AURELIA'S POV...
So it wasn't a trap.
The realization hit me like a second wind, sharp and clean. The door had stayed open. The flute's signal had been real. No guards sprang from the shadows. No mocking laughter echoed from the walls.
Amora's bitter offer had been genuine—not out of kindness, but out of a jealousy so vast it had carved a path to freedom.
I was already out. The pastel tomb was behind me, its sickly-sweet air replaced by the cold, damp scent of a stone corridor. I didn't know where I was going. Every turn was a guess, every shadow a potential dead end. My bare feet were silent on the cold floor, my breath a ragged hymn in the dark. The only map I had was Amora's hissed instruction: Find the bay mare.
That horse wasn't just transportation. It was a bridge. The final, galloping link between this gilded hell and a world where the sky wasn't viewed through a warped glass window. It would grant me real freedom. From Gaius. From this castle of pain. From everything. Maybe forever.
I pressed my back against a cold wall, listening. The silence was a living thing, thick and watchful. Then, it broke.
From the other end of the long, servant's passage, a door banged open. A familiar, confident stride echoed on the flagstones.
"I'm back!"
That was Calvus. His voice, brimming with whatever dark satisfaction his errand had afforded him, rolled toward me like thunder.
He was returning to his prize, to his cell, unaware that the bird was already out of the cage.
Every muscle in my body coiled tight. The horse no longer mattered. The plan no longer mattered.
All that existed was the instinct screaming in my blood.
RUN.
I launched myself forward. My legs, stiff from days of despair, forgot their weakness. They carried me, flying down the corridor, around a corner, through a narrow archway that scraped my shoulder. I was a ghost, a streak of white hair and desperate motion in the gloom.
The sound of my own heart was louder than my footfalls.
And then, there it was.
A small, muddy yard behind the laundry, steam rising from great vats. Tied to a skeletal elm, swishing its tail in the damp air, stood the bay mare.
Her coat was the color of rich earth, one white sock visible on her foreleg. She eyed my frantic approach with a weary patience.
She shied as I fumbled with the knot, my fingers clumsy with panic.
"Easy, easy," I breathed, the words more for myself than for her. The knot gave. I grabbed a fistful of her coarse mane, found the stirrup with my foot, and hauled myself onto her bare back. There was no saddle, no bridle, only a simple rope halter. It was enough.
As my weight settled, the world shifted.
The high walls of the yard suddenly seemed lower. The confining sky opened up. A sensation, wild and sweet and terrifying, burst in my chest.
Freedom!
My mind screamed it, a silent, glorious roar that shattered the last of my numbness. I kicked my heels against her sides.
The mare surged forward. We burst from the yard onto a narrow service road, then onto a wider path that sloped away from the castle.
The wind, real and unbroken, ripped the breath from my lips and streamed my hair out behind me like a banner. Each hoofbeat on the hard earth was a drumbeat of escape, a wordless poem of flight.
I didn't look back. I leaned low over her neck, my face buried in her coarse mane, becoming one with her rhythm. The world became a blur of greying night and the thunder of her hooves. We were flying, a single creature of muscle and desperation, hurtling into the dawn.
We ran faster. The mare's powerful strides ate up the ground, her breath roaring in her chest, matching the frantic beat of my own heart. The wind whipped tears from my eyes. The horizon ahead was a promise.
Stop now!
A primal warning shrieked in my veins—a cold, sickening pull in the pit of my stomach.
I had no time to think, no time to tug the rope.
My body acted, a desperate instinct to survive. I shifted my weight, a sharp, unbalanced move, trying to wheel the mare around.
It was our undoing.
The mare, confused and driven by her own panic, tried to obey the sudden, contradictory pressure. Her front legs skidded on the loose soil. A terrible, grating stumble.
The ground beneath us vanished.
We were falling into a pit.
"Heiiii...inn"the shriek tore from the mare—a sound of pure animal terror—and was choked off almost instantly.
THUD-SNAP-CRUNCH.
A sickening symphony of impact. The mare's body hit first, taking the full, brutal force.
The sound was wet and final. The sharp, wooden spikes—hidden beneath a fragile lattice of branches and dirt—punched upward.
They did not pierce; they exploded through her belly and chest. A geyser of dark blood erupted, soaking the earthen walls, the coppery smell flooding the pit instantly.
Her legs kicked in one last, violent spasm, then went still. Her great, trusting eyes were already glazing over, fixed on the slice of dawn sky above.
I had been thrown forward by the stumble.
I sailed over her neck as she fell, my body was twisting in shock.
Fortunately ,I landed not on spikes, but in the narrow, bloody space between them, my face pressed into the churned, wet earth. A single, sharpened point of wood grazed my temple, drawing a hot line of blood, its tip hovering less than an inch from my eye.
She planned to kill me???
Then, my own breath. It came in fast, shallow, ragged gasps that hitched in my throat.
The smell of blood and torn soil filled my nose. I was alive. Perfectly, horribly alive. Cradled in a tomb of spikes, baptized in the blood of my only escape.
I lay frozen, the truth dawning with a clarity more piercing than any spike.
This was no escape.
Amora hadn't given me a chance. She had given me a sentence.
She had planted the horse like bait, and the path to it like a trapdoor to a slaughterhouse. The flute's signal hadn't been my cue to run.
It had been my cue to die.
She wanted me dead.
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To be continued...