Her words drove my temper up and made me want to use that power she’d forced into me, made me want to throw her against the opposite wall. She turned me into this—she should get a real taste of what it meant.
Kit set his hand on mine, which made me realize I’d drawn it into a fist. The touch helped cool my temper.
This wasn’t just about me. Doing anything to her now would turn this into an all-out fight, and that wouldn’t help anyone. Not only could innocents get hurt, but the odds of escaping it weren’t great. I couldn’t throw everything away for nothing. I needed to bide my time.
So I drew in a deep breath then exhaled slowly.“What if I don’t accept your offer?”
Her smile held no concern, as if she already knew I’d do as she’d planned, that I’d fall into her trap. “Then I will have you picked up and brought back to Larkwood. I will drug you to the point that you never cause a problem for me again. I will recapture your friends and have them sent to the North Tower. I am fully capable of ending this the way I want it to end. I’d just prefer to do it with the least risk possible.” She nodded behind me, which made me turn to find a number of men dressed nicely, their hard gazes locked on me, telling me they were from Larkwood.
She moved past Kit and me as if she had no fear of us. “It’s up to you, Ms. Weston. Do you want to die in Larkwood, or do you want your freedom?” She peered over her shoulder, her lips curled into a confident grin. “I trust you’ll make the right choice and be very happy for the rest of your life.”
She offered me everything I wanted—freedom, safety, a chance at a real life. To get me through those horrible days in Larkwood, I had focused on my one goal, on escaping, on surviving. Now the Warden gave me exactly what I’d wanted, but now that it was so close, could I really accept it?
Running away because I didn’t have another option felt like survival, but having that door held open for me made me hesitate. Could I really leave knowing everything I now knew? After seeing what the world was really like, could I still turn my back on it all?
I’d chased my own survival so far, unwilling to admit that I was part of a community, that I was a shade, that their plight was mine. The Warden was offering me a chance to not have to look over my shoulder anymore, but it meant turning my back on everything that I’d learned, on the horrors I’d seen, the people I’d watched suffer.
I never thought I’d hesitate, yet here I stood, frozen.
The Warden was holding open a door for me, a chance at a future, everything I thought I wanted…but I didn’t know if I was the sort of girl who could walk through it anymore.
* * * *
Brax
“The Warden is just letting us go?” I struggled to accept and make sense of it.
The Warden wasn’t the sort of woman to just give up, especially after we’d embarrassed her by escaping. Was this some sort of trick? Was she trying to get us to let our guards down?
That didn’t make much sense. It would be far easier to hit us unaware.
“So it seems,” Kit answered. “I told her I’d probably killed Deacon, so she believes he is still loyal if he lives.”
Deacon snorted, as if he didn’t care for the lie. Then again, I got that. I didn’t like the idea of Kit being able to take me out, or someone else believing it so easily.
Whether or not it was true, well, that I wasn’t sure of. If it were a fair fight, I believed I could take Kit, but the problem with fighting a man like Kit was that if he could steal a person’s free will, there was no real fight.
It was like fighting Hera. If she could speak, if a scream could take out an enemy before they ever got a chance to get close, what hope was there?
“Could it be a trick?” Wade asked, voicing my own concern.
Deacon shook his head. “I doubt it. I’ve worked under the Warden for a while, and it wouldn’t make any sense to offer that only to trick us. It makes more sense for her offer to be real. If Hera leaves, the Warden can use her name to get favors without risking another riot. She’d probably finally realized just how dangerous Hera is, not just because of her powers but because she’s got an impressive ability to get people to work together—even people who are normally enemies. The Warden hasn’t ever faced that before.”
“Doesn’t that mean it’d be better to get rid of her?” Knox asked.
Deacon peered at Hera, as if in apology for the conversation. “Not really. Sure, it’d be better if Hera was at Larkwood, but since she isn’t, it changes the risk and reward. The less dangerous option is to just let her go. She’s trusting that Hera wants to stay out of there enough that she’ll happily take her up on the offer.”
“So we’re taking that choice, right?” I asked when no one spoke.
It was the obvious one.
Except… everyone remained silent.
Hera stared at the floor rather than at me.
“This is what we wanted. This was our plan. We escaped because we wanted away from Larkwood. We wanted to be free. The Warden is offering it up to us and you’re hesitating?” My temper slipped, my jaws aching from my fangs dropping.
“This changes things,” Wade said, ever the bleeding heart. “We need to think about our next step.”