Page 32 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

The wallsexpanded.

Moving away, sealing every opening until they were in a room with no exits. Then, like exhaling, the stone ground against stone and moved inward.

Walls scratched and moaned against the stone floor. The mountain rained loose stones and pelted them into their armor.

They were trapped.

Thalon summoned a portal. “Go.Now!” he screamed, waving them on.

Jade was the closest. Her red ponytail swung behind her as she leapt, only to be thrown backward and land on her back.

Wasting no time, Garrik’s palms twisted, calling upon Smokeshadows.

But they, too, didn’t show.

The males pounded their hands onto the contracting walls. Their boots slid against the stone floor as their strength fought to keep the walls from crushing them whole.

Jade’s eyes succumbed to terror—the first time, besides from flames, Alora had ever seen her that way.

Alora inhaled deeply before grabbing Jade’s hand and forcing a smile.

Jade didn’t smile back. Her eyes were locked onto Aiden struggling against the weight pressing into his palms.

“It’s going to be okay, Jade.” Alora squeezed her hand as a wall pressed against her back, pushing them closer to one another.

Garrik grunted. It shot a pain through her heart.

“Go help Aiden,” Alora commanded, and Jade finally broke her stare with a hard swallow and nod.

Surprisingly, Jade’s palm squeezed Alora’s before she flew forward and pressed her palms beside Aiden.

Her fingertips burned. Overwhelming panic rippled through her. But this wasn’t the time for panic. Even if she offered three times less the strength of Garrik, she still had to try. And when her palms smacked into the wall beside his hands and their eyes met, a sense of calm fluttered through her nerves.

Garrik nodded with his irritating smirk before they forced their combined strength into the wall.

Alora’s feet scraped the floor, pressing into something behind her. Only, when she turned, her heart sank, realizing that it was Thalon’s boot. Then another on the side of her foot. Jade’s.

The room had pushed them close together. Mere feet remained between them as the walls pushed closer and closer and closer.

Her head snapped to Garrik, who was already looking at her. In his eyes, she found regret and fury, woven together with a string of guilt and some sort of pain she couldn’t place.

He opened his mouth to speak, the veins in his forearms and neck bursting from the sheer strength he pressed into the wall. And just as his voice began and she heard her name so desperately on his lips?—

The floor gave out beneath them.

Alora’s legstwitched on a smooth, icy surface, leaving her bones shaking from the chill of the floor.

The same oblivion of damning darkness in the tunnels above dwelt here—whereverherewas.

It was like a crypt, capturing the deepest darkness and restraining it to lurk forever in the lowest pit of the mountain where nothing, not even starlight, reached.

A hardened cushion underneath her upper body created a barrier, keeping her from fully lying on the floor. Her hand traced the hard planes, sloping across solid inclines every few inches. She pictured the indentations as her warm fingers scraped curved shapes with pointed edges etched into the leathery surface.

Then, her skin met with flesh so frigid there was no mistaking who she landed on.

Her fingers traced across the thick collar of Garrik’s armor and brushed against the ridged scar on his neck. When she met his jaw, she felt his skin tighten as if he had smiled.

Garrik’s unusual heartbeat thudded into her ear pressing to his chest. He breathed—thank Maker of the Skies. And when that breath inhaled heavily, his deep voice asked, “Are you alright? Anything broken?”

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