Chapter 147 Revenge
ADRIANA
The sisters’ arrival was like a storm in summer.
One moment the room was exactly as it had been and the next moment it wasn’t, and the force of the change hit me physically before I had processed it mentally. I went off the platform and hit the floor hard, the impact going through my shoulder and hip simultaneously. I pressed my hand against my stomach and laid there for a moment while the world reorganized itself around me.
Something was wrong with my vision.
There was a warmth running down the side of my face, and the pain in my head had arrived with the fall and installed itself behind my eyes. When I tried to focus on the room around me everything blurred and swam, shapes refusing to resolve into anything I could identify.
I could hear the sisters. Their voices were layered, each word landing at multiple frequencies simultaneously, and the brothers were responding to that sound. The commotion in the room was significant and I was experiencing all of it through sound and sensation because sight had become unreliable.
I felt a warm hand on my shoulder.
“Adriana.” It was one of the sisters. She crouched beside me, her voice dropping from that extraordinary one to something directed and immediate. “What happened to you? Talk to me.”
“I can’t see properly. Something happened when I fell… my head. There’s blood.”
Her fingers moved briefly against my temple, gentle and assessing. Then she whispered something I felt as much as heard and the pain behind my eyes shifted fractionally.
“I can’t fix it fully here,” she said. “There’s too much interference from what they’ve placed in this space. You need to leave right now, before they regroup.”
“What about the—”
“We’re handling it. You can’t help us in this condition and if you stay here you become a liability rather than an asset. Go.” Something was pressed into my hand, solid, longer than my arm, smooth with a particular warmth that didn’t feel like wood or metal but something else entirely. “Hold this. Follow where it pulls you. It will take you to Elijah. Don’t let go of it regardless of what happens.”
I tightened my hand around it.
“Yara isn’t fully back yet,” I said.
“I know. The rod will compensate. Go.” She urged.
Then the place where she had been crouching was empty.
I got to my feet using the wall and the rod together, one hand on each. The sounds of the sisters and the brotherhood were behind me now, filling the room with a contest I could feel the edges of even without seeing it. Every instinct I had said stay and fight. But the practical reality of my current condition said that staying and fighting while essentially blind would help no one and endanger the child I had just bargained the rest of my life to protect.
I moved.
The rod pulled me like a compass with a physical expression. I let it guide me and focused on keeping my feet under me and my hand steady on its surface. The hallway outside the main room was dark and I moved through it by feel, one hand trailing the wall on my left, the rod extended ahead of me on the right.
I didn’t trip. The rod seemed to anticipate obstacles in some way I couldn’t articulate — a slight resistance before a step down, a small pressure to the left around something I couldn’t see. I followed each signal without questioning it.
The air changed as I moved further from the room. I was close to the exit, I breathed out a sigh of relief. I didn't fully exhale before something grabbed my wrist from the right side and shoved me hard against the wall and the back of my head connected with stone and the pain spiked white and immediate.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Luke hissed,
“What does any of this give you?” I said. I kept the rod in my right hand, tight. “Luke. What do you actually want from this?”
“You want to know what you did?” He wasn’t listening to my question, he was answering his own. “My brother is dead because of your father and because of you. Your father made a deal he couldn’t keep and my brother paid for it. He was killed to clean up after your father’s failure. And you just kept running and hiding and making everything worse, and now my brother is gone and you’re standing here with that man’s child like none of it matters.”
Finally, something honest from him. He was the one person that I didn't understand his motive. But I should have known, like all the others. It was revenge for a sin that they felt was committed against them.
“That is not something I did to you,” I said carefully. “Your brother made his own choices. So did my father. Neither of those things is something I chose or caused.”
He hit me. Open-handed, hard, and the impact sent me sideways and down and I lost my footing and went to the floor and the rod went with me, my hand still locked around it.
“You don’t get to say that,” he said from above me. “You don’t get to stand there and tell me it’s not your fault. I’ll kill that baby. I’ll take your powers myself. I will finish what the Grandmaster started because you owe me—”
My hand found the rod on the floor beside me.
I thought about what the sister had said. Follow where it pulls. And I thought about my child, and about Elijah, and about the four days of silence on the mind link and everything I had left to say to him.
I swung.
The rod connected with the side of Luke’s head. He made a sharp, startled sound and staggered away from me, and I scrambled to my feet with the wall behind me and extended the rod between us.
“Don’t come near me.” I warned. My voice was completely steady. “I mean it.”
He was groaning somewhere to my left. Recovering. I tracked him by sound.
Then a different voice. Somewhere further back, clear and urgent screamed at me.
A voice I have never expected to be the one to save me. Hannah.
“Adriana, run!”