Page 104 of Seized to Sacrifice
He and the others picked themselves up.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said contritely. ‘I just had a feeling.’
‘Well, the next time you get a feeling, fucking talk to us about it first. You’re not alone anymore, Elle.’
She nodded, her eyes wide, but he gave her no quarter. ‘There will be a punishment for this,’ he promised with a snarl.
She swallowed hard and turned away, a part of her afraid and another part excited. She didn’t want him to see either of her reactions.
She looked around her. They were in what appeared to be a small and sparsely furnished entrance hall. Everything looked pristine and clean, from the bright colors of the walls to the intricate patterns carved into the floor.
‘Where are we?’ Thorne asked.
Nyx shrugged.
The portal that had brought them here was gone. Wherever they were, they were stuck until they could find a way back.
Elle looked through the open door, finding a narrow corridor and feeling as if she knew where she was in some way.
Without hesitating, she walked down it and, when she reached the lone, closed door at the end, she opened it slowly.
Inside was a chamber with a small bed in the corner. There were two well-upholstered seats and a table with a bowl of fruit upon it and various trinkets on another table by the wall. Candles that didn’t flicker were spread around the room and every corner was bathed in light.
‘What is this place?’ Nyx murmured from behind her, and she found that they’d followed her.
He picked something off the table.
‘This was yours,’ he said, holding out a brooch of knotted metal. ‘I gave it to you when you took me from the Horde.’
Elle took it from his hand and looked at the intricately woven pattern. She surveyed the room again.
‘This is Gaila’s fold,’ she said quietly. ‘This is where she lived.’
She found her eyes drawn to a wall in front of the chairs and, as she looked at it, a window formed, showing her the city of Kitore. She gasped. A powerful quake was making the streets practically roll as the ground shook, towers were cracking, raining rock down on the city.
‘Is that happening now?’ she asked faintly.
‘I don’t know,’ Rye said, ‘but if it is, Kitore’s wards are finally failing as well.’
The men stood next to her, staring grimly.
‘This was the window she watched everything from.’
Tearing her eyes away and fearing for her new friends who were all in Kitore at this very moment, Elle walked around the small, windowless room. Why had the vessel brought them here?
Nyx gave a snarl. ‘This was where you spent all of your time. While we were in the Light Realm, able to go wherever we liked, sit in the sun, swim in the rivers. You were here in this tiny bower.’
His jaw tightened and turned away, but she grabbed his arm.
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘The past is finished, and I bear you no ill will. All of our suffering is Ceres’ doing, not yours or mine. He’s the one we should hate.’
She realized in that moment that her loves by her side and the babe she carried were more important than anything else to her. She didn’t want the Light Realm to fall, but she would sacrifice it and herself in an instant if it would mean saving her family.
It was time to leave this place. It was no longer hers, not really.
Elle turned on her heel, slowly taking in the entire room and everything in it. There wasn’t much and the bareness made her feel a bit sad. Gaila truly seemed to have spent all of her time watching the window to the Light Realm while she was confined to the Mount and this place. Besides the bed and the chairs, a few trinkets, and the window itself, there truly wasn’t much to show anyone had spent any time here at all.
She looked at the bed, the only place where something might be hiding, and spied something poking out from under it, behind the coverlet that hung to the floor. She knelt down and found another lamp that looked very similar to the one that had brought them here. She frowned, wondered why Gaila chose these old-fashioned vessels as her means of imparting information.
