I don’t have time to determine what’s occurred. He isn’t me—his knife hand is flailing aimlessly.

I spring ahead, snatch his wrist, and wrench his arm round.

With a sickening sound, his personal blade drives into the flesh on the base of his throat.

Borys’s physique spasms in entrance of me. I dodge backward as he crumples over, spewing blood from his neck and lips.

He sputters one thing as if he’s attempting to talk, however not with any phrases I can decipher. His arms fumble throughout the ground and drift to a halt.

His physique sags, his head lolling to the facet. The one eye I can see stares blankly on the wall.

Blood programs throughout the dusty flooring in a gentle present.

I obtained my gash, identical to I wished.

I suck in a shaky breath. “Julita? We did it. He’s useless.”

Nobody solutions. And , I understand I can’t really feel her—not the acquainted prickle in the back of my cranium, not the faint hint of a tingle that lingers even when she pulls herself as deep as her presence can go.

She will need to have flung herself proper out of me to smack Borys within the face with no matter presence she did have left.

She’s what he was clawing at, what distracted him sufficient that I might assault.

And now she’s gone.

Forty-Three

Ivy

Iwake as much as a cool breeze tugging at my hair and a heat hand on my cheek. Once I blink, Casimir’s attractive face comes into focus within the pale mild, framed by looming bushes.

A smile curves his lips. “There’s our girl.” He strokes my hair again from my temple. “How are you doing, Kindness?”

“I—” The primary phrase comes out as a croak. I clear my throat and check out once more. “What occurred? The place are we?”

The very last thing I keep in mind is the corridor within the farmhouse, Borys bleeding throughout the ground, my head unnervingly vacant for the primary time in?—

My physique tenses beneath the blanket that’s been laid over me. My cranium continues to be vacant.

I can’t discover any tingle of Julita’s presence regardless of how onerous I pressure my senses.

“We adopted the locket’s sign and located you within the farmhouse,” Casimir is saying. “You could have handed out.”

Stavros’s voice carries from someplace past my view. “Exhaustion and blood loss will try this.”

Blood loss. I regulate my place on the bottom—padded by one other blanket—and an ache ripples by my facet from the spot the place Borys lower me.

No wry remark from Julita. No cheer that her sadistic brother is lastly, positively useless.

I pry at my thoughts as if I can summon her voice by sheer will, however nothing comes.

Casimir’s forehead knits on the emotion that should present on my face. “We patched you up completely. A lot of the blood wasn’t yours.”

Alek seems beside him, holding certainly one of our canteens. “You ought to be all proper, but it surely’d be good so that you can drink one thing.”

I stare at them, a a lot deeper ache spreading by my chest. It twines round my lungs, making it onerous to talk.

“Julita—she helped me distract her brother—she… she flung herself proper out of my head at him so I might get his dagger?—”

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