“Then why would you think this paltry escape plan would work?”
“Escape?” Mike smiled grimly. “Thinking that was your first mistake.”
If he was going to die, this was a worthy cause. And this stand would do.
Mike happily threw the first shot.
Chapter Thirty-one: Ensnaring and Ensnared
I could hear the fighting elsewhere in the prison, could feel the ground shake. Could feel Axer and Constantine come back online. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Stavros was waiting. And he had my parents.
I stepped up to the last stamped painting.
“The fewer who are between you and Stavros, the better. Variables. Better to go straight there,” Axer had said, moving chess pieces in the library.
Straight to Stavros’s lair.
I carefully tucked all such thoughts beneath the layer of paint in my mind, letting it erase them, allowing only the fear and determination to remain.
Priyasha looked out sadly from her frame. Stavros watched me, coldly furious, from inside a small portrait on the wall behind her. “Do invite her in,” he said to Priyasha, then disappeared.
Priyasha reached out, almost unwillingly, and enveloped me inside. I could feel my magic as it was bound. The few devices I had brought with me to get to this point disintegrated. God, if I had tried to bring anyone with me in a storage paper, or hidden Rock Guard... I shuddered involuntarily. All my connections went dark.
But she held me within her painted arms before flipping me behind, and I could hear the whisper of her paint against my cheek.
I do not regret the years I had with Sergei. Not even the wisps of me in these enduring memories do I regret. I feel your turmoil, and the pain of your loved ones' loss, and I give you one last gift. I felt her painted fingers coat me. I can do nothing against he who holds my strings, but the destruction of the others makes those of us left stronger. And I can give you the protections I have, as love is not an emotion Stavros guards against. Take heed, though, the protections will only last so long. Good luck.
Her smudged fingers slipped from my cheek.
I caught the paint before it fled. Kinsky loved you, I said.
She smiled. I know. And I, him.
A corridor whooshed past me, and Stavros was before me. The last net of spells tightened around me. I had no magic to call. It was the entry price I had paid.
I looked around me, at the inner sanctum of Stavros, at the towering walls of paintings surrounding him. Priyasha was looking back from each one.
“That's why Kinsky's lair was never found.”
“I had hoped that the idea of the Origin Circuit would prompt you to try to navigate it. You would have been mine the instant you set finger to this spot.”
I thought of the mirror in Okai. “I have seen things that temper curiosity. And the Origin Book was always cautious of this spot.”
“Unfortunate.”
I stepped carefully into the atrium and felt the paint wrap around me. I needed to time things so very carefully. And to find the way that Stavros planned to cull. The button that he would push. “How many did he create?”
“Thousands. Each day, ten more. Trying so hard to find the right likeness, the one that would bring her back.”
I looked at my feet and thought of my hundreds of trials with Christian. “You used him. Told him you could help.”
“He was wasted on his own pursuits. Look at this. What do you see?”
I looked at the towering pictures. “I see someone who loved wholly.”
“I see someone who couldn't let go. But you let go, didn't you? Shoved your brother into the dirt, found new replacements.”
I choked down the fury and the other debilitating, unhelpful emotions suddenly clogging me, and concentrated on the ones I could count on. I counted on my Olivia ones. My Axer, Constantine's, and Neph's. “I know what you are doing.”
He smiled. “Knowing doesn't really matter. It's how you are feeling that does.”
He circled around me. “Look at you, with your miserly emotional protections, thinking that any of them matter when it comes to the end. I have all the time in the world to work on you. No one can get to you. No one can find you.”
“But you don't have all the time, do you?” I asked ruthlessly. “Because your house of cards is falling. You don't have the public's blind support anymore. You've failed here at the end.”
He gripped my chin, then let go and smiled. “You bring out the emotion in me. I will hurt you even more for it.” He stepped back. “You are just coming into your powers. Given a few years, you would have been able to find me without subterfuge, without using the paintings at all. Luckily, you possess little skill in the art.”
“Luckily,” I said, letting bitterness show, and allowing the paint in my mind to hide any other thoughts. I looked around at the dizzying array of Kinsky portraits. “An endless supply of seals. Convenient.”
“When needed.” He straightened his shirt sleeve. “They allow me to be anywhere, should I need it. And they protect me.” He smiled and looked derisively at Priyasha, who looked steadily back. “She protects me. Even when she knows that I'm the cause of his death. But she can do nothing—I drank too deeply of his magic, enough to trigger all the protections she doesn't want to give.”
“You've enslaved her memory.”
“You speak as if she's real.”
“The memory of her is real,” I murmured. “The love that went into her creation was real.”
“And yet she sits there, day after day. Barely moving. Useless.”
I thought of the journal, thought of all the Priyashas who had tried to help me. “You underestimate love.”
“No, it is you who overestimate its value.”
“Are you connected to all of them?” I looked around me.
His brief hesitation caused my anxiety to calm. “Of course I am. Come now, we have important things to do.”
“Small problem with those containers disappearing once more?”
A wave of emotion was abruptly pulled from me, leaving me staggering against my bonds.
His hands fisted, then loosened. “I'm being hasty, when I want you to suffer. The containers are easily found. Your little Third Layer girl hid them, and she will tell us where before you kill her.”
I gritted my teeth. Painted shadow curled around my throat as he squeezed.
“I do wonder how you got your connections back so strongly, and your mind. Making me have to work to take it again.” He prowled around me. “It was hours ago that I ripped them from you. No one heals that fast.”
“Maybe I'm just that durable.”
I felt my wrist break. Tears sprang to my eyes.
“So many different types of torture to choose from. I, of course, prefer the kind that you can never heal from.” He swung around. “Wake up, Miss Crown.”
Something shifted abruptly in my brain and I started to fall before I knew what was happening. A shift so severe; a fall in a nightmare.
I plunged into dark, churning waters then woke, gasping for breath.