Page 33 of Siege of Shadows

“Shown me what?”

“Who killed her?” Belle didn’t even look at me as she asked it.

It took only a second for my whole body to flush, for my head to swirl in frenzy as I scrambled for the words I was now used to saying. “No, no. Not yet. Everything I see is choppy, you know? Hazy. Unfinished. You were right when you said scrying can be kinda unreliable when you’re not super trained.”

“Then we’ll keep training.” Belle turned for the stairs. “If we are going to take on Natalya’s final mission, we need to know the whole story.”

“Sure, for the mission,” Chae Rin said under her breath. “Not like she wants to carve up whoever killed her.”

Carve up whoever killed her.The thought of it chilled me to the bone.

Belle shut the door of her room behind her, leaving us in an awkward silence.

“Well, these are done!” Lake said suddenly, turning off the heat on the stove, her cheerful voice breaking the quiet dread that had settled over us. The hot, oily slices of fried plantain were already drying on a paper towel–covered plate. “Maia, you want some?”

She always tried hard, Lake. Whenever she noticed the mood taking a turn for the worse, she’d put in her best effort to lift it again. But with my heart squeezing against my rib cage, I could only manage a smile. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”

After a few labored steps up the staircase, I disappeared into my room.

8

OUR TRAINING SESSION WAS OVER,but something restless in me still stirred. There were a couple of hours left in the morning, so Belle went for a run. The other two returned to the dorm to wash up. But I stayed behind in the gym staring down the black punching bag mounted to the wall in the corner. With my unruly hair tied at the base of my neck, I raised my arms, my hands nestled carefully inside a pair of boxing gloves, wrapped up with bandages in the way Chae Rin had shown me. And while I was not the pro she was, I’d taken to this particular method of training over the weeks; the sound of my glove-cushioned punches battering the leather-bound sand was steady in its rhythm, the powerful impact offering me the kind of release I craved as it shuttered up my bones. Saul on the loose. Natalya plotting inside me. Secrets, lies, deception.

Yeah, the stress was there.

The creaking from the double-door entrance to the gym ricocheted off the high, arched ceiling as someone slowly pushed the doors open. I figured it was one of the girls come back for something. Maybe Chae Rin—she’d forgotten her water bottle by the bench and it’d only cause another blowup if she used Lake’s without permission again. It was almost funny how comfortable we’d gotten around each other while still being so painfully dysfunctional in other ways.

My fists flew. I heard the footsteps behind me but didn’t think to look back, not until I heard his voice.

“You’ve gotten better.”

A sudden jolt in my chest made me miss the timing. The punching bag swung fast and hit me in the head just as I’d turned it. Stumbling, I fell back onto the floor at Rhys’s feet.

“Or not.”

Rhys knelt and gripped my arm softly, just above the elbow, while his other arm found my waist. I twitched at his touch but didn’t pull back. His dark eyes caught the light that slipped in through the high windows.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s just me.”

Just me. The gentleness in his voice had returned, breaking down my defenses like it always did. Making me want to trust him.

“Sorry I startled you,” he added as he helped me to my feet.

“No. It’s okay.”

He must have realized then that he was still holding on to me. Quickly, he withdrew his hands. I shifted awkwardly, looking down at my sneakers, my bare legs, before steadying my chest enough to look up at his sculpted face.

“Um, it’s been a while,” I said.

“Yeah.” It was times like this I remembered that before he was a trained soldier of the Sect, he was also just a kid like me, a boy of eighteen. He looked as nervous as I did, his eyes focused on the punching bag instead of on me. “I hope you didn’t think I was too short with you back there in the briefing room,” he said. “It’s just that we haven’t talked in a while.”

The side effect of dodging his calls for weeks. That was how I’d treated him. Even after he’d nearly died protecting me. Even when I wanted to know why he ever would.

“You didn’t visit, either. At the hospital, I mean,” he said, giving me a wry smile as he tilted his head sideways. I turned the moment I noticed my throat begin to tighten. “I thought maybe you forgot I existed. It’s all right, I forgive you,” he added jokingly.

I didn’t tell him that I had visited him three times, but each time he was sleeping, and I begged the nurses not to let him know I’d been there. During every visit, I studied his face and watched the rise and fall of his chest, wondering to myself whether he was really a killer—and whether I’d really be able to turn him in if it was true. And towhom? The Sect? Or Belle.

Belle. My body froze up from the very thought of her murderous anger. If he had killed Natalya, and if she found out... if I said a word about it... Belle would kill him. There was no doubt about it. She would murder him in front of me.

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