Vesper turned back to Nef and a pang sang through his chest as she wrinkled her brow. She had been out cold the entire time he and this woman had been arguing. And that didn’t seem right. Especially after what the woman had told him. “How sick is she?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“Early stage,” the woman muttered. She threw the knife and snatched it out of mid-air before she impressively twirled it around her finger.
Then his eyes narrowed on the blade. It wasn’t the one she had pulled on him earlier. That one had bird’s wings carved into the handle, and this one—
He ground his teeth. “Hey! Give me back my fucking knife!”
“No,” she replied sweetly. Too sweetly. “I think I’ll keep it. Along with all your other weapons. They’re fancy for a fancy boy like you, aren’t they? Plus I doubt you even know how to use half of those.”
“Of course, I know how to use them,” Vesper seethed as he wrestled with the rope. “And would you stop screwing around and unbind my bloody hands? This is getting ridiculous!”
She tapped the blade to her chin twice. “Mmm,no.” A grin split her face, one that may have been infectious to some, but only tempted Vesper’s temper to erupt like a volcano. “I think I’ll parade you through the streets as my prisoner first. Really give the people a show.”
Vesper stared back at her. “If you’re going to drag me into the open air, at least give me back my mask so I don’t die from this red shit.” His gaze slid back to Nef and his stomach twisted. “Hers too.”
“I’m not bringing you to the surface and you don’t need masks down here. Afraid you’re staying here with me until I figure out what I want to do with you.” She snorted and rolled her eyes. “And I can tell you’re concerned like a mother hen, but she was just winded when she came down that ladder. It’s a far climb. She collapsed at the bottom. It was rather inconvenient to drag the both of you back here but here we are.”
“What do you mean she collapsed?” he breathed, the wind suddenly sucked from his lungs. Nef had come down to look for him and fainted in that dark place. What if no one had found her?
“Stop looking at your girl like she’s already dead.”
He gritted his teeth at that. She wasn’t his anything, beyond his friend. She deserved so much better than him. Infinitely better.
The woman tilted her head. “Did you not hear me? She’s in the early stage. Meaning she has months until it takes her.”
“Only months?” All the blood drained from his face. “What if—”
“She’ll be fine. I gave her a little ofthat.” She nodded to a wall mounted shelf over the bed. Atop it sat three jars of the liquid she had bought from the shopkeeper. It was a slightly different colour now like she’d tampered with it before she gave it to Nef. As if reading his thoughts, she said, “She just needs rest. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to hurt her. That’s reserved specially for you.”
“So she’s sick, but she has time before she … dies.” He choked out that last word, and as he looked over Nef’s sallow complexion, guilt ate him alive. “Can you tell me how the bloodlace works?”
She shrugged off the question. “You breathe it in, it gets in your lungs, then it eats you from the inside out. Is there more to know?”
He swallowed hard and turned back to Nef. “We’re not from here. And she had a cough before we left. But do you think—” For a moment he debated how much he should say, then decided fuck it, he would just ask. “I was there when the mountain pass opened. And what was inside was bad. The decay and rot—it reminds me of this stuff. Do you think it could have been tracked by, well, by me?”
The woman frowned at him. “You think you gave it to her?”
As Vesper turned back to Nef and shame wormed its way inside him, he breathed, “Is it possible?”
Her expression shifted, morphed to one of pity, but such pity Vesper squeezed his eyes shut. “You can’t transfer it from one person to another. It doesn’t work that way. You can only catch it from the source. But if it was on your clothes or your boots—” When he opened his eyes, he found her watching him with the tiniest softness to her expression. The slightest give to anunyielding stone. “If she came in contact with it, then, yes. Maybe she breathed it in.”
The answer made him want to curl into a ball and bury himself in the darkness of that cavern he’d come from. Or maybe punch a hole in it.
Fuck. He knew he had done some terrible things but this was too much. He was just so unfathomably sorry. For everything he had done. All of the people who had been caught in the quake of his self-destruction. Who had been struck by the impact: Emmery, Fionn, Briar, Callias, Marlys, and now Nef. He scrubbed a hand down his face and this time, when the rope bit into his skin, he didn’t mind it. He leaned into the pain instead.
“But you likely would have come down with it first,” the woman said a little hesitantly. “I would be shocked if she caught it but you didn’t.”
“I don’t have it. But it seems fitting I gave it to her,” he said, his jaw clenched. He had more in common with the bloodlace than he thought. Everyone he had touched or loved had either tasted death or drowned in it. How much more carnage would he leave behind before he was left in this world with nothing but regrets? Would there be anyone he hadn’t doomed? When would someone stop him?
Vesper leaned his forehead on the bed and took a quaking breath, then spoke, his words almost a prayer. A plea. “I’m so,sosorry, Nef. I never thought I’d hurt you, too,” he whispered, hopefully low enough the woman couldn’t hear. Couldn’t pick out exactly how pathetic and vile he was. He couldn’t take it back—it was all too late.
He sat there and wished he could sink into the floor. Disappear for a while. Give everyone in his life a reprieve from his disaster of a soul.
So faint he thought he imagined it, he heard that song from before that played when her fingers met the hilt of her sword.He squeezed his eyes shut, and let it sink inside him, filling him with an unnamed ember of something. Behind him, the woman’s footsteps thumped on the wooden floor toward him.
His gaze flicked up to meet hers and he fixed on her strange silver eye that didn’t seem to focus. “Have you decided what you’ll do with me yet?” he asked and lifted a brow though he was too numb to really feel it. “I don’t have any particularly useful skills unless you need some corpses moved or some leaves gathered with a gust of wind. So you may as well just be done with me. Lop my head clean off. Or maybe you’d like to go the slower route and really savour the torture.”
The woman scrunched her nose and looked him over with such disgust it was comical. “Give me your hands.”