Heartless Villains (Ruthless Villains Book 3)

I slapped my palms together and threw a force wall to our left. Spikes of wood slammed into it a fraction of a second later. They shattered against my shield, sending splinters flying through the air and raining down on the stone floor.

Next to me, Audrey had jerked back a step and was now flicking her gaze between me and the broken bits of wood. “Nice timing.”

“Yeah,” was all I managed because my heart was thumping in my chest.

That had been far too close.

While letting the force wall fade out, I blew out a long breath and raked a hand through my hair. In the meantime, Audrey walked up to the stone wall and studied the broken spikes. Her fingers traced over the edges before she turned to look back at me.

“See these?” she said.

I moved over and squinted at the parts she pointed at. The spikes had shot out of holes in the wall that I had mistaken for simply uneven parts in the stone. But now that I was looking straight at them, I could see the holes clearly.

“We need to watch the walls for these,” she finished.

“Yeah.”

After shaking off a few splinters that had landed on my boots, I started down the tunnel again. Audrey fell in beside me.

For a while, only the faint sound of our footsteps broke the silence as we made our way deeper into the mountain while watching one wall each. We reached another spot that had those depressions in the stone on her side, so I summoned a force wall and held it up on that side before we stepped in front of it. The floor clicked again, and more spikes shot out. Just like last time, they hit my magic and shattered.

We continued walking in silence.

“Did you really take the key with you?” Audrey asked eventually.

“To Lance’s handcuffs?”

“Yeah.”

I chuckled. “No, of course not. But it’s better that Lance doesn’t know that Henry has it.”

“Smart.”

While keeping my eyes on the wall, I let out a huff. “Always with the tone of surprise.”

“Because it happens so rarely.”

“I’ll have you know that—”

My words got cut off as Audrey tackled me from the side right as I set my foot down and lifted the one behind me. Shock clanged through me. She was going to betray me all the way out here? I had for sure thought that she would wait until we had almost reached the Enhancer.

Since I was off balance, her move sent me stumbling sideways and slamming into the wall on my right. I touched my hands together, getting ready to attack her. Right as my shoulder hit the stone, and her body crashed into mine from the other side, something else flashed at the corner of my eye.

Wooden spikes shot up from the ground.

I stared at them in disbelief. They were located in the exact spot that I would have been standing in if Audrey hadn’t shoved me sideways. Since I didn’t want to admit that I thought she had been about to double-cross me, I threw the force wall at the spikes instead. They snapped in a splintering of wood and clattered down on the ground.

Audrey, however, didn’t appear to have noticed that the attack had originally been meant for her, because she just pushed herself off me and brushed her hands down her clothes.

“Shit,” she said as she looked up at me. “That was close. And clever. Since the other attacks came from the walls, we were so caught up with watching them that we almost missed it.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Good thing you tried to bait me like that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have looked over at you right then.”

I was still trying to recover from the shock of realizing that Audrey had actually saved me, so all I said was, “Yeah.”

“One of us needs to be watching the floor. And probably the ceiling too, just to be sure.”

“Yeah.”

“Alright, I’ll take those and you keep watching the walls.”

“Yeah.”

She had been studying the tunnel around us, but now she turned towards me with narrowed eyes. “You’ve said that three times now. Did you lose the rest of your vocabulary when I shoved you into the wall or what?”

Snapping out of my confused thoughts, I tried to recover my wits before she figured out what was really going through my head. While letting a sharp smile slide home on my lips, I stepped closer and drew my fingers along her jaw. “Watch that mouth.”

She slapped my hand away and smirked back at me. “Or what?”

“You know what.”

A huff of amusement rolled from her chest. Then she just jerked her chin and started forwards again. I shook my head to clear it before following her.

We walked carefully along the tunnel after that, watching all surfaces around us. A few more traps with wooden spikes waited for us, but we saw them all coming so we passed them without issue.

After a while, an opening became visible in the distance. We kept a wary eye on the walls and floor as we closed the final distance to it, but there were no more hidden spikes.

The ceiling moved drastically higher as we at last stepped into the space beyond the tunnel. Those same glowing crystals covered it, as well as parts of the wall behind us, and all of them illuminated a flat wall that rose up a few strides away. It didn’t reach the ceiling, but it was still too tall for us to climb over on our own. Not to mention that there was nothing to climb on. Just smooth rock.

“We’ll do it like we did when we got caught in Malcolm’s trap,” I said as I turned to meet Audrey’s gaze. “I’ll give you a boost up so that you can reach the edge.”

“Yeah.” A sly smile tugged at her lips. “Except this time, I pull you up too.”

“Agreed.”

After moving over to the wall, I crouched down and knitted my fingers together. Audrey adjusted the pack on her shoulders before taking off at a sprint. Timing it perfectly, she leaped up and placed her foot in my hands. I pushed upright, throwing her upwards.

She flew through the air.

For a second, panic flashed through me when I thought that she might miss. But then her hands hooked around the edge. She let out a huff as the rest of her body slammed into the stone wall. Then she started pulling herself upwards.

Standing there on the ground, I watched as she struggled to get one of her legs over the edge. A laugh built in my chest and I had to bite my tongue to stop it. She looked the same as when she had been climbing into Sienna’s kitchen window. Only ten times worse. Or better, depending on how you looked at it.

I watched her ass wiggle in the air as she tried to climb over the edge. She really did look like a stranded seal. But I had to admit that the view from down here wasn’t so bad.

“I swear,” she ground out between strained breaths, “if you say anything about seals right now, I will leave you down there.”

Another chuckle threatened to spill from my throat, but I swallowed it and instead said, “To leave me down here, you first need to actually get up there.”

“Shut up.”

That time I did actually laugh. Audrey let out a vicious curse, but then she finally got her leg up over the edge. A few seconds later, she pulled herself up the final bit and rolled onto the ground up there. I watched the top of the wall, waiting for her head to reappear.

It didn’t.

For almost a minute, nothing happened. A hint of worry swirled through my soul, but I was too proud and too stubborn to call out to her, so I only remained standing there on the ground.

Just when I thought that she had actually left me there, a rope flew down to hang over the edge. Then Audrey’s beautiful face at last appeared too.

A smirk decorated her lips as she looked down at me. “Worried?”

“As if,” I scoffed.

Grabbing the rope, I gave it a few firm tugs to make sure that it was securely fastened.

“I tied it around a boulder up here,” she said as if she could read my mind. “So it should hold even your massive body.”

“Good.”

While hoping that she also knew how to tie knots properly, I grabbed a hold of the rope and started climbing upwards.

My heart thumped in my chest. If the knot gave out, my ankles might not survive the landing intact.

But thankfully, both the knot and the boulder held.

Heaving a deep sigh, I rolled over the edge at the top of the wall. Before Audrey could start baiting me again, I pushed to my feet and brushed my hands down my clothes. But the poison mage was already moving towards the boulder.

After undoing the knot, she rolled up the rope and put it in her pack. I adjusted the straps on mine before walking over to her.

For a while, the two of us just stared at the space before us.

The wall we had climbed up led to a flat surface. Glowing crystals covered the ceiling higher up, and more of them dotted the walls around us too. But the space ended with another wall just a short distance ahead, and that one went all the way up to the ceiling. Before it was just one thing.

A round pool of water set right into the stone ground.

Light from the crystals glittered against the still surface.

I looked down at Audrey. She met my gaze.

For a second, we just watched each other. Then we turned back to the water.

“Now what?”