Reina slipped out of my grasp and stepped between me and Yemoja Roux. She began to glow, her hair whipping in the energy of her gift as it surged forward.
I grabbed her arm. “Reina, what are you doing?”
“She wants to hand you over to the Agency. She’ll have to kill me first.”
The sadness in Yemoja Roux’s eyes reminded me of how my mother used to look.
“Run, Kai!” Reina said.
I didn’t immediately know why, but I felt the strongest sense of deja vu. How many times had I been in this situation? How many more times was I going to let Reina destroy her life for me? She’d been adopted by her childhood hero. It was obvious how much Yemoja Roux cared about her, and I would not be the reason she threw it all away. I didn’t care if the Agency made an example out of me, whether that meant life behind bars or execution. I’d followed Zane and Carter out of GFA to protect Reina, and my job wasn’t finished.
“Stop this.” I pushed past her. “I’m going. Turn me in.... I’m ready.”
I felt Reina’s fingers dig into my arm. “No, you’re fucking not.” She started to tear up. “Please just…” She touched my face as a quick breath escaped, “let me save you this time.”
I smiled. “Can’t you see you already have?” I put my forehead to hers and whispered, “It’s going to be okay.”
She shook her head. “What do you expect me to do, let them take you? I… can’t.”
My chest warmed, and despite her tears, I knew I’d made the right decision. I took her hands in mine. “I want you to find Bri. I want you to go to GFA and become a great Fae like you always dreamed.”
Yemoja Roux’s gaze dropped to the ground. “Thank you, Kai,” she said. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”
“I understand,” I said, forcing my voice to remain steady for Reina’s sake.
39
Reina
I lay awake, my heart throbbing as I replayed my last moments with Kai. I could still feel the touch of his fingertips, my mind haunted with the fear he tried to hide from me as the Agency dragged him into a cell. The chairman would decide Kai’s fate in the morning, and I’d have no opportunity to prove he didn’t deserve to be there.
I could hear Yemoja Roux pacing outside my door trying to think of the right words to say. But nothing she could say would make me forgive her for her cowardice. She knew Kai was innocent, yet she let him be dragged to a cell with no trial, no one allowed to prove his innocence. She allowed him to walk to his probable execution without more than a few words in aid. How could I ever forgive her?
I didn’t know what I could do, but I knew I had to do something. I could practically feel Yemoja Roux lingering outside my door, cycling through the words she would never bring herself to say.
I wasn't just angry at her, I was angry at the whole goddamn world for its unfairness. But it wasn’t the world or even the system that had broken my heart, it was Yemoja Roux. I didn’t care if she tried to say she was just looking out for me. She wasn’t. And it was wrong. Kai had no one. He could have run, but his chances probably would have been the same outside of Ancetol. And, worst of all, I think he stayed for me so I could be protected by the same system that wanted to kill him. I fought the urge to smash the room she'd given me as my body shook in frustration.
My phone buzzed, my heart leaping to my throat. Was it Bri? I scrambled for it, my trembling hands fumbling with the device. The screen lit and I squinted through the brightness.
UNKNOWN:
I’m downstairs. Come out.
Me:
Who is this?
UNKNOWN:
It’s Kai.
Me:
What the fuck Kai? How did you get out?
UNKNOWN:
Are you coming or not?
Frantic, I leaped off my bed and raced out my bedroom door. I caught a glimpse of Yemoja Roux sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. “Where are you going?”
“I just need some air.”
“I don’t think it’s a good—”
I grabbed my jacket and slipped out of the apartment before she could stop me. Once I reached the bottom floor, I stepped out into the cold night. The air was icy. “Kai,” I whispered, but there was no one there.
A lanky stranger stepped around the corner. His face was slender, his eyes as blue and crisp as the night air. His hair was a distinctive snowy white. He smiled at me like we were old friends, his gaze moving down my body in appraisal. I shuddered in the cold. Why hadn’t I thought this through? I was so desperate for it to be true that I didn’t even question it. Perhaps Yemoja Roux would follow me out. If this was who I thought, I was in big fucking trouble.
“Reina Roux,” he said.
“It’s Reina Bennet, actually.”
He nodded, crossing his wrists behind his back as he paced in front of me. He looked like a vulture circling his prey, but his demeanor was superficially pleasant. He appeared to belong to the cold night, drawing in every last bit of crystal frost with his ghostly white skin.
“You don’t know who I am, yet you don’t look surprised to see me.”
I took a slow breath. “I know who you are. You’re DT.”
His eyebrows rose. “You don’t seem afraid.”
“That’s because I’m not.” I balled my fist. “Are you?”
He bobbed his head, as if bored with the conversation. “I’m always afraid.”
Truth.
I pulled my jacket closed. “What are you doing here?”
He stopped pacing and advanced on me. I felt the strength in the back of my knees falter, but I didn’t flinch. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He spoke down to me. “I’ve been looking for you for some time. A while ago you hurt someone I care about. I had planned to turn you over to him as a gift. After all, is there anything sweeter than revenge?”
He was looking down at me, but his eyes were vacant as if entangled in his thoughts. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and began to sharpen truth into a blade around them, hoping I could mask the glow within my jacket. I saw what he’d done to Carter. If he touched me, I was finished. The only way to survive this situation was to fight my way out.
He continued, “When he didn’t return home tonight, I thought you might be responsible.”
My breath hitched. “I don’t have Kai.”
He lifted his deadly hands and reached for me. I had no choice; it was now or never. I yanked my hands from my pockets and sliced them both across this throat.
His smile was sweet, like an innocent child. Shards of sharpened truth shattering to dust in the wind against his perfectly uncut skin.
My chest heaved, fear and adrenaline flooding my blood. “Truth?” he said. “Can you think of anything more true than death?”
I stumbled back, but he only walked closer, reaching for me one more time. I froze as he reached into my coat and lifted the owl charm on my necklace. He held it up to the moonlight, his gaze soft and gentle as he rubbed his thumb across the charm. “I think you do have Kai.”
His eyes moved to me, his face and voice sharpening. “I want him back.”
40
Kaito
My ribs screamed for medical attention, but the simple fact that they’d locked me in this dusty jail cell without it meant there was little hope of me not getting executed in the morning. The room was filled with cells, as if from a time long forgotten, but through the bars, there wasn’t another person as far as I could see. The Fae didn’t take prisoners, so I knew better than to hope for a life that extended past tomorrow. I thought of Reina, how we’d agreed on a Romeo and Juliet ending, and I couldn’t help but feel like we were lucky. I thought of the picture she’d sent me. It sent an involuntary smile to my face. She was going to be okay. She was going to thrive, and for once, I wasn’t standing in her way.
I slid down the cold concrete wall, letting my eyes droop closed in sadness and exhaustion. If I thought about it long enough, these captive moments were all I had left, but if the
y thought I had nothing but concrete walls and bars, they were wrong. I shut my eyes, pulling my legs to my chest and replaying everything I had left—Reina. Some memories returned like a storm of regret and others like a warm summer’s afternoon. But my thoughts lingered on one moment in particular, one from today when I first saw her purple glow in the alleyway. She’d never once confessed how she felt directly, but she’d always shown it. My fingertips tingled with the thought of her quivering body beneath them, my jeans tightening with the memory of her spontaneous reaction to our closeness, and that one solitary tear. She was worth it. And even my most logical thoughts couldn’t bring me to regret a second with her.
Reina had been proving to me how she felt since the day I met her. Before I even knew I loved her. I lamented the years I saw that as a weakness, as I now understood how strong she’d been all along. Yes. I was certain. Reina was worth dying for, and tomorrow I’d prove it.
Yet one regret lingered. Though she’d shown me, with every breath she took, how much she cared, I’d never heard her say it.
In fact, I couldn’t recall a single person ever saying it to me. My chest rose and fell in the darkness, my pulse even and unaffected by the sudden bolt of sorrow that struck me—regardless of what had passed between us, how I was sure we both felt it. I would never hear her say that she loved me. Not in this life.
I remembered the night of the dance, how she’d purged the truth from my lips. I’d given her permission to pull my true feelings for her forward, but when they’d emerged they’d surprised us both. I could have loved her better if given a chance, and who knows, I probably could have been a better man too.
The ground beneath me shook, and for one doubtful second, I thought I might’ve imagined it. The room shook this time, forcing me to retreat to the corner of my cell. I held my breath as I listened for clues, but it was several minutes until I heard the next howls of distress.
As a man practically condemned, I felt an odd indifference to the disturbance, able to observe with curiosity as I had nothing left to lose.
That’s when I saw her burst through the door. Yemoja Roux lifted a guard up by the throat, her braided hair shooting out webs of stray strands in every direction. What the fuck? The guard wrangled in her grasp and sobbed beneath her furious grip, and in that fractured moment I felt the same detached fury that haunted me whenever I visited DT. She tossed the guard aside, and he collided with the bars on the far side of the room with a resounding clang. Finally, she stood with her hands on the bars of my cell.
A shadow filled the doorway and the disheveled chairman stepped to fill it. He spoke, “If you do this,” he said, sleep evident in his weak voice, “you will be stripped of your title.” She froze, which only served to encourage him. “You will never work as a Fae again, and your life’s work will be tarnished by this act.” He moved forward, close enough for me to see the age lines on his face matched hers in depth. “But if you walk away, I can guarantee—”
She spun on him, glaring at him with such intensity that he stopped mid-sentence. He stumbled as he scrambled back toward the door, retreating up the stairs to the main hall. A moment later the alarm sounded.
“What are you doing?!” I screamed over the blaring alarm, but seeing my childhood hero unravel drained all of my strength, and I fell to my knees. “I’m not worth this. Please just let me go.”
“They got her. They got her.” I could see she hadn’t meant to say it twice, and that repetition and fear were sputtering from the inside out.
“Who?” Did she mean The Fallen got someone? The only person from our team that was still on their feet was Ensley, and I’d tracked some shards of glass to a trash truck, which meant she’d gone back to Fallen HQ and stayed there.
“Reina was taken by DT.”
I shook my head. She couldn’t have meant the actual DT. She must think it’s my team. “That’s impossible. We were all taken out at the fight.”
“It was DT,” she said. “I saw on the security footage. A boy with white hair.”
I froze as a wave of desperation crashed down on me. All I could think of was DT’s cold gaze on Reina’s face. Why would he take her? Was it because I lied? What did he plan to do with her? The answers my mind conjured curdled my blood. I wanted nothing more than to flee from this prison and rescue Reina. Any punishment I’d receive would be worth it, and it was obvious, based on the current situation, that Yemoja Roux felt the same, but was this exact reaction what DT had planned? I needed to think logically. It had to be a trap.
Yemoja’s knuckles paled as she clutched the bars of my holding cell. “He looked at her necklace and then she went with him. Why would she go with him?”
Struggling to breathe, I took a sharp breath in, my mind reeling. “He could kill her in an instant. She had no choice.”
“So it’s true then?”
I nodded. He must’ve been desperate, to leave the tower and get his hands dirty. The only time I’d seen him do that was with Carter, and in his mind he’d done it for me. I could only assume this was the same. I thought I’d been so careful to keep my feelings for Reina hidden, for this exact reason. Either way, he knew now. We couldn’t just run in there with no plan, and based on the look in Yemoja Roux’s eyes, we were both too emotionally involved to do this rationally.
“Do you know where he is?” Yemoja Roux asked, her steely eyes penetrating.
“I…. I do, but—”
“But what?” she screamed. “You don’t want to give up your buddy? If you don’t help me get my daughter back—”
“That’s not it.” I walked up to the bars. I wanted Reina back as much as she did, but the look of horror in the chairman’s face, and what he’d promised her, were fresh in my memory. “I put myself in here so you two could have a normal life together. Look, DT is always doing ten things at once. If he knows about our ties to Reina, he’s probably banking that you’ll do something reckless like this to get her back. Think about it...”
The muscles in her jaw tensed.
“He never goes in the field. He’s banking that you’ll let me out of here to help you find him. That way he can get to you… He wants me back and he wants you dead. If we run in there, gifts firing, we’ll all die.”
She clutched the bars between us and they began to glow pink. I backed away, and she bent the bars apart with little effort. I stepped through but stopped and remained motionless on the other side. I sighed. “He’s trying to get you to destroy yourself.”
Her eyes glistened. “What choice do we have?”
“I’m going after her alone.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I brought Reina into this. I’ll handle DT. I’m a dead man walking, anyway,” I said. “It’s you alone who has something to lose here.”
I closed my eyes as I felt the trash truck inch forward in the back alley of the Agency. It was packed full of glass shards, most of which were still in my gift’s grasp. So DT was expecting me. If it was me he wanted, it was me he was going to get. Either way, I wasn’t going to risk the life of Ancetol’s last hope, my childhood hero, and Reina’s only family.
“We need you. I know you’re tired. I know you’d give it all up for her, but this city still needs Yemoja Roux,” I said. “I’ll save Reina on my own. I can’t let you walk out of here with me. I can’t let you throw it away.”
“Let me? It’s done. The choice is already made. The chairman already said—”
She was wrong. If I hurt Yemoja Roux a little, they’d believe she broke in here to talk, and that I’d jumped her. The Agency wasn’t perfect, but they believed in Yemoja Roux as much as they needed her. I could still fix this. The only obstacle left was DT, but I might be able to bargain my life for Reina’s. If I succeeded, she’d still have family to come home to, and Yemoja Roux could protect the city as Fae. I drew the glass shards toward me, and while I could feel them approaching, all appeared unmoving. Then there was a disturbance at the top of the stairs. Even with the wailing sire
ns, I could hear the yells of panicked Fae and the shift of the glass as it began interacting with whoever waited for us to emerge. I drew the glass together into a ball and released it in a massive explosion. I lost more glass from that attack than I’d wanted, but it was enough for what I planned next. I closed my eyes in concentration as I waited for the glass to move again, alerting me that the Fae called to stop my escape were still on their feet. Nothing moved. I yanked a wave of glass down the stairs and it finally crawled into view in a glittering black mass.
“Kaito, please,” Yemoja said, but her voice lowered in resignation, as if she’d understood even with such a sparse explanation. I sharpened the mass into a spike and forced her into the cell, reconstructing it out of glass. “Save her,” she whispered through tears. She lifted a glass shard and cut her face with it as white hot relief seared through my veins. With that single act, I knew I’d saved Yemoja Roux.
I thought I heard her mumble something else, but I couldn’t hear it through the sound of the alarms.
I headed up the stairs and saw the piles of low-tier Fae that were supposedly supposed to stop me and Yemoja Roux. They began to stir weakly. But upon looking a little closer, many of them were pretending to be injured, probably to avoid facing her. I practically rolled my eyes at the charades and games we all played just to maintain the status quo. I performed my next line with the conviction of a drama student forced to recite a line in their school play to pass the class. “Remember, it was I, Kaito Nakamaru, who defeated Yemoja Roux.”
I burst through the front door of the Agency and followed the leftover glass to the trash truck, instructing the driver to head to the tower.
I didn’t want to admit that I was scared of DT. Or that I would have gladly taken the merciful execution of the Agency’s water treatment over what I’d seen Carter endure. It was checkmate if DT had taken Reina, as she was the weakness that I, his closest friend, and Yemoja Roux, his greatest rival, shared. If I failed tonight, Yemoja Roux would follow, and if she fell, so would Ancetol—whether at the hands of The Fallen, or something else entirely.
The Brave & The Broken: Gifted Fae Academy - Year Two Page 14