Page 128 of The Trials of Ophelia

She was answering. That was good. “Did you kill him?”

“I rammed the first thing I found in his throat when I realized we were trapped together.” Her voice was impersonal, lacking the passion this usually would have caused in her. “Didn’t interrogate him. Couldn’t. He didn’t even realize I was there. He’d been following Ophelia.”

I tucked away that bit of information to give to the group later.

From the way Mila was recounting the fight so clinically, I didn’t think that was what had caused her to crawl into herself and fortify her own borders.

“And what happened next?”

But she didn’t answer. She couldn’t.

Her hands clutched her wrist cuffs, and she rocked right there on the stone floor.

I shifted so I blocked the corpse from view. “Why didn’t you answer when I called?”

Silence. Muttering under her breath. I ran my hands through my hair, refraining from reaching out to her.

“Mila?” Worry cracked my voice.

She didn’t look at me. Just watched the floor with vacant eyes as water dripped from the ceiling, her hands wrapped around her wrist braces.

Mila was here. She was safe.

But she was not all right.

I tried to follow her line of sight but there was nothing in here besides the water, the body, and a dull mystlight orb overheard. Not even a cot or desk.

Had he hurt her? Death was kind if he had. Didn’t matter right now, though. We’d figure that out later.

“Can I pick you up? I’ll get us out of this room, and then I’ll put you down.” She might be able to walk herself, but with the way she was shaking it wasn’t likely. Still, I wouldn’t move her without her consent.

After a long moment of shallow breaths, her chin bobbed once. My arms nearly fell slack with relief.

There was no way I would get her out through the tunnel like this. Instead, I cradled her in my arms, careful to only touch her leathers in case it was skin on skin contact she didn’t want. Her shocked wide eyes clenched tightly as we passed the body, not opening again until we were settled in the room with the rickety cot.

I didn’t think about how much it reminded me of my cell. Didn’t remember my fears at all as I laid her down on the cot and lowered beside it with my back pressed against the wall.

I felt so fucking useless, sitting at the foot of her bed as she curled into a ball. I stayed where she could see me, in case she didn’t want to be alone, but I tried not to stare at her. Instead, I counted her breaths until they fell into a steady rhythm and waited for someone to find us.

Despite the fact that I didn’t know what happened, I’d promised her earlier she wouldn’t be alone in these tunnels. I wasn’t leaving now.

Chapter Forty-Four

Ophelia

Tolek pulled me flush against him the moment the walls caved in. I clenched his tunic, flashbacks of another collapse when he’d been buried making my knees weak. Visions of my father’s last moments tightened my chest.

I whimpered as all the memories of that day slammed into me. It should have been me in that temple, not my father, not Danya, or any of the innocents who died. Tolek should not have broken half the bones in his body pushing me out of the way. I was the one the queen wanted; I should have seen the brunt of her destruction.

“You’re okay. You’re okay,” Tol soothed us both as the roaring stopped.

Only half of the room we were in suffered, the back half of the ceiling being sturdier rock, but the door to the tunnel was gone.

We started digging but took a break after what felt like hours. Now, we sat in silence, the conversation we’d been having before the collapse creeping through the cracks of our facade.

My throat was scratchy and dry, my muscles stiff, but the tension layered between Tolek and me in this small caved-in alcove was more painful than the rest of it. Fighting with him was unnatural, like thorns driving between my ribs and wrapping around my heart. Constricting, piercing, and wrong.

“Can we talk?” I forced out.

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