knew what was to come even before his black eyes latched on to hers.
The first wave of Sadov’s fear manipulation hit her, scattering all logical thought. Ana’s knees gave way. Her body was paralyzed; she slumped against her restraining guards, gasping for breath, the wet cobblestones of the bridge spinning before her.
“Let her be,” she dimly heard Sadov say to the guards, who released her and took a step back. Ana slumped on the ground, shaking so hard that tears dripped from her eyes. “I can control her.”
Between the ebb and flow of fear, she clung tightly to one thought; a feeling, an instinctive calling from a memory ten years past.
There was only one way out.
As another spasm of fear shot through her, Ana doubled over and gagged.
“Come here, my little monster,” Sadov crooned. “Be good, and obey me. Take the Deys’voshk, and we shall bring you to the future Empress. She wants to be your ally, not your enemy.”
Despite the trembling in her muscles, Ana grasped the railing of the bridge and heaved herself to her feet. The railing dug into her lower back as she leaned against it, her hair clinging to her sweat-slicked face. Sadov’s Affinity pressed into her, and she remembered her nightmares of tumbling over the bridge and into the Tiger’s Tail. Images of the vicious white whorls flooded her mind, and she closed her eyes against the feeling of being tossed around in that violent storm.
I am afraid.
And it was Linn’s voice that came to her then, like a blade cutting through the mist of her fear. That is when we can choose to be brave.
Ana was sobbing so hard that she thought she would break. Her hands tightened around the railing.
With the lightest tip of her weight backward, she flipped herself over the Kateryanna Bridge and plunged into the yawning depths of the icy Tiger’s Tail.
When Ramson saw her fall, he was standing beneath a lamppost on the riverside promenade by the Kateryanna Bridge, waiting for Tetsyev’s signal that he had been cleared to enter the Palace.
Princess Anastacya is going to stop Morganya, the alchemist had said. And we must get to her before Morganya’s forces do.
Only the Countess and her forces had found Ana first.
He hadn’t believed his eyes when he’d seen her on the bridge—but, he’d realized, it was utterly Ana to attempt something so brazen and ridiculously foolish with stubborn pride. He’d watched the altercation unfold on the bridge with a growing sense of dread, his mind already racing five, ten steps forward and mapping out all the different scenarios in which this could play out.
He’d just never expected for her to jump.
And Ramson did the only thing he could think of. He dove after her.
He had the sense to take a deep breath before he hit the river like a bag of rocks. The water dragged him under, buffeting him this way and that and pulling him down to its depths. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe, his world tossing in every direction possible. And, inevitably, the river’s wrath pulled him back to the stormy night that had changed the course of his life forever.
He was eight years old again, and he was drowning in the black waters of that storm that had almost claimed his and Jonah’s lives. But the real nightmare was that image of Jonah’s crow-black eyes, gaping and unseeing, seared into Ramson’s memories.
Terror choked Ramson. The darkness was absolute. He had no direction.
No, he thought, and the phantoms of his mind dispersed. By whatever means he’d met Jonah—coincidence, fate, or the Deities—it wasn’t Jonah’s death that his friend would have wanted him to remember.
It was what Jonah had taught him when he was alive.
Swim. The voice came to him, so real that Ramson opened his eyes. But instead of a pale-faced, dark-haired boy, there was a girl in front of him: a brave, selfless, and stubborn girl who had worked her way into his heart, by Jonah’s side.
He would not lose her.
Not again.
Swim, came the voice, but this time, it was his own.
Ramson kicked out. The currents were dragging her away, down to where it grew darker. She thrashed, her gown puffing out around her, pulling her down.
A sharp pain cut across his forearm and he flinched, lashing out to grab whatever it was that had bit him.
An arrow.
Another whizzed past him, and another. Archers. Those bastards were really intent on killing them.
The best way, Ramson knew, to escape archers was to swim deeper.