Page 15 of These Divided Shores
Lu said nothing.
“I thought so,” Jakes spat, and retreated up the stones.
Lu waited, seconds filling with her thundering heartbeat.
Tom could save her. He could swoop in as he had the night the war ended—
A sob ruptured out of Lu’s chest. No,no—she wouldn’t disintegrate. Elazar hadn’t torturedheryet.
But he had. Having her wake up to Milo in shackles, facing Tom’s duplicity...
How could Tom have done this to her? How could Lu not have seen his lies?
In the same way she had not seen the truth of the Council, and how they had ignored the poverty of the stream raiders and lower classes. She had been so blindly loyal that it had never occurred to her to question what she loved. What other foundations would prove to be rotten? What other truths that she refused to see were right before her eyes?
Lu cried out and dove for the cot. She had left the metal tongs under the blanket, and she grabbed them now in sweaty fingers. Her harsh breaths choked her as she braced the tongs on her thigh and snapped them apart. She had two metal rods now—the number needed to pick locks.
Rational thought leaked out with Lu’s sobs. Only desperation remained.
Tom had taken everything from her. She would not stay here, collapsing at Elazar’s feet, waiting for Milo to come. She would get out. She would make them suffer for ever setting foot on her island.
She would destroy them all.
Lu scrubbed her eyes on her sleeve and reached through the bars to level the picks in the lock. Her body quaked, but she pried apart each tumbler with delicate precision—click.
Lu paused. No soldiers rushed her. No alarms were raised in warning.
She shoved on the door and it opened. Her boot hit the stone of the hallway, and that single tap of leather on rock made her sob again.
What of Ben and Gunnar? Where had the soldiers taken them? No matter—she would follow their path and free them. Or find Vex. Find him, and get help. Find him, and—
Exhaustion sculpted a fuzzy, singular wish: Vex, his arms open to her.Safe, her heart said. Teo, too. And Kari, she hadn’t forsaken her like Tom—had she?
The shakiness in that question pushed out a feeble cry. Lu ran—from her cell, from the part of herself that whispered,Who will you run to? You cannot even trust yourself.
Shadows blurred the hall, thrashing in the torchlight. Lu hit a fork, and a grating noise rumbled farther ahead.
Guards could shift these walls with knobs and levers. One hall could become a dead end. Another could loop her right back to the cells. Which way would lead to—
“Adeluna!”
Lu spun to the left. That voice—it couldn’t be.
A raffish smile. The ripple of muscles in his neck when he tried to suppress true emotion and the glitter in his eye when he made her laugh. The softness in the brush of his fingertips, as though he believed her worthy of sweetness and respect.
“Adeluna!” His voice was coming from ahead, louder now.
You cannot even trust yourself, her mind echoed.
But I trust him, she told the broken pieces that had once been her heart.
“Vex!” Lu screamed. “VEX!”
She started again, hitting a corner and shoving off it, scrambling until she swung into a long hall. A lantern flickered at the distant end and it slowed her steps, one, another.
“Vex.” The name broke through to her soul as the person lifted the lantern to his face.
Lu stopped.
