Chapter 15

Half a day later, we"d taken a break from carving the tunnel, now a little over halfway there according to the boys. Even with me supplementing their energy, they tired, and finally we called it quits for the night. We"d resume in the morning, making it the rest of the way to the prison and finally breach the wall.

I"d just begun to drift off when Nia started awake, sitting up and blinking groggily. "Lily," she said loudly, and everyone else stirred, sitting up to stare at her. "She was sleeping too, it was the weirdest thing. We weren"t in the prison. We were at the beach," she said with a small smile before shaking it off and refocusing on remembering everything she"d heard.

"What did she say?"

"They keep her locked in a cell almost all of the time, except when they"re torturing her," she spat, a shudder running through her body. "But she knows she"s in the east wing. She"s guarded round the clock by ten guards, only a few other prisoners on her block."

"Easy. We"ll get in, kick some ass, and get right out!" Finn was way too optimistic for a guy who had just spent twelve hours pulling rock out of solid earth.

"Cas is there too," Nia continued, her expression worried. That was a lot of people for us to take out in unfamiliar territory, and previous run-ins with Cas hadn"t always gone to plan. At least we"d be inside where he wouldn"t be able to use lightning to teleport away.

"Is Tantaii there?" I asked her. Cas and Tantaii would be too much for us to handle. I hadn"t faced off with her since she was freed from her prison.

"She hasn"t seen her," Nia replied, shaking her head. She paused, staring at me with a look I couldn"t quite place.

"What?" I asked.

Nia took a breath, her voice slightly shaky. "She said there"s someone else we need to break out too. The man in the cell next to her." My brows pinched together, confused. "I don"t understand."

"She said his name was Engar. Engar Rowan."

My heart skipped a beat as Nia uttered my father"s name, my mind reeling with disbelief as my blood ran cold. The name echoed in my mind like a haunting melody, transporting me back to the conversation I"d had with the Goddess Prim, the note Olette had written to me, telling me Engar had been my father. She"d named me after him, to keep his memory alive.

How could he not be dead?

Tantaii didn"t do this by accident, that much I was sure of. Putting Lily in the cell directly next to my father was a deliberate choice, but for what reason I don"t know. Had he been in that prison this whole time? For five hundred years?

"Oliver?" I asked weakly, my voice cracking on the word.

"I never saw him," he said, understanding immediately what I was asking. "But I wasn"t in the east wing either. There was a special wing she kept for halflings, on the west side of the prison."

"Wouldn"t he have lost his mind by now? I thought shifters didn"t live that long."

"He should have," he said slowly, then hesitated. "Unless..."

"Spit it out," Callan drawled from where he sat near me, just as gripped on the story as everyone else.

"They could be true mates," he said slowly, enunciating every syllable. "I"d always assumed Engar had a mate when he"d had the affair with Tantaii, given he was able to conceive you. Fae women don't have fertility issues. With the way he"d disappeared, I didn"t give any thought to them being true mates. I just assumed she got bored of him and killed him, or he went back to the mortal realm to be with his shifter mate. But a true mate pair is bonded at the soul, the very essence of life. If she"d killed him and they were true mates, she"d die too."

"You think she locked him up for five hundred years instead?" My thoughts raced at the revelation. It was the only thing that makes sense. If he"d had a shifter mate, he would have been long dead. The true mate connection must extend his shifter lifetime, and his mental integrity. Tantaii would never have killed him if she even suspected it would kill her too.

Another thought struck me. Had Olette known? She"d known his name, named me after him even. But if she knew he was alive, wouldn"t she have broken him out of prison when she freed Oliver? Or come back for him after the Queen was imprisoned in the ground? No, I didn"t think she"d known. She"d originally intended to kill Tantaii, but lacked the power. I don"t know if she would have had it in her to kill her mother knowing her father would die too. But then again, I didn"t know Olette. We were the same, but not.

"I think she would do anything to save her own ass," Oliver said, pulling me back to the present. He was right. I drew a shaky breath, Callan reaching out to place a warm hand on my lower back, immediately steadying me. Reassurance flowed through our bond, and I drew it around me like a soft, fuzzy blanket, using it to comfort my frazzled nerves.

"We"ll figure it out when we get there," I said finally, not sure how I felt about anything anymore. "My priority is Lily, anyone else is a bonus."

"I"m going back to sleep," Eldrin said, his eyes squinting under the weight of his eyelids as he rolled back over, devolving into soft snores almost instantly.

Nia reached over, giving my hand a squeeze before she did the same, the rest of our group following suit. As I laid back down again, I gripped Callan"s hand tightly in mine, clinging onto him like life support.

It was a long time before sleep took me.