Emma

Chapter Twelve

A/N: There's a massive, MASSIVE infodump at the end of this chapter. I mean massive. But please don't skip over it, because it has a lot of important information that you, as the reader, need to know. In the second draft, I will most certainly keep some of this info in here, but other parts are easily explainable in the following chapters, so I'll remove them from this chapter. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy, and please leave a vote and/or a comment if you did. :)

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As the man continued to explain their situation, Emma tried to organise her thoughts in her head. “I could take the offer and then, obviously, get the map and key back,” she mused, her eyes drifting to the sandstone ceiling, “but then it could all just be a trick and I might not get the items back at all. Although it seems their offer is legitimate, and it looks like they’re going to go through with Aaron’s punishment after all…” The voice in her head trailed off as she glanced back to the stranger, who was now walking towards the back of the room which Emma noticed had a switch on it. He flicked the switch and another room immediately opened. Aaron lay there, his hands and feet fastened with rope, which the girl guessed was hers. Two guards dressed in full black stood on either side of his restrained body.

Emma remembered the moment she discovered Scarlett’s body. Her thoughts flashed back - to the moment she knelt and inspected the items she had, to the events that followed up to her discovery, but for some reason she couldn’t remember a tear ever falling from her eyes. This surprised her; Scarlett was Emma’s closest friend and yet she didn’t show any clear signs of sadness. “Perhaps the shock softened the blow,” she thought to herself.

For a moment her gaze met with Aaron’s. She furrowed her eyebrows as she tried so hard to break the contact but somehow she couldn’t. His eyes were so undeniably filled to the brim with fear that Emma willed all the strength she had to try and break the rope that prevented her from reaching him, from helping him, but they were tied too skilfully and she was too weak. Her mouth opened and Emma swore she had previously planned things to say when Scarlett was ever in danger. Things such as “She gets hurt and I get hurt too,”, “I’d rather sacrifice myself than let her die,” and “Spare her!” were all phrases she promised herself she was going to use, but they were reserved only for Scarlett. Now that she was gone, and Aaron was here almost replacing her, she felt she would be able to use them in this situation, but no words escaped her lips. It was like at that moment all life had been sucked out of her… like she was meant to work for people as lifeless as the gang who had kidnapped her and Aaron.

The girl thought she could see something else in his eyes. Emma’s heart sunk when she realised that the other hint of emotion hiding in the man’s eyes was guilt. If only she could go over there and tell him how she really felt about the situation, how she really felt about him having to die because his human instincts took over and he helped an unconscious girl who could have been hours or even minutes from someone finding and killing her. If he hadn’t treated her wounds she wouldn’t be there, secured to a sandstone wall, unable to even give the simplest of words to whom she now considered a friend. He shouldn’t have helped her in the first place. Surely she was meant to die at that point where she collapsed after being wounded in the shoulder by an arrow. It was at that very moment when she realised that she should feel guilty for not being able to help him like he helped her, multiple times… and yet, all that she could feel was fear.

She wondered what was going to happen to him. How he was going to get cruelly murdered – or was he going to be given a relatively peaceful end to his life? Surely they would want the most violent death for someone who was as ‘rebellious’ as him. And, as Emma finally unlocked her gaze and stared at the floor, as a single tear silently rolled down her cheek, she understood that if she didn’t say anything now, the last conversation she would remember having with him would be the argument about the supposedly poisonous scorpion piece, which Emma now considered stupid.