Let The Wind Rise (Sky Fall, #3)(6)

A killer couldn’t be so soft.

“You’ve had to grow up too fast, and you’ve had to do it alone,” he whispers. “But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore, Audra. I can keep you safe.”

“Safe?” Repeating the word doesn’t help me understand it. “But . . . I’m in a cage.”

“To shield you from the others. The ones who took away your father.”

My mother’s face fills my mind. “You can protect me from her?”

“That’s why I brought you here. Now she can never hurt you again.”

I close my eyes and lean against the bars, grateful to feel them.

“You’ll keep her away?” I whisper.

“As long as you stay here. But I might have to send you off alone.”

I try to open my eyes but my eyelids feel too heavy. “Why?”

“Because you’re hiding something from me. The secret I need in order to protect you.”

“I don’t have any secrets.”

“That’s not true, now is it?”

“It is.”

At least, I think it is.

It used to be true. But everything feels so faded and blurry I can’t be sure anymore.

He sighs, slow and sweet. “Don’t you trust me, Princess?”

“Of course I . . . what did you call me?”

He leans closer, stroking my cheek. “Tell me what you’re hiding, Princess.”

I jerk away and crawl backward across the floor.

My father had a dozen nicknames for me. But he never called me Princess.

Raiden is not my father.

The statement feels so glaringly obvious—but it’s earth shattering too.

Raiden. Is. Not. My. Father.

Did I really think that he was?

How could I . . .

The wind.

This ruined, Southerly wind.

It’s clouding my mind somehow and shifting my emotions.

I pull myself to my feet and press my cheek against the wall, letting the shiver clear my head. “Does that usually work?”

Raiden sends the wicked Southerly away, stealing the last of the warmth—but I’m grateful for the cold.

Each shiver makes me me again.

Even the pain that floods back to the wound on my side is a welcome reality check.

“Actually you’re the first person I’ve tried it on,” Raiden says. “Your mother taught me the trick while we waited for you and your friend to arrive at the Maelstrom. She claimed it would be the only way to get answers from you.”

“Leave it to my mother to help you capture me and torture me.”

Raiden laughs—as bitter and cold as the air. “Actually her method was far gentler than what you’ll face now.”

I can’t stop myself from shaking. But I force myself to meet his eyes, noting that they’re rimmed with dark smudges. Further shadows line his brow and deepen the creases around his frown.

He looks tired.

The realization boosts my confidence as I tell him, “I’ll never give you what you want.”

“They all say that in the beginning.”

He snarls a word, and a ruined Northerly coils into a whip and cracks my face so hard it knocks me to my knees.

Pain stings my cheek. But when I reach up to check for blood, my hand comes away clean.

Raiden seems as surprised as I am and lashes me again, this time across my chest.

The force of the blow makes me wheeze, but a second later the pain fades and no marks line my skin.

My loyal Westerly shield must be strong enough to protect me.

“I knew you had more to hide!” Raiden shouts, his voice a strange mix of fury and triumph.

“No—everything’s gone.”

Everything Vane shared with me.

Everything that mattered.

I stripped it and shredded it and scattered it on the wind—whatever I had to do to make sure it was safe.

“Then why did your friend’s shield abandon him at the first blow?” Raiden asks. “The draft you wrapped around him before we took you both away rushed back to the sky at the first crack of my whip.”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

He holds his sleeve up to the moonlight so I can see the splashes of red staining the fabric.

I turn away, trying not to imagine Gus—smiling, handsome Gus—bloody and alone in some dark dungeon.

“Let him go,” I beg, knowing it’s pointless but needing to try. “He has nothing to give you.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. Your Westerly won’t let me hurt you. But I can hurt him. And I’ll make you watch, until you tell me what I need.”





CHAPTER 5


VANE


I’m starting to worry that Os is right.

Not for attacking us. Or taking our weapons. And definitely not for tying Solana, Arella, and me to the sturdiest palms in the grove and telling us we can sweat here until we’re “ready to cooperate.”

But the fact that he was able to do all of that—and create some sort of weird vortex around us that’s spooking all the winds away—makes it pretty hard to argue that the power of pain isn’t more effective.

Come on Westerlies—time to prove you’re the big, legendary things you’re supposed to be. . . .