Chapter 12 #3
“I do remember my mum, and I remember her dying—slowly. I don’t care if plants get cancer, or you lost your parents before you could even remember them. It’s not the same, Samick.”
At the sound of his name, those green eyes flare. They burn like faint torchlights in the dusky room.
I’m definitely pushing it.
“The mother I remember,” he starts as he reclines in the tub, hooking one arm behind his head like a pillow, “is no mother at all. That felt much like loss.”
I itch to tell him to shove his own emotion bubble up his arse.
I don’t give a shit about his pain, his mother, his father, his anything.
I feel mine.
I only feel mine.
“You don’t know loss,” I tell him.
And something runs over him. A darkness, a shadow, a silent threat.
Hand rested on the edge of the tub, his thumb twitches—and I remember how it ran over the hilt of his glassy dagger.
A cold feeling runs through me.
His instinct, I forget, is still dangerous.
I let myself get too relaxed, too lulled.
And way too mouthy.
I turn for the sink, just for something to distract myself with, and start washing off the facemask.
The burn of his stare is ice-cold on my back.
It doesn’t fade, doesn’t drift away.
He stares into me, through me, for so long that, when he speaks, my shoulders jerk with the fright.
“ísabroch,” he says, and it’s an utterly foreign word to me, one he emphasises before he goes on, “is an isle north of Dorcha. An isle of mountains, glaciers, cliffs, ice melts, snow, blizzards—and a race of fae, the only fae in existence who can survive there.”
I think of Antarctica.
But somehow harsher.
“There is no vegetation or wildlife on the land, there are no running rivers or lakes unfrozen.”
Disbelief twists my wet face. “Then how do your people survive?”
It’s not possible.
“Visiting wildlife come in warmer seasons. My kind emerge to hunt on the shores and in the sea. The cold season returns, preserves the meat, and water can be made from ice.”
I drag the towel off my hair, then run it over my face. “Don’t you freeze?”
His face softens, faintly amused. “No.”
I watch water drizzle from the soft strands of his hair, along his nose, over his lashes, down his cheeks, and I think of a lovely statue lost in the mist of a garden rain.
He continues, “The best territories are fought over in every cold season. These are close to the shores for hunting, and with caves for shelter, and on mountains easy to scale. My mother and father had a territory good enough to breed in.
“While my mother slept through her gestation and my father watched over her, another pair attacked. My mother fled to the shore where she birthed me. Dorcha whalers noticed her corpse, and the babe in her fresh blood.
“I became a ward of Dorcha to be raised in a loyalist house. Those who dedicate their lives to fostering the youth with promise.”
I sigh and drop onto the edge of the tub. The tiled ledge is too firm to be comfortable.
“Your, uh, promise,” I start, delicate, “is all the things you can do that they can’t, right?”
I think I’ve figured out more than he has.
He just looks at me blankly, like he doesn’t fully understand what I’m insinuating.
But it sounds a lot like he was stolen from another land—and being this powerful fae baby with an empty mind, he was placed with what he calls loyalists… but are always extremists, usually overly religious, too.
I can’t keep the grimace off my face.
He was groomed.
He was crafted into what Dorcha wanted him to be.
Bet the whalers even killed his mum, because she had a mind full of life and opinions, so he was the prize, not her.
But thankfully, Samick can’t read minds. At most, he can sense my doubt and suspicion.
“What about your adoptive mum?” I ask, and there’s derision in my tone. “Not everyone is lucky enough to get a replacement.”
‘The mother I remember is no mother at all’, he said. And he doesn’t remember his birth mum—so there’s pain there with the adoptive one.
I want to press that pain. Push it.
I want to hurt him for what he said about cancer and wallowing.
“I was raised to be both what I am and nothing close to what I am.” He lifts his chin, offended by my question.
“I was raised to perfect my senses, whether it be the feelings of others or incoming storms. I was raised to kill with a touch… but I was raised to feel, also. And this is unnatural to me.” He watches me, dark lashes low over moody eyes.
“The fae of the ice do not feel as the dokkalves do. We live in echoes. That is how I can kill those in sorrow,” he says, cold. “I feel it as a mere echo.”
A chill runs down my spine.
The swallow I give is loud, too loud for the softness of the bathroom and the trickling of water.
Samick’s gaze drops to my mouth before I turn my lips inwards and bite down on them.
I have no idea why he tells me any of this so openly, if it’s the absence of the unit that frees his tongue and loosens his lips.
Or if it’s the way he stares at me sometimes, like now, watching my mouth spring back from my teeth, plumping, and it lurches me back to the pharmacy, when he said my name, and I know now just as I did then that there was something stirring in him when he spoke it.
Samick lingers his stare over my lips before travelling my face, every freckle, every blemish, a pimple I scratched in the dark that hurt my chin, the rawness of my face after I scrubbed it—
Too much is in that stare.
Like he doesn’t only observe me, he devours me.
“It was theory and lessons—”
His words jolt me back.
I frown at him.
But still, his gaze wanders, now down to my clavicle, just above the wrapped towel.
“I was taught to care for the feelings of others by rule, even if it went against my nature. The time came for the teachings to be practiced. I heard the screams of children. Humans.”
I feel the colour drain from my face.
Samick considers the folded towel over my breasts, like he’s counting my freckles just above the fabric.
“The children had fallen into our realm. The teachings of my parents are why I stopped and saved those children. I brought them home and they became family. A brother and a sister, however… human,” he says, and his mouth twists.
He lurches his gaze back to mine.
Like I’m to blame.
I sink back into the tiled wall.
“I tolerated them for the sake of my teachings,” he tells me.
“For the sake of my mother and father. But those children do not devote themselves to Dorcha or the gods as they should. They are spoiled, stumpy things that demand and expect, and would eat the worlds whole with their greed and self-pity.”
The chill rises in the air and nips at my flesh.
My skin is prickling all over.
Slow, I slip off the edge of the bath, the sudden urge to create space pulling me into a retreat.
The water suddenly rushes as he pushes up to stand. And I forgot, just for a dangerous stupid moment, how massive he is.
My insides twist.
“I killed my brother,” he says and takes a step out of the bathtub. “It was his own doing. But the blame fell on me. I was pushed out from the only family I had ever known.”
His lashes lower over those sharp eyes, and the look he gives me is a dark, chilling one.
My feet slide over the tiles—until my back hits the wall.
Samick follows, step after step, dripping with the bathwater, hair stuck to his face.
He stops, towering over me, and practically growls, “But you tell me I do not know loss.”