Chapters (64)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Pronunciation Guide
- Prologue
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Part Two
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Part Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Part Four
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Epilogue
- Excerpt from The Sun and Its Shade
- The Night and Its Moon Playlist
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Cover
Nox had never felt more powerless than she did as the men dragged Amaris backward out of her cell. She screamed, clawing fruitlessly through the bars for Amaris as she struggled.
Nox’s heart pounded through her throat. Her stomach turned as she looked over Amaris’s shoulders into the open doors of the coliseum beyond, knowing both she and Amaris were seeing its horrors for the first time. Amaris whipped her head around wildly, taking in the enormity of the coliseum with its teeming crowds of onlookers and the heat of the high-noon sun, all absorbed in mere heartbeats. Her eyes swam painfully as they struggled to adjust to the change in light.
Amaris was still looking at Nox and screamed a command, eyes darting wildly between Nox and the jailed men behind her.
“Save them!”
“I love you,” Nox sobbed, gripping the bars with both hands as she became smaller and smaller in the distance. Her cries were otherworldly, ripping from a depth of suffering known to the pits of hell. She didn’t even know what she was saying. Her heart ached; her tears lubricated the iron of the bars. Her fingers gripped uselessly against the metal that had separated them. “I love you,” she said again as the doors began to shut.
The lights, the sounds, the enormity of it all crushed down on them. Amaris’s gaze stayed fixed on Nox for her final moments. This couldn’t be it. Amaris couldn’t be whisked off by assassins. Nox couldn’t have taken her place in a brothel. She couldn’t have spent years amassing forces, formulating plans, doing everything she could to reunite them only for the All Mother to grant them five pitiful minutes separated by iron.
Nox hurled her final words, her last plea before the doors drowned out the shouts.
“Just buy time!”
She begged Amaris to hear her, screaming the words once, twice, then as one final plea. Her command cut through the tiny slit in the wood in the moments before they snapped shut, a wooden barricade slammed down to lock it in place. She repeated it like a prayer. Three final words rang into the coliseum before Amaris was shut out from Nox’s vision altogether.
“Just buy time!”
Forty-Four
Amaris bolted toward an exit the moment the men released her. The shock of seeing Nox had been just enough distraction to catch her off her footing. One of the centurions hit her with such rattling force that her jaw nearly dislocated. She collapsed to the sand, a cloud of dust surrounding her on impact. Her ears popped and the stars dripped from her eyes, but by the time she got to her feet, it was too late. Her only escape route was shut.
She turned in a slow, painstaking circle as she soaked in the horrors on all sides.