Page 15 of The Trials of Ophelia

Tolek held me when I spoke of my father, not saying anything for a long stretch, and simply letting me get out the emotions I hadn’t shared with anyone else. The anger I’d been suppressing over it all. He let me indulge in each feeling, the good and the bad, catching every single one I couldn’t carry.

By the time the sun was fully risen, exhaustion lined both our frames.

“You should sleep, Tolek,” I said. At the suggestion, his eyes flared wide. Terrified.

His nightmares.

I desperately wanted to ask what plagued him. To help him overcome them. But when I opened my mouth to ask, he cut me off.

“Will you stay here?” The words were small and vulnerable, his fingers tracing aimless patterns across my palm.

“Of course,” I whispered. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

“Thank you,” he muttered, and leaning his head against mine, he tried to sleep.

There was a darkness in his words, though. A haunting he wasn’t speaking of, perhaps wasn’t ready to share. I wouldn’t push him, but I’d be here however he needed. As long as he needed.

Because my infinite tether had come back to me, and I wasn’t letting him leave again.

Chapter Six

Tolek

“Spirits, Tolek!” Malakai barked as he emerged from the bathing chamber with a towel around his waist. “Knock first.”

“In the mood for an outing?” I asked, leaning against the door frame, the damn cane Santorina bullied me into using beneath my hand.

“Sit down,” Malakai instructed. Once I obliged—because he was stern and not at all because my leg muscles were aching—he narrowed his eyes at me. “Where are you trying to go?”

I pulled a pouch from my side and tossed it in the air, the coins within jingling.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Malakai proposed, but he disappeared into his dressing chamber and emerged a moment later with a shirt and pants in hand.

“I told him the same,” Cyph grumbled from the doorway.

“Yes, but you were already on your way into the city, so really there’s no argument there,” I said.

“I didn’t wake three days ago from a two-month coma!” Cyph challenged.

A chill swept across the back of my neck at the reminder. At the slightest memory of what I’d seen while in that coma, of the images that played on a loop in my mind.

“I’ve slept enough, then,” I forced out, attempting to be cheerful. “Let’s go.”

I pretended not to notice the look Malakai and Cypherion exchanged as I led the way, cane supporting my weight. I needed a fucking distraction.

“Fighting?” Not that I judged Cypherion’s choice of activity, but it wouldn’t have been what I expected him to choose.

Then again, as we walked through Damenal and dusk faded to night, I supposed a lot had changed while I was…gone. The setting sun stretched ruined shadows across cobblestones, leaving the city with a morphed imprint of what it should look like.

My friends had explained what happened, had detailed how they’d spent their days trying to restore the city atop the peaks, but it hit a spot in my gut to actually see the devastation. To feel the quiet of nights once so raucous settle across my skin. The moment Santorina had cleared me today, I wanted out of the infirmary, but still, a part of me had been unprepared.

“Fighting works out the tension,” Cypherion answered, hands flexing like he was mentally already in the ring.

“Tension?” I asked. Malakai elbowed me, shaking his head to warn me to stop, but I continued, “Have you truly not spoken to Vale?”

“Spirits,” Mali huffed.

“No, and I don’t approve of the way Ophelia is using her now either. How can we trust any information she’s giving us?”

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