Page 101 of At the Mercy of Midnight
Silas sighed. “I would assume you know some things about me and the woman you ambushed, and you want to exploit that.”
“Exploit?” the man said before laughing. “You’re in the Sanctum of Equilibrium, Silas. I lead a team with certain beliefs, and you’re wrong. We don’t exploit, wecorrect.”
Silas frowned. He had never heard of them.
“Correct?” he asked. “Correct what, exactly?”
“Imbalances,” he answered simply, “injustices.”
“And what injustice have I committed you hope to correct?” He had a feeling he knew what the response was going to be, but Silas wanted to hear it.
“Everything.”
Silas kept his stare, chewing on the word for a moment.
Before he could open his mouth to query further, he heard someone else speak, saying his name in a voice so familiar that a sense of betrayal immediately slammed into him.
“Silas.”
His eyes shifted from the man to the door, the piece of fabric still fluttering from her entrance.
His heart squeezed in his chest as he looked at her, disbelieving, like perhaps his tired brain was hallucinating, conjuring her out of thin air.
But the masked man turned to the sound of the voice, too, looking at her. She was really there, come to make the betrayal utterly clear.
He swallowed the bitterness in his throat.
“Mother.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Amelia slowed her hurried steps the moment she heard voices ahead. She crouched behind some crates, heart slamming against her ribs, trying to catch her breath. Her eyes darted everywhere, an enormous cavern up ahead seemed empty as she surveyed, though there was a soft humming of voices.
Inching around the crate, she peered ahead, two tunnels spanned in different directions. Her hand brushed over something soft, and Amelia glanced quickly at it, eyes darting away again before going back.
It was the same dark robe the attackers had been wearing in the alley. Amelia stood slowly, picking up the cloak.Something fell to the ground with a hiss, and she glanced at it. A mask.
She tilted her head.
Alright then.
She shucked off her cloak, quickly replacing it with the dark fabric before fixing the mask around her head.
She immediately loathed the way her breath quickened as the cloth covered her mouth, her periphery slimming behind the hood, feeling claustrophobic. She willed herself to be strong, furiously remembering that somewhere up ahead, Silas needed her.
Amelia had never considered herself a brave person.
She had let her parents do awful things to her for a long time, and even after that, she had been too cowardly to trust anyone else.
The bravest thing she had ever done was travel into the Rift. Look where that had gotten her.
Now, Amelia could hardly comprehend what she was doing. Sneaking through a cave in the middle of the icy wilderness, where people who had just held a knife to her throat and taken Silas, were hiding.
Was she afraid?
Desperately.
A cold sweat dampened her forehead, her body wouldn’t stop shaking, heart pumping blood through her at an alarming rate. The runes in the middle of her back throbbed uncomfortably in rhythm with her erratic heartbeat.
