I opened my eyes, and a frightening face loomed close to mine. The blurred glitter of a jewel was shining in his brow, and a menacing tattoo swirled over his face.
My knee jutted upward. If I was going to die, I was going to die fighting with whatever strength I had left. I heard a groan, an oomph as I pushed him to the floor and held the spoon in my hand to his throat. He writhed in pain beneath me.
“Kazi.”
I blinked again.
The eyes. Brown, the color of warm earth.
His voice.
“Kazi, it’s Jase,” he said again, the pained grimace finally fading from his face.
“You going to kill the Patrei with a spoon?” I turned my head. It was Wren, her hands planted on her hips. “Not that I don’t think you could.”
The room was crowded with people. Synové, Vairlyn, Titus, Priya, and more. Staring at me.
I looked back at the man beneath me.
Jase.
Stay with me, Kazi.
It hadn’t been a dream.
The spoon tumbled from my hand
, and I fell down onto his chest, holding him, my face pressed into his neck. His arms circled around me, holding me as tight as I held him.
I heard sobs. But they weren’t mine or Jase’s.
It felt like I said his name a hundred times.
“Enough already,” Synové sniffled after a minute had passed. “We want some of that too.”
I got to my feet, and Wren and Synové swooped in, giving me long, smothering hugs. I looked at the stain on Synové’s face that matched Jase’s. “I’ll explain later,” she promised.
The weight that had hung inside of me for days lightened when I spotted Paxton. He made it. He stepped forward, his face puckered, and threw an arm around me, his other arm in a sling. “They’re safe,” he whispered in my ear, his voice breaking, and quickly stepped away. And then I faced Jase’s family, crowded in the doorway. I froze. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t see Gunner among them, but the last time I had seen Priya and Mason, they were throwing me into a snare and leaving me behind to be captured.
Jase must have seen something in my eyes. He asked everyone to leave. “Give us a few minutes,” he said. Maybe he knew how I had ended up in the king’s custody. Maybe the way I’d attacked him just now had given him a small glimpse of what I’d been through. Thank the gods it was only a spoon in my hand.
The door shut on the room that was little more than a closet. It was dark except for a small candle burning in the corner. I was still unsteady on my feet, and Jase helped me sit back on the pallet.
“We’re in the vault?” I asked.
He nodded.
I reached up and touched his stained face and the ring in his brow.
“A disguise,” he explained, then told me what had happened to him since the ambush, from his days recovering in the root cellar, to searching the town for news of me, to swooping down from the tembris to steal me away. Death’s angel, it was him.
I shared details of the past weeks with him too, from my first days as a prisoner in a dark cell. But mostly I concentrated on how brave Lydia and Nash had been, and how much they believed in him.
“The crypt? They weren’t afraid?”
“Not as much as they were afraid of Montegue. They knew what he was using them for. I’m sorry if hiding them in the crypt exposed your secret. It was the only way, Jase, the only way I could steal them and be sure Montegue wouldn’t find them. Does your family know?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid they know everything. Including—”