Page 16 of The Rising Wave

She forced herself to look more carefully. The shoes . . . the shoes were her mother's favorite. Warm slippers for inside. She remembered those shoes, and the light blue stone ring on her mother's finger was where it had always been.

The skull still had hair attached, and it was the same golden brown hue as her own, though streaked through with white.

She thought . . . She thought they had died coming to save her. Herron would taunt her with that. Say they had tried but failed. That all hope was lost.

And all that time, had her mother been here?

The rage that rose up in her was so hot, so very white hot, that she had to close her eyes and swallow before she could speak again.

“Can you see how she died?” She looked over at Luc, but he was still watching her, not looking at her mother's remains.

She wondered what he had seen on her face.

He turned slowly from her at last to look, shook his head. “If she was murdered, the evidence is long gone. She may have died of illness, she wasn't necessarily killed.”

“If she died down here without help, I would still consider it murder.” She could not say more. Her throat closed up.

Ava had been here for nearly two years, and her mother had been down here from perhaps a few months after that. She had been told her parents had been captured and killed by bandits while crossing the mountains into Kassia, but perhaps her father had been killed, and Herron had her mother brought here.

The single biggest fear her mother had had her whole life, for Ava and herself, had come true. They had both been captured and imprisoned for their talents.

Her mother had been dead for a while. Ava didn't know how long it would take a body to look like her mother's did, but the fact remained she had been alive and right here while Ava was imprisoned above.

And then, she suddenly knew . . .

She felt Luc's hands grab her as her legs gave way beneath her.

Thiswas why Herron stopped trying to get her to embroider for him. She had thought she had managed to outwit him. Instead, her mother had been down here, picking the threads from her cloak to embroider items for Herron in her place.

Perhaps with a threat to Ava's life as the incentive.

And when her mother had died, that's when the orders for Ava to sew for him had come again. And when it became clear she would never bend, the harsher treatment, the edging to murder, had begun.

“I'm all right.” She was still held up by Luc, his strength seemingly endless, and she struggled to get her feet back under her. “We need to go.”

They really did need to go, and yet he looked back at her calmly. “Is there something of your mother's that you want to take with you?”

She felt a sudden rush of tears at his thoughtful question. “This cloak was a gift from my grandmother to my mother.” She stared down at the clasp resting on her mother's breastbone. “But I will not disturb her body.”

Instead, she crouched beside the bench and carefully removed the ring from her mother's finger. It was the only piece of jewelry she could see.

“Now we need to go.” Luc's attention was focused down the passage.

“You can hear something?”

He nodded, and she followed him out of the room, glancing back one last time to imprint the horror of it on her memory. The chain on the wall, the unpicked cloak.

The body, lying discarded and forgotten.

But not by her. She would not forget.

Chapter 4

They were at a dead end.

It had always been a possibility, but Luc knew they had nothing to lose trying their luck.

There was only one more chamber down from where Ava's mother's body lay, a storeroom with boxes and barrels rotting in the shadows, and a dust-covered table where it looked like someone had once sat pouring over ledgers and papers, a plate and cup visible amongst the clutter.

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