Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(33)

No. No, it may not be, least of all Natalya’s last living memory: Aidan Rhys, standing over her as she struggled to breathe from the poison he’d given her.

But was it really true?

And for the thousandth time I tried to justify my doubts, though it’s not like they weren’t already justified. If I, from the depths of my mind, could see her using my body to decimate Saul’s phantoms in France, then Natalya could see everything I saw. She would have seen me with Rhys. She would have felt the way my chest tensed whenever he was close to me, the way my body flared to life when he smiled. She would have known—

I thought back to the way his head moved to follow me, almost involuntarily, as I passed him on the way out of the briefing room.

She would have known.

And Natalya hadn’t wasted a single moment snatching my body the moment my mind crumbled at the thought that he might have killed her.

I knew how much it had meant to her, feeling the air rushing through her lungs again, feeling her muscles burning with adrenaline. More than needing me to find out why she died, she needed me to regain the life she’d lost. It was everything to her. But those memories had felt real. Too real to be lies. And—

And I didn’t know what to think anymore.

“Maia.” Belle’s voice snapped me out of my desperate thoughts.

“Y-yes?”

A pause. “Has she shown you?”

There was a strange twinge in her voice as she spoke.

“Shown me what?”

“Who killed her?” Belle didn’t even look at me as she asked it.

It took only a second for my whole body to flush, for my head to swirl in frenzy as I scrambled for the words I was now used to saying. “No, no. Not yet. Everything I see is choppy, you know? Hazy. Unfinished. You were right when you said scrying can be kinda unreliable when you’re not super trained.”

“Then we’ll keep training.” Belle turned for the stairs. “If we are going to take on Natalya’s final mission, we need to know the whole story.”

“Sure, for the mission,” Chae Rin said under her breath. “Not like she wants to carve up whoever killed her.”

Carve up whoever killed her. The thought of it chilled me to the bone.

Belle shut the door of her room behind her, leaving us in an awkward silence.

“Well, these are done!” Lake said suddenly, turning off the heat on the stove, her cheerful voice breaking the quiet dread that had settled over us. The hot, oily slices of fried plantain were already drying on a paper towel–covered plate. “Maia, you want some?”

She always tried hard, Lake. Whenever she noticed the mood taking a turn for the worse, she’d put in her best effort to lift it again. But with my heart squeezing against my rib cage, I could only manage a smile. “Thanks, but I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed.”

After a few labored steps up the staircase, I disappeared into my room.





8



OUR TRAINING SESSION WAS OVER, but something restless in me still stirred. There were a couple of hours left in the morning, so Belle went for a run. The other two returned to the dorm to wash up. But I stayed behind in the gym staring down the black punching bag mounted to the wall in the corner. With my unruly hair tied at the base of my neck, I raised my arms, my hands nestled carefully inside a pair of boxing gloves, wrapped up with bandages in the way Chae Rin had shown me. And while I was not the pro she was, I’d taken to this particular method of training over the weeks; the sound of my glove-cushioned punches battering the leather-bound sand was steady in its rhythm, the powerful impact offering me the kind of release I craved as it shuttered up my bones. Saul on the loose. Natalya plotting inside me. Secrets, lies, deception.

Yeah, the stress was there.

The creaking from the double-door entrance to the gym ricocheted off the high, arched ceiling as someone slowly pushed the doors open. I figured it was one of the girls come back for something. Maybe Chae Rin—she’d forgotten her water bottle by the bench and it’d only cause another blowup if she used Lake’s without permission again. It was almost funny how comfortable we’d gotten around each other while still being so painfully dysfunctional in other ways.

My fists flew. I heard the footsteps behind me but didn’t think to look back, not until I heard his voice.

“You’ve gotten better.”

A sudden jolt in my chest made me miss the timing. The punching bag swung fast and hit me in the head just as I’d turned it. Stumbling, I fell back onto the floor at Rhys’s feet.

“Or not.”

Rhys knelt and gripped my arm softly, just above the elbow, while his other arm found my waist. I twitched at his touch but didn’t pull back. His dark eyes caught the light that slipped in through the high windows.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s just me.”

Just me. The gentleness in his voice had returned, breaking down my defenses like it always did. Making me want to trust him.

“Sorry I startled you,” he added as he helped me to my feet.

“No. It’s okay.”

He must have realized then that he was still holding on to me. Quickly, he withdrew his hands. I shifted awkwardly, looking down at my sneakers, my bare legs, before steadying my chest enough to look up at his sculpted face.