Page 70 of The Eighth Isle

I reached out my shaking hand to touch Grey’s. “I’m fine,” I whispered. “Sit down, please.”

Grey didn’t want to, but he also knew that Syra could easily just throw him in the ocean right now and do with me whatever she wanted. I knew it since the moment I stepped into the room—that was not the way to go about it with her. If we had any hopes of escaping this place, it would be bynotaggravating her. By submitting to her—or pretending to.

And Grey knew it just as well.

He finally moved his wings away, and the fork that had been in the left one fell to the floor with a loud noise. By the time they disappeared into his back again, his shirt now torn, Syra had produced another fork and was eating peacefully like nothing at all had happened.

Grey looked like he might lose his mind for real like that, hair all over the place and fangs extended, eyes bloodshot as he looked at Syra first, then at me.

And when our eyes locked, he leaned back in his chair.We can’t win this,I told him in my mind, and I actually believed that he could hear me—or that he knew me well enough to figure out what I was thinking through the look in my eyes alone.

“You know what I’ve been wondering?”

We all turned to Valentine, who had leaned back in his chair and was playing with his cup, eyes on his empty plate but he wasn’t really seeing anything, lost in thought.

“What if we create a network between the Isles, too—a brand new network that would connect us at an incredible speed. Something faster than even magic.”

I blinked and blinked and expected him to burst out laughing, to say that it was a joke, but then he turned to Syra.

“Oh—like the Internet?” she asked.

“Betterthan the Internet because we have magic as well. Imagine if we found a way to merge it with technology,” said Valentine and he was already so invested.

Like he hadn’t even seen what had happened a minute ago right across the table from him.

Like he couldn’t care less that we were there at all.

My God, he really was heartless. The way he was smiling made my stupid—stupidheart break into a thousand more pieces.

“I like it,” Syra said. “Talk to me—what are you thinking?” And she, too, leaned back in her chair, sipped her coffee and listened to Valentine.

Within the minute, neither could care less that we existed, and I was thankful for it, though it didn’t last. And when we were done eating, Syra announced that I needed to be in this very room for lunch and dinner as well. Otherwise, she was going to be forced to either transport me here against my will or have one of her golems carry me over their shoulder.

She even promised to make sure Grey couldn’t be there to save me, too, and that’s how she won. I’d be there for lunch and dinner on the clock as long as she kept those fucking hands off Grey.

So, then I was free to go—back to the room, she said, to rest.

That’s where I went.

In my white dress, feeling like I carried a world on my shoulders, I lay down on the bed. I pretended Grey was with me and we were actually in a cave, forgotten by the world, and I slept again just to escape reality.

I was alonefor lunch and dinner. No sign of Grey or Valentine or Syra anywhere, but I didn’t really search. I couldn’t for the life of me convince myself to go do what I’d been so motivated to do just that morning—find a way out of this castle, out of the entire Isle. So, all I did was sleep. Lie down and stare at the ceiling and daydream about Grey, then sleep some more.

My life had become so damn exhausting, and sometimes it felt like this was all happening to someone else, not me.

To this day I’m convinced that that’s what got me through the worst of it. That’s how I survived that very first day.

Then came the second.

I was alone for breakfast, too, and by then I was craving to see Grey again, so going back to the room after I’d eaten wasn’t going to happen. I’d taken the day before to escape my reality, to not allow myself to think about the fact that I waspregnantor trapped on yet another magical isle, only this time by an even more powerful predator. A worse predator, one who would hurt the man I loved because at that point I couldn’t care less about myself anymore. But she would hurt Grey, and this baby that I now apparently had inside me.

And I had to accept all of that and continue to submit.

Syra had furnished the entire castle, it seemed. I found the room where she usually hung out, where those throne-like chairs were and that table with the red light she and Valentine had been looking at two nights ago.

They weren’t there now, but the room was full of things—carpets and glass in the windows, two large TV screens and a speaker as tall as me at the corner. Lamps were on all around the room and the liquors on the stand at the side of those throne chairs glowed in different colors, but the oversized blue fireflies were still floating around close to the ceiling even in the daylight.

She’d filled the hallways and corridors with doors and flowers, and the stairs now had railings, too, made of black glass, engraved so beautifully they were a piece of art on their own. But even though now the place looked like someone actually lived here, it was completely empty. Not even golems walked the hallway or the stairs, and I descended another flight before I came to this round room with tree balconies at the edges, all with beautifully engraved glass doors that were half open, luring me to them as if by magic.

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