The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

48

Geneva

F ood provisions are cut in half. We get no visitors. Time moves at a glacial pace the longer we go without seeing the movement of the sun.

But the chains that keep us bolted to the floor, just out of arm’s reach of each other, sinking morale to a dangerous level. I haven’t touched Ren since I covered his body with mine back on the Mosacian shoreline, and if I don’t make some sort of contact soon, I’ll surely spiral towards insanity.

The only thing that keeps my mind at bay are the notes.

Mysteriously filed in sporadic time increments, handwritten updates Ren and I otherwise wouldn’t have known about come taped to the bottom of our stew bowls. I’d discovered the first one by accident, nearly slicing my fingers as I repositioned my soup bowl in my chained hands.

Chumley’s dead. His head turned up in the Harbor. Someone’s sending a message.

“A warning is more like it,” Ren supposed. The message had kept us questioning things for hours. Who sent it? How did they sneak it past the staff in charge of delivering our meals? What would the next one say? Would there even be another one?

Three servings later, another one turns up.

Jericho and Venus do not sleep much these days—likely in fear of what they may see.

The next two come in at the same time, one addressed to me and the other to Ren. Seconds after he receives his message, Ren slides it over to me for my own evaluation.

Venus convinced the guards to stop beating you. I don’t know what you told her, but it worked.

Meanwhile, I keep mine tucked in close to my chest, and don’t feel an ounce of remorse about it.

He’s cute. If you two start screwing, don’t let the guards hear you.

“Saints, Calliope,” I say under my breath. Only she could make me laugh after weeks in this hellhole.

“What’s that?”

“The notes are coming from my oldest sister.”

Ren and I wait for a fifth message. Outside of our theories, we don’t talk about our pain, our hunger, our thirst. Instead, we talk about the past—because talking about a future we may not have beyond this room might just do us in.

Today, Ren asks me, “Was there ever a time when you wanted to change your name?”

“What? My first name?”

“Mmhmm.”

My face scrunches up at the idea. “I don’t think so. I’ve always thought mine was pretty.”

“It is.”

I blush. “Did you?”

“Oh, yes. There were a few girls named Wren in my town, so it got confusing when young ladies would call after their friends.”

“I guess, but it shouldn’t matter who else shares your name if the meaning of it is something positive. Mine means juniper tree, a nod to the way our home was built around a grove full of them.”

I only allow myself a few moments to drift back in time and mentally walk back through the place we once called home. I see everything as it was before tragedy struck. My father’s there, doting on my mother in the kitchen. Calliope and Venus bickering by the fireplace over something so trivial. And me, perched on the lip of the lowest stair step, watching it all without the slightest inclination that we’re poor—for what is poverty in the wake of such overwhelming peace?

“What does your name mean?” I rasp, returning to the present.

“Depends on the translation. Mosacian dialects say that it means honesty or cleverness. But in the Urovian tongue . . .”

“Yes?”

Ren smiles at the floor. “It means love.”

It’s quiet for a moment, too quiet. The silence is downright provoking, to the point where I’m on the verge of word vomiting my soul onto the floor, and—

“Did Pandora ever want a sibling?”

A whole new kaleidoscope of butterflies run amuck in my stomach at the question. “Not at all.” I laugh, the movement feels like sandpaper in my throat.

“Really?”

“Absolutely not. She got to watch her three cousins fight for attention between two parents, so she enjoyed being the center of my universe.”

Ren chuckles, but soon groans at the way laughter brutalizes his damaged ribs. I wince for a moment, but he’s always known how to distract me from his misery. “Say that her wants weren’t part of the equation. Only yours. Would you have wanted another child?”

For a fleeting moment, I’m not forty years old with an adult daughter. I’m not a Urovian Duchess or the secret birth mother of its beloved, musically gifted princess. I look at Ren Satare—hear the gentleness in his curiosity—and my soul feels ageless. Invincible against every dreaded hurdle life has forced me to scale.

“Not alone, no. But in a world where I met you sooner . . .” I whisper. “Yes.”

Somewhere in the movement of my bashful smile, my eyes had fluttered shut. My face had tried to hide along the curve of my hiked shoulders. But when I will myself to look at Ren again, I find tears shining at the brim of his kind eyes. His laugh lines deepen as he studies my face.

“Ren?”

“I’m so disastrously in love with you, Genny,” he sighs with the same reverence one would pray with.

I go stark still at the same moment his body finally, fully relaxes. The confession frees him.

“I’d be a damned fool not to tell you how deeply I love you,” he goes on. “Not because we’re likely on death’s doorstep or because we may never get out of here—but because you simply need to hear me say it. I’m a single man in my late thirties who’s spent his entire life searching for adventure. But it all makes sense now, the longing that felt so useless all those years. The relentless urge to scour the world for something more. It’s like my soul knew that you were out there, far from my reach but still promised to appear someday.”

The words make my heart soar and swell in my chest, drawing phantom tears out from the depths of my eyes.

“From the moment you conned that cinnamon loaf and kept trying to talk to me, I knew I was in trouble. The good kind. The kind that all my buddies fell into—the kind I gave them hell for. It only got worse with time, how much you were starting to mean to me. I’ll admit, most nights, I would think back on our conversations that day to ease into sleep. I’d dream of you. But the minute you bounded towards the shore, towards Pandora, I saw the depth of your love for her with my own two eyes, and it snapped something inside of me. To imagine a reality where you could even come to love me a fraction —”

Sobs burst out of him like a dam, and tears of my own steadily drip off the slope of my chin. “A fraction as much as you love her,” Ren resumes, chest heaving. A piece of my soul sings at the knowledge that he can be his perfect, shattered self with me. “But then, you gave it all up. You gave her up, just to be with me. To rot in here with me.”

“I’ll never go anywhere without you, Ren,” I weep. “Even into death itself, I will walk with you, hand in hand.”

We struggle against our restraints, and for the first time since our arrival, Ren and I manage to intertwine our fingers. The touch unravels us all over again.

“I know most people anticipate finding the love of their life by the time they turn thirty, but there were days—years, really—where I figured the great love of my life would be nothing more than the world I’d get to explore. But all it took was you,” Ren laughs, “initiating this crazy cross-country chase to find your daughter for me to realize that you are the world. My world.”

There will be time to tell him everything later. How he showed himself to me in the temple’s sanctuary, and how I’ve been a lost cause ever since. How my heart fused to his own that night we shared in Vesta. How, if I’m being honest with myself, I was doomed from the very first look. But for now, I offer him the truest thing I know.

“My love for you transcends every struggle I’ve faced, every year I endured unknowingly waiting for you. There’s nothing in my life that fulfills me more than being with you, Ren. Than loving you—”

The feeding slot opens again, and Ren and I go ghastly still.

No food. No bowls. No cutlery.

Just a set of fiery eyes staring at me through the gap. Eyes I’d recognize anywhere.

“Calliope?”

Beneath dark lashes, her eyes dart over the two of us, likely assessing any lasting damage we’ve endured. And then, she whispers in warning, “Cover your heads,” before dropping what I first think is a rock through the feeder and bolting backwards. Ticking fills the room.

This time, it’s Ren who rushes to shield me. Metal groans and gives way as his chains snap free, and his body plasters itself above mine. His warmth and friction destroy me in the best way imaginable.

And then, the bomb goes off.

The force of it shakes the room, and I hear Ren groan in surprise rather than pain. Smoke clouds coat the room in ash, us included. Suddenly, a slender piece of metal fiddles with the part of my chains that keep me pinned to the floor, going free moments later.

Calliope hauls me over her entire frame, fearing that the blast rendered me immobile, and Ren doesn’t move to tear her away from me—even with how badly he wants to touch me again. “Calliope,” I mumble again, my eyes trying to adjust to the sunlight coming in from the windows. But it appears as though the smoke has followed us out here, and my lungs ache.

“The kids are out. Eli’s out. But I had to come back for you.”

My head swims. “Out? What do you—”

A horrible, crumbling noise further down the wing shudders in response, and Calliope presses a kiss to my temple, crying in earnest. “I should’ve done more for you both, and I should’ve done it sooner. I shouldn’t have been so worried about what they’d do to me if they found the notes I sneaked in with your food. I was a coward .”

“No, Calliope—”

“It’s happening, Genny,” my sister tells me with such alarm in her eyes, her voice. “The vision that sent Venus over the edge all those years ago, it’s happening now . And if you don’t get out of here, it’ll take you both with it.”

Calliope means to make a run for it, but I clamp my hands down on her wrist, not wanting to let her go.

“ Genny ,” Ren says in a tone that makes my skin prickle with nerves.

Another blast sounds from somewhere deep in the castle, and that’s when I see it—flames clawing up the columns beyond the window panes, ash streaming towards the sky and tarnishing the otherwise beautiful sunset.

Broadcove is burning.

“We need to go,” Ren mutters.

Calliope assesses Ren with unwavering authority—the eldest daughter within her shining through. “Go through the tunnels. Genny knows the way, and fire won’t penetrate the stone down there.”

Just like that, Calliope fearlessly runs into the chaos, darting around the flames that threaten to lick up her legs and consume her. And with a tight squeeze of Ren’s hand, I will myself to tear through the castle until we reach the trick door into the tunnels.