Page 71 of In Rising Tides

“Enjoy your freedom,” he muttered.

The mouse squeezed through the bars of his cell and hurried down the hallway.

Wilder would walk down that hallway soon enough to face his father.

He squeezed his fingers into his palms tighter and felt the prick of fingernails into the pads of his flesh.

Had it been stupid of him to storm through the castle walls without a plan?

No.

Even if he had paused and worked through the various possible scenarios, Otto betraying him would not have been one.

A breath worked its way out of his chest. Otto had been a permanent fixture in his life for as long as he could remember. His first memories held Otto’s face, and his darkest memories held Otto’s face.

What else had Otto been capable of?

Had everything been a lie?

Wilder thought back over the last couple of months, trying to decipher the depth of the treachery. Otto claimed to have not seen the attack on the beach and had not seen the wulvers surrounding their inn on their journey back.

That could have all been part of his treachery.

Rage and anguish twisting together expelled loudly from his chest.It poured out of him in waves. All the raw emotion that had writhed inside his veins.

The roar faded away, and the echoing silence pressed in.

Pointless, complete and utter uselessness.

He needed to focus and try to come up with an actual plan now instead of wallowing in self-pity.

Lyra was still out there, and she needed him.

He hadn’t been held down here long enough to become weak, despite the lack of magic in this place. So the best course of action would be between fighting and then fleeing.

They would have to move him from this cell to wherever he was meeting the High King.

So long as they didn’t drug him to the point of incapacitation, he could escape.

But had they drugged him initially?

Wilder couldn’t remember. The throbbing he woke with could have been from Otto’s punch or a sedative.

Wilder’s vision blurred. Golden light from the ceiling swam around the edges of his sight. It shifted and swirled to a lovely shade of red.

He blinked, focusing on the light spots that had returned to a normal shade of gold.

He hallucinated the color of her hair.

A horn blast swept through the air, and panic seized his chest.

The sound of a wooden door colliding with a rock wall echoed down the hallway, and Wilder pulled his feet closer to his body.

A set of booted footsteps thundered down the hall.

There were at least four guards.

Shadowed faces peered at him behind the bars of the gate. He didn’t recognize any of them.