here!” She raised her hand and I cowered, thinking she was going to hit me. Instead, she slapped her own face, hard.

She raised her hand to do it again, and I jumped in front of her, catching her wrist. “Stop! Hitting yourself won’t do anything.”

Terror overtook her eyes. “She will find me,” the woman croaked. “She will find me, for I have failed her. She will have me tortured.”

“Hey, hey.” I inched closer to her, maintaining a safe distance while calming her down by rubbing her shoulder. “Listen, I get that it sucks to be in jail, but they follow the law here. Torture is illegal. Not even the queen could hurt you.”

“Oh, poor child.” She barked, “I am not scared of the queen. She’s nothing compared to her. I can’t be like Lamia. I can’t let her touch Petros and Iosif. I can’t.” She backed away from me, crying into her hands as she crumpled to the floor. At least now she didn’t look like she was about to murder me.

I crouched down next to her. “Listen,” I said, knowing that my words were meaningless, “no one’s going to hurt you.”

The second I let my guard down she moved with lightning speed and lunged at me, her hands wrapping around my neck. I released an ear-splitting scream as I tried to escape her, hitting and kicking wildly, but she was determined to choke the life out of me.

I punched at her again, but my fist hit something else—a boot? Two guards came into the cell. They yanked her off me, restraining her violently and dragging her away. I scurried back into the far corner, curling my knees up into my chest, crying with relief.

“What the hell just happened?” Officer Warwick asked me.

“I should be the one asking that,” I choked out.

Officer Warwick barked orders to the three guards behind him to secure the perimeter. He then kneeled down and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You’re going to be okay.”

He picked me up like I weighed nothing and brought me to the medical room located at the back of the building. The nurse stood almost immediately when Officer Warwick slid the door open using only his elbow. The doctor, who was in the middle of reading something, set her papers down and adjusted her glasses, nestling them on the bridge of her nose. The doctor pointed to a bed attached to the wall and told me to make myself comfortable. Even in the best of conditions this would have been difficult because the blanket on top of the thin mattress was made out of a scratchy, puke-yellow fabric.

Officer Warwick put me down on the bed. “I’ll wait outside,” he said with a nod.

In addition to the physical checkup, the doctor also asked me how I was feeling. In all honesty, I was in shock. It was not every day a woman spewed nonsense at me before trying to kill me. Yet, if I was honest with the doctor, the examination would take much longer. It was funny how just yesterday I had been so desperate to leave my cell that I had been willing to have a visit from my parents. Now, all I wanted was to get back to my cell so I could be alone. After convincing her that there was nothing wrong with me, I was given permission to leave. I thanked her before getting up to go.

Officer Warwick, who had been leaning against the wall adjacent to the door, took two long strides to meet me. “Commander Hudson would like to have a word with you.”

When would this endless cycle end? We got to the end of the hall and Officer Warwick swung open the door to Commander Hudson’s office. I stepped into the dated office. Commander Hudson was waiting for me behind his desk. “Ms. Montgomery, please have a seat.”

He spent the next twenty minutes quizzing me about everything the strange woman had said to me. Once he ran out of questions, his all-business façade dropped. He looked at me with genuine compassion and said, “I am so sorry, Avery, that you went through that.”

My eyes widened a little. It was the first time he had used my first name, and from his voice, it seemed that he was actually genuine.

“She shouldn’t have been able to get in here.” His brow furrowed. “I’m going to get to work on your release papers right away. Then you’ll be free to go.”

Apparently almost getting strangled to death is a get-out-of-jail-free card, and I wasn’t about to argue with that.