Something big and soft grabs me from the side, pulling me into it. The hand over my mouth stifles an involuntary cry of surprise.
“Shh, shh. It’s okay, it’s me.”
Thomas!
I spin, relief washing my heart down my throat at the sight of the big guy. “What are you doing here?”
He raises a finger to his lips and leads me back to The Pheasant’s Roost, entering around back. When the door opens, a glorious sight meets me.
Eli stands there, holding hands palm up as Fin fiddles with the cuffs. They click open as he turns to see me. The next moment, I am in his arms and blinking back tears. I squeeze tight as if he might slip away if I surrender an inch.
“Good boy, now throw those into the bay. And don’t let anyone see you,” Thomas says to Fin before I hear a clanking of chains followed by thumping feet running for the backdoor.
“Come on, you two. We’re not out of the woods yet,” Thomas’s gruff voice pulls me away.
He ushers us into a storage room, rolling some barrels aside, revealing a hidden space in the floor. A pounding on the front door makes us all turn.
“Quickly, quickly.”
The space is small and crowded with barrels. It is short too, with barely enough room to sit up. Can we both fit? But Eli climbs inside and I stumble after him, falling against his chest. Angry voices erupt from the front and Thomas slams the trapdoor shut. The sound of barrels rolling overhead is followed by heavy footsteps and the locking of the storage room door.
The space is dark. Eli is close. Very close. My body presses up against his on the musty floor. His arms slowly surround me and I feel his cheek rest against the top of my head.
Cold, wet tears slip down my cheeks and I hug him back. I almost lost him today. Before I entered this city, I never imagined he could die. He always seemed invincible. But he is just a man. A mortal, like the rest of us.
The light in the storage room clicks on and several pairs of heavy booted feet pound overhead. Through the cracks in the wooden boards, I see Thomas standing in the doorway, arms crossed. Guards search the barrels and shelves, knocking things over left and right.
“You know me, anything I can do to help keep the peace,” he says to someone standing beyond the doorway. “It’d be nice if your boys didn’t make such a mess though.”
A finger snaps and the guards stop, filing out.
“You’ll let me know if you see her?”
It’s Jaxon. I feel a weight lift from my shoulders. He’s alive, at least. Even still, I squeeze Eli tighter and bury my face into his shirt. He cannot find us.
“Of course. Scouts honor and all that.”
There is a pause, then a pained grunt. Someone leans against a wall.
“You okay, Jaxon? You look…pale. Should you be laying down?” Thomas asks.
“I’m fine.” A pause. “Just learned a lesson in placing trust where it doesn’t belong.”
I muffle a gasp into Eli’s chest. My stomach twists as guilt impales me with its long spindly fingers.
The door shuts, leaving us in darkness once again. Eli’s hand lightly pets my head, brushing my hair aside before tracing down my back. His feathery touch dances circles around and around. I shiver and relax against him, my fingers curling into his shirt
“I didn’t think I would see you again,” he says softly.
“I told you I would save you. You should have a little more faith in me.”
“I should.”
I rest my head against his chest. “Now it’s three to two.”
“Three to two?”
“Sure. You saved my life three times and I’ve saved yours twice. One more time and we’ll be even.”
A chuckle escapes his chest. “You’re either very crazy or very brave.”
“All this time and you still can’t tell which it is?” I look up at him through the inky blackness, a mischievous smile curling my lips. I whisper my next words. “I thought you knew me better by now, Sensei.”
His breathing hitches beneath me and I can only imagine the spectacular blush hiding behind the darkness. His hand touches my cheek and follows the line of my jaw to my lips. He shifts, leaning down, and then our lips meet. His are eager and filled with hunger. I kiss him back, sliding a hand over his shoulder and up along the back of his neck. The small space suddenly grows hot—
The hatch door lifts open, bringing blinding light with it. I flinch and pull away, panting and flushed beyond belief.
“If you two lovebirds can wait a hot minute I’ll get you your own room.” Thomas chuckles from overhead.
My cheeks burn so bad they hurt and I hide my face in Eli’s shirt.
“How long before they return?” Eli asks.
“Depends.” I hear a jangle of keys, “how badly does our fearless leader want you dead?”
I feel Eli stiffen beneath me and we both climb out of the floor. The small closet is in disarray. Pots, knocked over and jars opened, their contents strewn about. My gaze snags on a familiar plant.
“Is that Valerian root?”
Thomas looks surprised. “You know it?”
I follow close to Thomas’s heel as he leads us upstairs. “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Only in high doses. It’s a sleeping aid. Two pinches of powdered Val and you go right down. It’s fairly common for most folks around here. You need some?”
“How much is a high dose?”
Thomas stops and regards me with a raised brow. “Depends on the concentration. People generally mix it with water. One pinch to one cup will help you relax, five pinches will knock you out pretty hard, and ten and you’re in dangerous territory.” He swings open a door at the end of the hall. “Should I be concerned?”
“Someone tried to kill me with it once.” I shrug, following Eli through. “So I guess you can call it morbid curiosity.”
Thomas stops me, touching my arm. “This someone, I don’t know him, do I?”
I’ve seen this look before. It was in Uncle’s eyes when I came home from school one day with a bruise on my face. The sight of it in the eyes of another catches me off guard.
I place my hand over his and give it a reassuring squeeze. “Not unless you know a hermit who lives in a treehouse.”
Eli and I walk around Thomas’s room. A false wall in the back of a shallow closet opens up a space large enough for three standing people. Part of me wonders what Thomas is doing with hidden rooms and secret trapdoors in his inn, but I keep the thoughts to myself. The man can smuggle whatever he wants with what I owe him after tonight.
“You should be good for the next few hours but if you hear that bell ring"—He points to a small bell above the doorway—“best get your butts in that little room asap.”
He tosses a pair of keys at Eli’s chest.
“And keep the door locked. Last thing I need is someone to see the two of you.”
“Thomas,” I say before he turns to go.
I hug him. My arms barely reach around his middle, “Thank you.” After a moment he returns the embrace, patting my back lightly.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure no one finds you two, alright? This old dog has a few tricks up his sleeve.”
Before he leaves, he calls Eli over and they step outside the room, walking down the hall a bit. I listen just inside the doorway.
“You should know I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing it for her. You should have told me who you were,” Thomas says.
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Silence.
Thomas sighs. “If you let anything happen to her, I’m coming for you. She trusts you for better or worse.”
I hurry over to the bed, take a seat by the window and close the curtains as Eli walks in. He locks the door and then stands there, staring at the floor.
“How’s Little Wolf?”
The mention of our furry friend draws him from his thoughts.
“Fine. I told him to wait by the horse so he’s a good ways away from the city.”
Poor thing is probably going out of his mind. But he knows how to hunt, mostly with Eli but still. I’m sure he will be fine until we make it out of here. Right now, I have more pressing matters.
“Ivan called you the Red King,” I say quietly.
The question in my statement is obvious, but I wait to see what he says. His eyes rest on my arm and he frowns. “You’re bleeding.”
The sentence beacons a hidden, burning pain to the surface of my mind. I shrug it off. “It’s not serious.”
He takes a seat beside me and with careful fingers, pries away my tight binding. Blood gushes forth and I jerk my arm over the wood floor to save Thomas’ bed from getting ruined.
“You need stitches.”
Tight lips. A quick exhale through the nose and an obvious tone—he is upset. I watch him as he searches the room and returns with a small homemade first aid kit. Then, as he cleans away the blood, I try again.
“What is the Slaughter at Haven Day?”
He stops—a slight tremor in his hands. I let my fingers trace the bruises the shackles made on his wrists and then explore the discolored skin along his jaw, cheek, and eye. Ivan’s handiwork.
“You don’t have to tell me.” My words are soft as my thumb traces the bruise on his cheek. “But I’m here if you want.”
He swallows hard. “Do you remember when I told you raiders found me the first day I woke from the stone?”
I nod.
He returns to his work on my arm. “Raiders have a hierarchy. People thrown in the pit start as a zero, no different than an animal. But the more you kill, the higher your rank rises. Kill a few challenging raiders, and you rise further. With some luck and skill, you can find yourself one of them. Someone outside the pit, rather than in it.”
He explains it all so emotionlessly. Such a cruel and heartless thing, and yet so normal for him.
“Is that why you surrendered to them back when we met?” I remember the first time he saved me from the raiders on the baseball field. “You knew you wouldn’t stay in that pit forever?”
“That, and it was the only way to avoid a bullet in the head.” He smiles at his own dark humor.
He finishes cleaning and takes a needle, holding it over a candle flame before sewing me up. I resist flinching in pain; I’ve been stitched up plenty of times but never without the help of a local anesthetic. It looks like a graze, but the bullet took a good chunk of my arm. It could be worse. I could be captured. Or dead.
“So you became a raider? Ivan hates raiders but that doesn’t explain why he hates you specifically.”
“Have you noticed how there are no large raider groups? They rarely reach beyond one hundred in number.”
I think for a moment and nod. As terrifying as they are, they are usually small. Groups of thirty, or fifty usually. Which means when they leave their base, it’s in a dozen or fewer. It makes them easy to avoid. At least, if you’re not me.
“That’s because they are constantly fighting and dying within their own groups and with anyone they come across, especially other raiders. They care little for human life—or any life for that matter. But there is one thing every raider group respects. One thing that binds them together.”
He hesitates and I squeeze his hand. He looks at me and I see regret.
“Power. The taking of life. This is something they all see. It is what ranks you and it is what earned me that title.”
“The Red King?” I ask.
He finishes stitching me up and leans back. I examine his handiwork. The level of skill is remarkable but also sad.
“I challenged each of their top fighters, and I killed them one by one. With every raider group I conquered, I added to my own. It became an army. Then I…”
He stops, eyes growing distant as his body turns rigid. I see it then as he struggles: his fear. This is what scares him. What he runs from. This moment. I lean into his chest, wrapping my arms around tight and he returns the embrace, squeezing me close.
A moment passes and he continues. “I felt unstoppable. So I took my army and decided to take them to war with the biggest city around. New Haven went by the name Haven Day back then.”
I pause, pulling back to look him in the eyes. I remember Ivan’s story about the Red King killing everyone. “Then you attacked.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t that simple. Haven Day was well-built and organized, far more than any city I had ever come across. “
“Sounds like how New Haven is now.”
“Indeed. I knew I stood no chance even with an army at my back. But if I could find someone on the inside, someone I could use…”
“Ivan?”
His face confirms it. Eli used Ivan. Everything makes sense now.
Eli’s eyes lose focus and he frowns. “I bid my time. Weeks and months passed as we got to know each other. He didn’t know I was the Red King. We were both young. Both strong and smart, and both alone in this world. I think he believed we were friends, but I didn’t have friends. All I saw was a man weaker than me.”
“You betrayed him.”
“My army slaughtered everyone. We came in the night while the men of Haven Day were asleep, unprepared. Over a thousand in the city and I would be surprised if even ten survived. By a stroke of luck, Ivan made it out alive.”
Ivan’s insistence that Eli must have tricked me was because he himself was tricked all those years ago. I take a deep breath as the horrible realization settles. Ivan’s trust was broken long ago and what’s worse, now I’ve added to it. I gave him even more reason to despise Eli.
“So you’re infamous. And the mask keeps your identity a secret.”
He looks down, “It was over five years ago, but raiders in these parts still remember me. That’s why I was so far west when we met. It’s unlikely the raiders on that side of the country would recognize me but over here…if they saw me again then word would spread and it would stir up trouble.”
“You never told me any of this,” I say quietly.
“I didn’t think it mattered. I didn’t want to believe it back then but I knew if Ivan was your brother then you would find him here. Then you could forget about me.” Eli leans away, breaking free from my touch. “You don’t belong with me; I only wanted you safe. Here, in this city, you are exactly that. Safe.”
Safe?
Am I really? I killed a man. One of Ivan’s men. All to save the person Ivan despises most in this world. If Ivan got ahold of me, what would he do? By all rights, he should kill me. I’m sure the laws of this city would demand it. There was a time when I would agree with Eli, but now I’m not so sure.
“He would never hurt you,” Eli murmurs, watching me as if reading my thoughts. “That much I know.”
I shake the worry away. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not staying here.”
Eli regards me with hesitant skepticism.
“All this time, I wanted to find Ivan, but now that I have, he’s…changed.” I study the floor, squeezing my interlocked fingers together. “I wanted to make him see who you were. I thought that if I got back to you, together we could convince him. But now…I’m not sure I can change him. He’s not a boy anymore. The person I remember doesn’t exist.” My heart twists at the words.
“He is still your brother.”
I nod, slowly, as sudden unwelcome tears swell in my eyes. “Some part of me will always remember Ivan as my little brother. But that little boy is gone, now he’s—” I stop as emotion balls up inside me, crowding against my heart and the ache there.
I wrap my arms around my middle, looking down as the world swirls with salty tears. Pain pitches in my chest and I clamp my mouth shut to keep the cries inside but my body heaves with waves of mourning. Eli pulls me close and something about the simple act of comfort makes me fall apart. Like the breaking of a damn, buried emotion floods out in a tsunami, wrecking everything in sight. The intensity, the ferocity with which this unwelcome pain appears leaves me ruined. As if the pain pushed aside everything else until only it remained. I cry for what feels like forever and exhaustion takes over.
“Am I a horrible person for missing Ivan even though he’s still here? I miss my little brother,” I say weakly.
“No.” Eli’s fingers run soothing circles across my back. “Sometimes we need to grieve the person who was in order to accept the one who is.”
Eli is right. I need to accept Ivan as he is now. Say goodbye to the little boy I came to this city searching for so I can try to love the man I found instead. Despite everything, he is still my brother.
“Eli?”
“Yes?”
“Will you stay with me?”
“Of course.”
“No, what I mean is…” I pull away, wiping my face. “Do you remember that first night in front of the fire right after you saved me? What you asked me?”
“I asked if you wanted me to leave.”
I nod, a smile playing on my lips. “I have a new answer for you now. Do you want to hear it?”
The sudden light in his eyes catches me by surprise as he straightens, holding my gaze with intensity and yearning.
“I want you to stay with me, Eli. Stay with me forever; don’t ever leave me.”
Hope and longing. I see them both before me and maybe a million other things. Eli reaches out, touching my cheek.
“You can so easily forgive my past?”
I lean my face into his hand. “Forgive you? Eli, you saved me over and over. You gave me my freedom. All I see is the man I want by my side until the end of time.”
He gently takes my face in both his hands. Tenderness swells in his eyes. Those beautiful eyes. One, golden and the other, blue as the ocean itself. I could stare into them until the end of time. Until the sun burns up and the earth freezes over and every star falls from the sky.
“Oh! Wait–” He pulls away excitement lighting his voice.
Dazed, I watch as he reaches for something around his neck. But then he gets down on one knee and shock parts my lips.
The ring around his neck—his sister’s ring, his mother’s, and grandmother’s—he holds it up to me with eyes bright as a supernova.
“I promise to stay by your side. No matter what life brings, I will do whatever it takes to remain with you—always. I will protect and love you until my last breath.”
I know the truth behind those words because I know this man. Strong and smart. Brave and selfless. I trust him with my life. And what’s more, I trust him with my heart. He loves me. Loves me as no one ever has. In this stone world filled with monsters and madmen, he remains human. He is a glimpse of the past I lost and the future I want to keep.
“Yes.” I fall into his arms and he squeezes me back. I kiss him and grin as he slips the ring on my finger. “Yes. I’m yours, Eli. Completely yours. Only yours. Now and forever.”
He kisses me, the passion from earlier returning like a tidal wave as his hands carefully, tenderly explore my body. It catches my breath and sends a fiery anticipation through my veins. It’s nothing like the chiefs invasive groping. He is gentle and slow as he lays me down on the bed, placing butterfly kisses down my neck. The feel of his body against mine is spectacular as his desire joins my own. His hands work their way down the buttons of my shirt. But he stops abruptly, pulling back.
“Remember when you asked me if I wanted kids?” he asks.
I blink, breathless. “Yes.”
The corner of his lips hitches up to join a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Well, I have an answer for you now.”