Lexa
An entire day passes. I count the hours, the minutes, the seconds, until time bleeds together in my head. My mind pounds like a drum, my temples splitting, and the only thing keeping me lucid is a near constant array of healing drafts being poured down my throat every hour on the hour, as if they are responsible for ensuring my heart doesn’t stop beating.
In the first hour of the second day in Silas’s country home in the Highwoods–a mountainous estate several hours north of the capital, I’m told–I rise from bed, gingerly testing my range of motion, feeling how taut and new my spine feels. Like the bones are made of glass.
I make it three steps before my back crumbles, forcing me onto the edge of the bed.
Bea, Silas’s healer, is a stout and bossy woman, a shifter, and a beautiful one, at that. She can’t be older than my age, but she’s hardened, like she’s seen nothing but violence, blood, and war her entire life. She doesn’t take no for an answer. The woman has been torturing me, keeping me tied to the bed if I so much as flinch away from her constant, disgusting medicines and painfully prodding.
But this last time, she forgot to slip my wrists back into the loops of the ropes keeping me bound belly down in the bed.
She says it’s for my own good. Chessie agrees with her. Silas won’t speak to me. Blake has been absent.
I’m losing my mind.
The door opens, and Chessie appears dressed in a simple white frock and cream-colored cardigan. She draws in a breath when she notices me sitting upright, but I wave her off, wiggling my toes to test the feeling in my legs before pushing myself into a standing position again.
“Lexa, please, you can’t be on your feet!”
“I have to go back.”
“There’s nothing to go back to. Silas’s resistance has the entire capital surrounded. The Alphas of the free wolves and the kings of the lesser fae are sending in their enforcements to help Silas’s cause. They may get there in time to stop–”
“Where is Kaleb? Is he still in a dungeon?”
Chessie’s perfectly pink cheeks drain of color, turning a sickly gray. “Lexa, please–”
“I have to go get him.” It’s casual. I say it like I’m simply running an errand.
Her eyes water as I take two steps and stumble, saving myself by bracing a hand against a dresser tucked against the wall to my right.
“I can’t let you do it.”
“I’m not asking your permission.”
She steps in front of me when I try to pass her. The blood races from my brain to my lower extremities, my legs suddenly leaden and refusing to move. Frustration so hot it burns like fever drives my heart rate into a frenzy, which only makes the feeling of utter dread worse.
“Get out of my way!”
“You need to stay here.” She raises her hands in surrender, but tears slip down her cheeks. “Please? Lexa, please, you have to.”
“I am your captain,” I remind her with a sharp bite in my voice. “You will do as I command. Move.”
“You are in my house,” she snarls, and I fall back, totally shocked by the tone of her voice.
My legs hit the bed, and I fold like bread dough, my body just as pliable. Chessie lingers in the doorway for several seconds, wringing her hands, before stepping forward, reaching to help me back onto my back, but she stops, pulling her hands back. “Silas and I are fated mates, Lexa.”
“Blake said as much.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” she cuts in then clears her throat. “I am his mate, and he is mine. We knew pretty much immediately, but I wasn’t sure I could trust my emotions. It felt… insane, but so did everything else we were going through. I brought it up to him. What it felt like for me. It wasn’t until the king lifted his magic and allowed me to fully feel my wolf during the Beast Trial that it fully snapped into place. And then I–”
“Then Meg put a sword through your skull?”
Chessie looks down at her slippers. “I held on. I held on for–for both of you. You and Silas. I wanted to tell him I could feel it like he could now, that he could stop walking on eggshells around me and we could–” More tears roll down her cheeks in a torrent similar to the rain still pounding the windows near the bed. “I don’t remember much after that. I remember feeling like I was slipping away and begging the Goddess to let me stay a moment longer. I thought She heard my prayers because I woke up a week later here, and Silas was telling me that Blake saved my life, and you were still alive, still in the games. Silas has been losing his mind over you and Kaleb.” She sucks in a desperate breath. “You’re his mate. That’s what Silas told me. You’re Kaleb’s mate. I thought–I thought there was something–”
“I can’t let him die in that dungeon.”
Chessie blinks like she’s been lost in her head, but she looks at the far wall as if there’s something, or someone, there–but there’s not. She’s silent, her eyes glassy. She’s suddenly trapped in her mind.
I freeze, unease tingling through my body. “Chessie?”
When she doesn’t respond, I shakily get out of bed and sway in her direction, tripping over my own feet like I haven’t totally mastered the act of walking at twenty-two years old. I reach for her, grabbing her upper arm, but she only stares forward, past me, her eyes locked on the window. . “Chessie? What’s wrong?”
Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out.
“She’s having a lapse,” Blake says from the doorway. My hand drops from Chessie’s arms.
“What?”
“I call it a lapse. I had to reanimate half of her brain. She retained most of her memories, from what we can tell, but she gets confused easily when trying to conjure them and use them to make new decisions.” He steps around her to look into her eyes. “It’ll pass. The lapses are growing fewer and fewer now, and they never last very long.”
“Is she having a seizure?”
“No, not really. She’s actively trying to build new neural pathways. She’s still healing. It’s difficult for her mind, so she tends to just… turn off for a moment and reboot.”
“What have you done to her?”
“I saved her.”
“At what cost? Is she still Chessie?”
“Yes. She is. But she had a lethal brain injury. It’ll take months to fully heal from that. It’s a miracle she’s still herself and not locked inside the part of her mind that survived. I built her a new one, and she’s filling it as we speak.”
I stare at my cousin in horror and awe. “You really are a god, aren’t you? You cheated death. Only a god can do that.”
He says nothing for a moment, but his eyes flick to a random corner of the room. “When we return home, you cannot say a word about this to anyone.”
I struggle to understand why.
“I need you to swear it.”
“Why?”
“Because this skill of mine isn’t natural. It goes against the Goddess. If I am a god, Lexa, I am the God of Death, sure, if we’re calling it what it is, and what I’ve done for you and Chessie has just allowed you to live a little longer for my own gain. That’s the only reason it worked. It’s not healing. It’s selfishness.”
My stomach pitches. It takes me a moment to respond, to process what he just said. “You need to save Kaleb. You need to save him and everyone in the Glade. I don’t care about the rest. I’ll swear. I’ll keep this secret for you.”
“You’re going back, regardless of what I do. I can already see it.” His eyes meet mine, Chessie still standing between us, her eyes locked on the rain trickling down the window. “You’ll go back and make a huge mess.”
“He’s my mate. I’m not going to let him die.”
“He wants you to leave.”
My jaw clicks shut.
“I was able to speak to him. I used my shields to get into the capital unseen, and I found him.”
I shake my head.
He continues. “He made me vow to get you out of Pantharas.”
“It’s not your call to make.”
“I will be traveling back to the capital tonight to face off with Hannibal. I’ll be using his altar, the way he was able to try to spy on us from Pantharas, using my daughter’s dreams as a conduit… to try to get a hold of Maeve. I’ll slip into her thoughts and dreams somehow. She’ll be able to find us then, and then Evander will send the entire naval force.”
“I’m going with you. We’re going to free Kaleb and his people.”
“You are staying here.”
“You cannot keep me here.”
“I will put you under, lock your mind in a dark cage within your head, if you try anything.”
I glare at him. “I will kill you if you try.”
Chessie jerks to sudden awareness, gripping her head. She takes a step forward, glancing around the room like she’s forgotten why she’s here, and then turns to Blake. “Silas?”
“He’s downstairs waiting for you. He made tea.”
Chessie practically floats out of the room. I watch her go, wishing she’d move faster. My fingertips prickle to close around Blake’s throat, but I can’t do it. I can barely move as it stands.
“Fix me,” I tell him with a breathy sigh. “Just do it, Blake. Use your powers to turn off the pain in my body so I can finish this.”
“No.”
“I won. I deserve to stand before the king and ask for my reward. The games are not over until I end it. That’s how this works. I am going, whether you like it or not. I will find a way there. I will walk if I have to. I will shift and risk my life and ruin all the work you did to–”
“You’re pregnant, Lexa.”
I shake my head, choking on a laugh. “Shut the fuck up, Blake.”
“Laugh all you want. You’re risking two lives instead of one if you step a single foot outside of this house.”
“You’re doing whatever you can to force me to stay, but I won’t. I am going back for Kaleb. You can either help me or stand back and watch me burn Pantharas to the ground, alone. It’s your choice.”
Blake stares at me. I stare back, unafraid, refusing to let his warnings settle. I notice it then, the flicker of power behind his eyes, so much quieter than usual.
“This place is draining you of your powers, isn’t it? That’s why you said you were running out of time.”
“I’m using my powers to their max everyday I’m here.”
“Then let’s fucking finish this!”
“You are not involved.”
“I am.” I step toward him. The act of simply putting my toes to the ground sends a jolt of pain up my spine. I fight through it. “I’m going back for my mate. I will not leave without him and his people. I will face the king. I will go to that arena, and he will be forced to give me my reward. Those are the rules. He cannot deny me. He could not deny Kaleb when he asked to become Alpha King. He has to do it. The games are governed by magic–something ancient–not him. That magic is everywhere. I felt it in every game. The dragon. The maze. The woods. There’re portals out there, Blake. He doesn’t control those. Not fully. They allow him to do this as long as he follows the rules. I have to go back.”
Blake takes several moments to reply. He’s livid but reining his feelings in, silently going over every option.
“Tell me you wouldn’t do this for Marianna and Skye,” I say, and he jolts back to the present. “You’d be fine leaving them in chains?”
“Come here,” he says gravely, motioning for me to close the distance between us.
I have to trust him. I have to trust I won’t wake up days from now when Kaleb is already dead.
He clutches the back of my neck, his fingers digging into the hollow at the base of my skull.
“You have no idea what you’re asking me to do. But I’ll do it.”
The world goes black, but only momentarily.