Page 77 of The Curse of Ophelia

A change of plans. Something heavy settled within my chest as her men charged up the smooth stretch of rock that separated us. Their threatening daggers and axes loomed closer. I contemplated falling backward into the volcano one more time but shut the idea out quickly.

Do not fight it, his instructions echoed in my head as hands gripped me, shoving me to my knees. If possible, I hated the man now more than I ever had before.

A boot collided with my stomach, and I hunched over, giving in to the shock that flooded my body as I understood the betrayal here. Something in my side cracked—a rib, perhaps. The pain shot through me, but they didn’t stop. And I was not fighting back—I could not fight back for the sake of my heart—yet they beat me without remorse.

A fist connected with my jaw. Once. Twice. I lost count.

My teeth dug into my tongue. The copper tang of blood filled my mouth. I spit it out, the rocks at my knees turning crimson, and threw my head back to glare at my captor through an eye that was already swelling.

“Remove your hood. I want to see your face as you watch what you have done.”

The men around me snickered, but I didn’t care about them. They were nobody to me. It was not their lies that found me on my knees now.

My captor was still, his expression masked in shadow. Then, he turned and walked away to meet the woman waiting for him. He extended an arm, and the two began the journey down the switchbacks with unsettling ease. Every step he took cemented the betrayal now spreading through me as steadily as my blood seeped from my wounds.

As I was forced to my feet and pushed down the volcano, I thought back over every interaction leading up to this, questioning if I had been a fool to not expect this deceit. I supposed I had. For so many reasons, I wanted to storm at the man now descending the volcano—beat him as he had watched them beat me.

My blood heated. My chest tightened.

But one of the guards shoved my shoulder, and I remembered how precarious my position was. I swore I’d never show that man that side of me. The side that cried out at what was being done, begging for mercy. I locked my heart behind iron bars, tossing the key into the volcano with all my hopes of peace.

Biting my tongue, one thought echoed through my mind. I was not the coward here. He was.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Present Day

Ophelia

I thought I knew pain when I fell through the Spirit Volcano. I thought I knew pain when the wolf’s claws sank into my body, tearing flesh and muscle. I thought I knew pain when Malakai left me standing on the edge of Palerman and did not return.

The dive into the Spirit Fire was all of those and more.

Every physical and emotional wound I ever suffered—every heartache and toil—was bundled up into one endless pit, thick and heavy, that I now plunged through. It hurt everywhere: body, mind, and spirit shredded apart until I existed only in useless scraps.

End it. End it now. End it quickly, I repeated the mantra in my mind. I did not care about anything; all I knew was endless agony and the tunnel of thick blue flames warping around me.

I couldn’t find any breaks in the flame’s power.

Then, something shifted. The blue flames flickered ice white for a moment, and in that flash, they soothed instead of tortured. I exhaled as the agony calmed into a peaceful melody, but it was as quick as a lightning strike.

The pain returned, burning stronger than before.

Bursts of white punctured the blue flames with an insatiable hunger. Within those white streaks lay strips of images that felt foreign yet familiar.

A girl and her horse.

A sword flashing through the air.

A piece of leather with stars printed on the material—

And I realized that they weren’t arbitrary images. They were memories. My memories.

They battled the haze of agonizing blue flames to reach me. Image after image, they struggled to push into my mind, each one that landed easing the pain.

All pieces of myself. Threads in the tapestry of my life that made me a Mystique Warrior. A streak of short golden hair under a clear blue sky was imprinted against a hand trailing through a shining stream, leaving ripples in its wake, then faded into a pair of striking forest-green eyes.

I stretched a trembling hand out for them as I writhed in the flames, but they morphed before I made contact, becoming a curtain of jasmine and honeysuckle that parted to reveal the stark outline of the Mystique Mountains. A star brighter than the rest pulsed in the air above the highest peak, sending a sharp pain through my heart. Then, the stars rearranged themselves. They formed a constellation of a rope tangling into a knot I had tied many times before.

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