Slave to Royal: The Omega Moon goddess

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

POV: Tarek

I walked through that servant gate exactly the way Roan told me to, head down, moving like a man delivering grain too early for anyone to bother questioning, and every step down a corridor I had once walked like someone people stepped aside for now felt like wearing a stranger's skin. The lock on her cell was easier than it should have been, old and neglected because nobody in that palace had ever imagined a prisoner worth guarding properly, and when the torchlight spilled across the dirt floor inside, I understood why Roan's voice had gone tight relaying what the water girl told him.

She was curled against the far wall, smaller than I remembered her being, her back marked with stripes that had only half healed before being opened again, and for one paralyzing second I could not move, because the thing in front of me was no longer an idea I had spent six days reading about in a borrowed scroll. It was Nyla. It was what I had done to her, laid out in dried blood and torn fabric, and every excuse I had built for myself in that outpost crumbled into something too small and too late to matter now.

"Nyla." My voice came out lower than I meant it to. She did not move, and for one terrible heartbeat I believed I had come too late for any of it.

Then her eyes opened, glassy and unfocused, and her whole body went rigid the instant some part of her recognized the shape of me in that doorway. "Get away from me." Her voice barely carried, but the venom underneath it was alive enough to cut. "Have you come to finish what you started in front of everyone, or does Celene want me delivered somewhere more convenient for her this time?"

"I came to get you out." I moved toward her slowly, the way you move toward something wounded and rightfully furious at you, and when I reached for her she flinched back hard enough to scrape what skin remained on her shoulder against the stone. "I know exactly what I sound like saying this. I know what I am to you right now. But the full moon rises tomorrow night, and if you are still in this room when it does, none of what either of us feels is going to matter, because you will not survive it."

"You should have thought about what mattered before you opened your mouth in front of five hundred wolves."

"I know." No defense behind it, because she had earned the truth without decoration. "I am not asking you to forgive me tonight. I am asking you to let me carry you out before Celene comes back to finish what she started this morning."

She studied me through the swelling on her face for a long, terrible moment, and I watched something in her give way, not because she trusted me but because her body had run out of other options, some part of her still bound to me whether either of us wanted it recognizing the truth in what I said even now. "If you are lying to me again," she whispered, "I will not survive being wrong about you twice."

"Then I will not give you the chance to be wrong twice."

I gathered her up carefully, every wound she carried landing in my own chest like a debt I intended to spend the rest of my life repaying, and she did not fight me when I lifted her, too broken to do more than press her face against my shoulder and let her body finally stop pretending it could hold itself upright alone. Roan was waiting exactly where he said he would be at the servant gate, his face going tight the moment he saw the condition she was in.

"Move." He wasted no other words, and we crossed the open ground beyond the wall together, her weight settling heavier against me with every step, her wolf pulling tight against mine through everything broken between us, instinct older and more honest than either of our pride had ever managed to be.

The cold night air hit her exposed skin and she stirred against me, a small sound escaping her that was half pain and half something I refused to name while we were still inside the narrow range of that palace. "Where," she managed, barely a whisper.

"Away from here. That is all that matters right now."

"You betrayed me in front of everyone I have ever known, and now you expect me to let you carry me into the dark and trust wherever you are taking me."

"I do not expect anything from you tonight. I only need you to survive long enough to decide later whether any of it was worth trusting."

Six days of reading exactly what I had done to her sat heavier in my chest than her weight against my arms ever could, and I did not say any of it out loud right then, because confessions made while running from a kingdom that wanted her dead were not confessions at all, only excuses dressed up to sound like courage. I only ran, and let the rest of it wait for a night when she had strength left to decide whether she wanted to hear it.

We had almost reached the treeline, the dark wall of the forest close enough that I could feel the shift in the air promising cover, when the horns split the night open behind us, three long blasts rolling across the open ground, and Nyla went rigid in my arms at the sound of it.

"She found the cell empty." Her voice had gone flat with something colder than fear. "She knows."

I tightened my grip on her and pushed harder toward the treeline, every instinct in my body narrowing down to one fact. The hunt behind us had already started, and we were nowhere close to far enough away to survive it.