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The sound of her oath band resetting. Sparing her for another night.

I turned boneless, and even Goren released a great exhale, his powerful shoulders sinking with relief.

“Thank you,” Perla breathed, her hand now shaking in his.

Goren nodded, frowning as he looked her over. Then he must have realized he was still holding her hand because he dropped it abruptly, his throat bobbing with a hard swallow.

A scuffle sounded to the right, and we whipped around to see a Banarrati soldier. The man had barely raised his sword before Goren’s power blasted him to the ground. He didn’t get back up.

“We need to get out of here,” Goren said, newly urgent.

He helped me out of the pit first, then gave Perla a leg up. Her boot skidded over the loose nightstones, and Goren immediately steadied her from behind, his hand gripping the back of her thigh. As she clambered up beside me, faint color crawled across her cheeks.

“I passed Val on the way here,” Goren said, taking my offered hand as he hauled himself out. “The sword wasn’t at her location either.”

“Then we have to hope that either Keil or Dashiel found it,” I said, too flustered to explain just how badly I needed that to be true.

Because I believed I now knew what the Unbreakable Blade could achieve.

“If they did,” Goren said, “they should have deposited it on our ship by now, which is where we need to be, too.” But before he took another step, he fixed a glare on Perla. For a moment, I thought he was going to intimidate her into keeping whatever she heard here to herself.

Instead, he grabbed her hand, withdrew the key-copying mold, and set it in her palm. “Don’t let this out of your sight until that band is off your wrist.” He spoke with a fervent air of command, all his softness shedding away. “Nobody should own the key to your freedom but you.”

Perla pulled up taut, clearly irked by his tone. “I know that.”

“Good,” he said gruffly. His fingers folded tightly over hers, forcing them to close over the mold. “Because breaking the bones of someone I hate is a lot less fun when they’ve asked me to.”

Perla’s eyes narrowed, her wariness seeming to return in an instant. I didn’t have time to dissect the way Goren’s gaze trailed over her face before he released her, and we plunged into the carnage once again.

35

Goren cut through the Crater like a spear.

His power funneled forward to knock stragglers out of our path; his axe swiped down upon the golden-uniformed soldiers who delighted in the slaughter of all those defenseless. By the time we raced back onto the beach, it had become a hellscape of blood and rocks and broken limbs.

I was still absorbing the magnitude of the destruction when Perla murmured, “Gracious gods.”

I followed her eyeline, and my stomach sank. Because an armored figure sat slumped against the cliffside, his swollen, sweat-plastered face angled toward the light.

Dashiel.

We sprinted forward and I dropped to my knees, palms skidding over sand. Dashiel gasped into awareness, his eyes flaring wide, but I didn’t yet feel relieved. Because blood was leaking from his nose, his temple, a gash in his thigh—and his eyes were glassy with pain.

“What happened?” I asked breathlessly, looking around for something to stop his bleeding.

But Perla moved faster than me; she peeled off her blouse entirely, leaving just her camisole beneath, and used the fabric to bandage his thigh.

“Soldiers in Ansoran uniforms,” Dashiel panted, holding his ribs. “I found the sword. I was heading to our ship to deposit it when I saw the battleships by the beach. So I—”

“Pulled in here instead,” Goren finished darkly. Because those ships had made him turn toward the beach, too.

We shared a grim look of realization. Erik hadn’t ambushed the group while they’d searched for the sword because he probably hadn’t known the potential locations of Saxon’s tomb. So he’d planted those battleships near the beach, knowing it would immediately lure them here.

And when his soldiers had seen Dashiel carrying the sword . . . they must have ambushed him.

“They took the sword,” I whispered in bleak understanding.

This whole night, Erik had been waiting for us to bring the Unbreakable Blade to him.