Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
I missed my home. Things didn’t exactly go the way I had hoped after I finished college, but I had managed to build a cozy life for myself. My apartment was small, but it was comfy, full of books, and mine. I didn’t love my job and my grocery-delivering side gig, but I tolerated them well enough. They were the price I had to pay to sleep in a soft bed under a solid roof, drink coffee in the morning in my cute kitchen, and play games on my Steam Deck at night. I lived in a nest of safety.
There was no safety in Kair Toren. It was the kind of place you wanted to visit only from the comfort of your home, while wrapped in a blanket and sipping on some hot cocoa for courage. You dove into it, let it thrill you and crush your emotions, and then surfaced, grateful to be back in your own little corner of existence.
I wanted to go home. I closed my eyes and pictured myself on my tiny balcony, sitting in the rocking chair my brother had bought for me and hauled all the way to my third-floor apartment. There would be a view of the picnic area and two large oaks in front of me and a round table on my right with a steaming cup of my favorite green tea in a mug that said Good morning. I see the assassins have failed.
I imagined myself in that chair and wished for it with all of my being. Nothing happened. I was still in the bath. I had already tried dying. That didn’t work either.
Maybe there was some purpose to my being here, something that only I could accomplish and then I would get to go home. Or maybe this was it. This was my life now.
A hard lump blocked my throat.
Okay, no. I was safe for the moment, true, but falling apart in the Garden wasn’t the wisest thing to do. I needed to stay sharp.
Worrying about what really happened wouldn’t get me anywhere. It didn’t matter what took place in the “real” world because right now this world was real enough to harm me. It had injured me, starved me, killed me, and resurrected me, and I had felt all of it. Lecke’s knife hurt. Drowning hurt. My feet still ached from running on the streets, and my whole body hummed like every cell in it had simultaneously developed a toothache.
This was my reality right now. If five years later I woke up in my bed like none of it had ever happened, it wouldn’t matter because I still had to survive today. And tomorrow.
I needed a plan. First, I had to avoid dying at all costs. I had no idea how my resurrection worked. Would I revive every time someone killed me, or did I have a limited number of lives? I didn’t want to find out. Not only that, but the pain had been excruciating, and the echo of that hurt still rattled around deep inside my bones. Thinking about it made me shiver, which was a mistake because all of me was terribly sore.
Survival was crucial, but so was safety. Even if I could revive every time I died, I could still suffer while I was alive. Broken bones, cuts, bruises, hunger, all of that would hurt just as much. The difference was, after it killed me, I would resurrect and endure it all over again. Now that was a cheery thought. Yay.
I had to find a secure place to stay. Somewhere safe where I could hole up while I figured out what to do next.
The Garden didn’t rent rooms. All patrons were kicked out by two am with very rare exceptions.
I had been here for at least a couple of hours. It was probably close to ten or eleven pm. The majority of the inns were in the Inn Quarter to the east, all the way across town and walled off in their own section. Kair Toren liked to keep track of their visitors. If they got unruly, the city could simply lock them up within the Inn Quarter and call it a day. The current arrangement had come about because a century ago, a rebel princess had snuck her army into the city by having them pose as merchants and random travelers and then tried to take the capital. The municipal regulations had relaxed a little since then, but not much.
The asshole who’d chased me was probably still out there. The area around the Garden wasn’t the safest part of the city and that was partially by design. The element of danger added to the thrill. If someone got uppity and tried to rob some of the wealthier patrons, the Garden would stomp on their neck fast, but I was a nobody. An anonymous woman alone on the street in the middle of the night was fair game.