Unstoppable (Their Shifter Academy #6) - May Dawson Page 0,70
all worth it.
One night of memories with my father wasn’t enough, of course. But it was more than I ever had before, and I was going to be grateful for every minute of it.
Chapter Thirty
Maddie
* * *
The next day, I didn’t see Silas or Rafe. I kept an eye out for them as I quickly ate my breakfast, which looked an awful lot like dinner the night before, then headed out into the yard.
Jensen and I were assigned to work on tearing down a half-burned barracks building, since we didn’t have any regular assigned job like the other prisoners.
“Do you think it was struck by lightning?” I asked another prisoner curiously.
Half of the roof was burned away, but strangely enough, the entire inside of the barracks had burned away. I wondered what had happened there. I hadn’t seen anything like it ever before, but I also was far from an expert on lightning.
The prisoner just looked at me and then walked away. Well, good talk.
Jensen sidled in beside me. He’d shed his prison jacket earlier—of course he had—since even in the cold, we were all sweating. Now he was shirtless, except for the leather gloves we all wore handling the rough wood.
“I don’t think it was lightning, Maddie,” he said softly. “I think this was some kind of…execution.”
Unease twisted through my gut. I felt sick at the thought, but I said, “It seems a bit dramatic.”
“Magicians seem to be.”
“I wonder if that has anything to do with their attempt at an uprising a few months ago,” I said.
“Might fit the timeline. Looks like the rain and snow’s been beating down on the inside of this place for a while.”
I glanced over my shoulder, curious how anyone had tried to escape. We were on the other side of the building from the bored guard watching over us; there was a long slope down the hill, a deep pit of water that reminded me of a moat, and a wall beyond it, made of stone in places and wood in others. The fence didn’t seem that high, but I had a feeling that was a lie.
It was only because I was studying the wall that I saw Isabelle.
She must have escaped, and yet she was coming back now, squeezing through the wall.
It took me a second to realize she was stuck. She was frantically trying to perform magic, her lips moving and a stick gripped in her hand as a makeshift wand.
Wait, could she actually use magic despite the rune?
Yet somehow she was trapped. We had to help her.
Jensen followed my gaze and frowned. “What kind of idiot would break into Elegiah?”
“What kind of idiot indeed,” I said, even though I knew what he meant. If Isabelle had a way of escaping, why the hell hadn’t she just run?
What was going on with Keen, Sebastian and the others? I couldn’t get Isabelle to talk to me, but something was going on here that I didn’t understand.
I heard the guard’s voice coming and grabbed Jensen’s wrist, determined to keep them from coming around the corner and seeing Isabelle.
But when he slipped around the edge of the building, he had stopped and was talking to another guard. For a second, I didn’t even realize Silas; he had such a knack for blending in and he was wearing the crisp navy blue uniform that made the guards all blend into one for me.
Once I recognized his face, a sense of relief flooded me. It was so powerful that my bone-deep trust in Silas surprised me.
“You two, get back to work,” the guard shouted at us. He reached for the baton on his belt.
Silas never looked our way, but he said something and the guard laughed and relaxed subtly.
“Go,” I whispered to Jensen. I could busy myself at the edge of the building piling fallen stones into the wheelbarrow, but it was definitely a task for two.
He gave me his skeptical eyebrows, but he went, climbing up onto the rooftop to help pull with the demolition of the cross-beams that were being torn out. I loved him for that. Jensen always listened to me.
Actually, he had since the beginning. That was what I thought about as I worked on piling the stones, trying to keep an eye on Isabelle and on the guards. Even when Jensen and I were engaged in our little war, he’d made it clear he valued my intelligence…even as he tried to chase me out of the academy.