Page 5 of Anchor

The dark consumed everything.

Chapter 2

Rosabel La Rouge

So many things I could have done differently that night.

So many nights I lay awake staring at the ceiling and thinking about them.Seeingthe scenarios unfold in my mind’s eye, my imagination fully equipped to make every word, every move, every look perfectly believable simply because of how well I knew every little detail of Taland Tivoux’s face, and because I wished so hard for any of those scenarios to have been real instead.

Taland, there are agents outside and you can’t go into that Strongroom or they’ll kill you!I could have said instead of grabbing that candleholder and hitting him with it.

And Taland would understand right away, raise his hands in surrender, and pretend he was there just so he could have a moment by himself—but what if he didn’t?

What if he didn’t understand and didn’t just automatically know what to do, and would there be time to explain before the agents broke the door?

No, there wouldn’t have been. No time-no time-no time.

But then another scenario went something like this:Taland, you better do exactly as I say or you’ll be dead. Agents will come through that door any second now and you’ll tell them you came here to surprise me. That you hid a surprise here somewhere and you knew I’d follow you all along, do you understand? You tell?—

The door would open too soon. Not enough time.

Taland, run!was a pretty desperate one, followed by questions like,why would he just listen to me telling him to run? Where would he run to? We were underground—where would he go?!

So, no, that one would definitely not work.

Another might have—Taland, I need you to grab me by the neck and use me as hostage so you can get out of here. There are agents outside that door that is going to burst open any second now, and you’re going to use me, threaten them with my life, to make it out of here—do you understand?!

That one might have worked, except knowing Taland, he would have never agreed to use me as hostage or hurt me if needed in any way. Even if he did, he had no weapons on him, no anchor to do magic with, so what would he have threatened my life with? Those men wereagents,trained and armed and chockfull of magic. They’d have taken him out without question if we pretended Taland was going to kill me if they didn’t let him out.

So, in the end, that scenario failed, too.

All scenarios failed, andIfailed, and the guilt won every single time. The guilt suffocated me even while I was still drawing in air. The guilt killed me while also keeping me alive.

Torture worse than anything physical anybody could ever do to me. Worse than what the Tivoux brothers had done, even worse than knowing Taland was sitting there in the shadows, watching me screaming while he smiled.

My cheek stung with a slap.

Wake up!

I was almost a hundred percent sure that somebody was calling my name, but I couldn’t open my eyes.

I tried to focus, tried to feel Taland’s arms underneath me, tried to speak, to tell him to just go back to the Rainbow mountain, to our familiars, to those players who wanted me dead—just go back! Don’t step onto those bones, don’t get drained, don’t lose everything again on my account.

By Iris, I am not worth it. Don’t you know that I am not worth it by now?

Except I couldn’t. I had no energy to open my eyes, and I was sure somebody slapped me again, whoever was telling me to wake up. It wasn’t Taland—that much I knew. He’d be kissing me to wake me up, not slapping me.

He’d bekissingme.

Darkness, full and absolute.

The voices, even those from the outside world calling for me to wake up, faded away. It was just me and my thoughts and my memories of Taland. Of the game. Of the vulcera.

Where was she?

And where was he?

And where was I?

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