The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 517

Then it was gone. The tunnel went dark again. Callum didn’t move.

Neither did I.

He was breathing hard, and so was I, his chest flush to mine and his heart going just as fast as mine. When I tilted my head back to look at him his face was close enough that the torchlight caught the gray of his eyes and lit them gold at the edges.

His gaze dropped to my mouth. I felt my lips part. Everything else fell away, and his head dipped toward mine, and I let my eyes start to close—

Zane cleared his throat. “Hey, lovebirds. Listen.”

We pulled apart. Somewhere far ahead of us, an echo of an echo, I heard a sound—something metal and heavy. Like a chain dragging across the floor.

Followed by a low, wet cough.

My heart caught in my throat. Without hesitating, I took off at a near-sprint, Zane and Callum shouting after me as they chased on my heels.

“Marcus!” I shouted. “Marcus, it’s me! Liora!”

After thirty or forty feet, the tunnel opened into a low, round chamber, and the torch found a row of iron doors set into the curved wall. Most stood open on empty cells. The last one didn’t. The sound was coming from behind it, and when Callum lifted the light to the barred slot in the door, it fell on a man slumped against the far wall with his arms dragged up over his head, wrists chained to a ring bolted into the stone.

I skidded to a halt, breathless, in front of that cell.

“Marcus!” I gasped, gripping the bars. “Marcus!”

His head slowly lifted, and under the matted beard and the dried blood and the weeks of whatever they’d done to him, I found his face. He was thinner than I’d ever seen. One eye was swollen shut. But it was him, down to the gray at his temples, down to the broad scarred hands that had closed over mine the first time he ever set a blade in them.

His good eye landed on me through the dark.

“I’ll walk out of here on my hands and knees if that’s what it takes.” He set his jaw and fought to get his legs under him. “Help me up.”

Zane took one side and I took the other. Marcus hung a heavy arm across each of our shoulders and we hauled him upright, swaying, hissing through his teeth. Callum went ahead with the torch, eyes on the floor for ward lines, carefully finding our way back.

We moved slowly. Marcus didn’t complain, not even when his legs buckled at times and the pain took hold of him. None of us spoke, just focused on putting one foot in front of the other and reaching that door before it was too late.

When the door finally came back into sight, still slightly open, the band of light around it shining in the darkness, I could have dropped to my knees right there.

The moment we were through, the door was already closing at our backs, drawing itself shut until it was only a slab in the wall once more. A moment later, the light returned to the seam, shimmering faintly around the edges. Sealed.

Marcus lifted his head off my shoulder and squinted up the long stretch of stairs standing between him and open air. Then he huffed out something that, on a better day, might have passed for a laugh.

“Hell of a way to spend a vacation,” he muttered, and put his foot on the first step.