Page 77 of Gothikana

She did. She told him about the feminine voice she’d heard the first time at the lake, of the voice she heard every time she’d gone near it, and of the dream.

‘You don’t really think there’s anything to it, right?’ she swallowed, needing the reassurance.

He stroked her back with his fingers mindlessly, quiet for a long minute.

‘I think tomorrow you need to make a call to Dr Detta and I need to make a call to the Board,’ he finally stated, distracted. ‘I’ve seen enough things I cannot explain in my life not to write off whatever this is. From my knowledge, the lake was never dragged before.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, but his voice held an edge of something Corvina couldn’t decipher.

She looked at the clock on the wall. It was already five in the morning, the sky still dark outside.

‘Can we go to the lake?’ she asked him, getting out of bed and finding her clothes on the floor.

‘What’s the point of going right now?’ He leaned back on his elbows, watching her with those sharp eyes. ‘We can’t dredge the lake by ourselves. The Board will get a team up here by noon.’

Corvina felt jittery, unsettled, the dream still at the forefront of her mind. ‘I don’t know. I just… I need some air.’

She quickly put on her clothes and tied her hair back with her choker ribbon, wrapping the shawl around herself. Just as she headed to the door, she felt him at her back.

‘You’re not going there alone,’ he stated, pulling the door open.

Grateful for his company, because she really hadn’t wanted to go there by herself, Corvina followed him silently as he snuck them out, zipping up a jacket and pulling the hood over his head.

They went out into the dark, cold, foggy morning, the wind an assault on their skin. He picked up a lantern from the side of the doorand flicked his lighter, turning it on, leading them to their right. Thankfully, the rain had stopped, leaving behind only a trail of moist mist that clung to them. Corvina looked at the stairs she’d taken up the mountain, confused.

‘There’s a shorter path that cuts through here,’ he told her, taking her into the dark woods to the side.

A chill went down her spine, a frisson of fear as he led them to the black mouth of a tunnel she hadn’t even known existed.

He pulled the lantern up and turned to her, extending his hand palm up, his face half-glowing in the light from the flame, half-darkened from the night around them. Corvina looked into the mouth of the tunnel, her heart beating rapidly, knowing this was the moment of truth.

‘What if he’s been evil all along, Corvina?’ an insidious voice whispered in her head, one she’d only heard once before in her life. ‘What if he said the things you needed to hear to bring you here? You could disappear and never be found.’

Corvina paused.

She had gone to him of her own volition, so no one in her tower even knew she was missing from her room. Sex was one thing, emotions were one thing, but life was another. She trusted him with sex and trusted herself with emotions, but life? Did she trust him with her life? She’d had a dream about finding corpses, bodies that his grandfather had tortured and murdered, a grandfather whose death she still didn’t know about. Had he killed his grandfather? When he said he wanted toclean up the mess in Verenmore, had he meant burying the secrets deeper or bringing them to light?

Corvina stared at his hand, at the hand that had touched and caressed and claimed every inch of her, her heart pounding. It was the same hand with which dream-Vad had pulled her underwater, the same hand with which beast-Vad had held her down, the same hand with which real Vad had played both her body and that piano with beautiful music.

Did she trust him enough to go into an unknown tunnel with him? Was there a risk of disappearing forever without a trace or was she overthinking?

She glanced up from his hand to his eyes, watching them watch her, his gaze alight with the knowledge of her thoughts.

This was his test.

He had deliberately brought her to this tunnel, as a test to her mettle.

What had he told her?

‘I can’t give the truth to someone I don’t trust not to flee.’

Was this a test to see if she fled or did he want it to seem like a test?

She didn’t know why the sight of that tunnel triggered all these questions in her brain. Did she trust him to go into the dark alone with him after knowing everything she did?

She closed her eyes, centring herself, images flashing behind her eyes in a splitsecond.

---