A Dawn of Onyx (The Sacred Stones, #1)(27)

Once he was gone, I released an exhale I felt like I had been holding for a hundred years. I had been hoping to charm him but making him aggressively uncomfortable had worked just fine too. My hands wrapped around the iron bars with care, and ever so slowly I inched the cell door open with a creak.

Open.

It was open. Not locked.

Barney had turned the key into the rusted lock, and the deadbolt had slid right past the strike.

I was free.

But I couldn’t celebrate yet.

I pulled the food and supplies that I had pilfered from my few days in the apothecary out of my skirt pocket and found the paper with a rough map I had drawn of the outer courtyard inside one of the empty buckets. I had everything I needed, including a small pack I had swiped from a snobbish noblewoman’s wife who came into the infirmary with a scratchy throat. Who knew I was such a good little thief? Must run in the family.

Now came the hardest part. Sitting in my open cell, knowing I could leave at any moment, but waiting for midnight, for Jaem, for the chime of the bell.

***

I was jostled out of a half-sleep by groaning.

A prisoner so bruised his face looked like a plum was dragged along the wet cobblestones before me and brought back to his cell from the sealed-off annex at the end of the dungeon’s passageway. Night after night of tucking my head under the fox fur to hide from weeping, gurgling, and wailing had told me exactly what went on in there.

Three fingers were missing from his hand, and he had a festering wound where his ear had once been. A terrible gasp slipped out of me.

He was bloodied and retching, almost skeletal, and barely able to take three steps forward. Finally, the soldiers reached his cell and threw him in with the sickening slap of skin against stone. It was the cell two over from mine, directly next to where the handsome stranger had been kept. I was certain now that the pulp of a man had been who the stranger had argued with on my first night.

Dusk slipped into night, and my mind never stopped racing. After one uniquely unpleasant imagined scenario in which I only made it steps out of my cell before a soldier found me and sliced me in half for my treason, I turned on my side and released a pent-up groan into my cloak.

“Tough day?”

His voice did something to my heart that I didn’t want to look at too closely—an uncanny blend of relief and excitement and genuine fear. When I turned around, the stranger was standing across from my cell, leaning back against the cool, lantern-lit stone of the dungeon, face awash in blue light. One foot up against the wall behind him, and arms crossed, he was the picture of leisure.

I gripped my hands around my knees to keep them from shaking.

“What are you doing in here?” I said, my voice a mere rasp. There were no prisoners in the cells directly next to me, but there were a few that could likely hear us farther down.

“What a lovely cell you have. Much nicer than mine was. A bench, a bucket. How’d you sway the tall oaf to set you up so nicely?” He gave me a lazy smile and leaned closer. “Did you bribe him with your gorgeous, pouty lips?”

I didn’t attempt to hide my disgust. “Get your mind out of the gutter. He’s a kind soldier. One of the rare few here, it seems.”

His eyes sparkled as he walked right up to my cell and peered down at me.

My instincts had clearly been right about him—to be slipping in and out of the castle so easily, and with such cool, unnerving calm. He must have been more cunning, more dangerous than I had even realized.

I just didn’t trust him.

And clearly, the feeling was mutual. He hadn’t been interested in telling me anything about his escape. Irritation pricked at my skin. This stranger couldn’t help me, but he had ample time to stroll through the dungeons and come bother me?

“Your healing skills are top-notch, bird,” he purred. “I feel like I’m in one piece again.” He lifted his shirt, showing me a slice of dazzling, near-carved, golden-brown torso, with a single stitched line across it.

I scowled. “You must have a death wish. Why are you back down here?”

Remembering my cell was open, I crawled toward the door until my feet were pressed up against it, holding it closed. A sinking feeling snaked through me at the thought of him being this close without a real partition between us. He was much more menacing tonight than he had been in the infirmary. I wondered if it was the clammy pallor that had come with his pulpy chest wound. The look in his eyes when he feared for his life.

“I told you, I have a few things to attend to. Some of which are down here in this dungeon.” He pulled his gaze from me and peered down the dark corridor. “Don’t worry,” he continued, looking back at me with a gleam in his eye. “I won’t get you in any trouble.”

The clock tower outside struck, sounding that it was only two hours until Jaem would ride for Willowridge, and I’d need to slip out of my cell.

“Right,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening anymore. Fear and self-doubt were creeping in like they always did. I couldn’t do this. I wouldn’t make it out alive. I—

“What’s wrong?” His voice had lost its playful purr.

“What? Nothing.”

I trembled, anticipation and anxiety physically shaking my body. My bones. The sun was setting, and I had no real plan for getting past the dungeon guards at the top of the stairs. What was I thinking, attempting this? Maybe I had a death wish, too.