Chapter 51 #3
"I suspected as much." The dimple returned to his cheek as he lowered his attention back to my dress. "I imagine stabbing me ranks considerably higher."
A startled laugh escaped me. "Something like that."
He huffed softly and unfastened another button. This time, when he paused, his fingertips drifted lightly down the bare skin of my back. The touch was so fleeting I almost thought I'd imagined it, yet his gaze followed the path his fingers had traced.
"Nevertheless," he murmured, "it's not something I'll soon forget."
The words stole every coherent thought from my mind.
Neither of us moved. We simply stood there, scarcely a breath apart, his hands still resting lightly at my back, his presence pressing against every one of my senses.
There was something in his voice I'd never heard before.
Slowly, I turned to face him. "Look at me."
He hesitated. Then, almost reluctantly, his gaze lifted to mine.
My breath caught. His pupils were blown wide, his eyes almost entirely black. Endless. Bottomless. So deep I wanted to tumble into them and simply keep falling, lost forever in that impossible darkness.
I couldn’t quite stop my mouth from curving.
"Truth," I said softly.
He frowned ever so slightly, something almost apprehensive crossing his features. Finally, he inclined his head.
Permission to ask.
I arched a sly brow. "Are you feeling quite well?"
For the briefest instant, he simply looked at me. Then, with a long-suffering sigh, he caught me gently by the shoulders and turned me back around.
"Fucking Ambrosia," he muttered, resuming his task.
I bit the inside of my cheek, fighting the smile threatening to escape.
He eased another button free. A long moment passed.
"Yes," he admitted at last.
The grin I'd been trying so hard to suppress won.
"It's not so bad, is it?" I murmured, more to myself than to him. "Feeling good for a change."
The thought escaped before I even realized I’d been thinking it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt this light—this unguarded. The last time I'd simply enjoyed existing. Maybe never.
He sighed. "It's definitely a change."
I looked at him, startled. I hadn’t expected him to answer.
His head was bent, a dark lock of hair falling into his eyes as my dress slowly parted beneath his touch. His face remained utterly unreadable.
I'd had almost no glimpse into his inner life. No idea what he was thinking. What he was feeling. Even after Levinica's death, he'd remained impenetrable. It had taken the first Gate forcing me into his memory to understand the depth of his grief—and how fiercely he'd loved his sister.
At the thought of Levinica, sorrow welled up suddenly, threatening to pull me under.
He looked up at once, searching my face, as though he'd felt it. Had he felt it? My blood rushed at the possibility, but then he bent back to his work, his fingers now halfway down my back.
The faint furrow returned to his brow, his expression drifting somewhere far away. The softness I'd glimpsed only moments before vanished like mist, and with it went the man who had so carefully unfastened my gown. In his place stood the sharp-edged villain who’d emerged from the Veil.
The contrast was absurd. The feared Dark Prince, breaker of kingdoms and monsters alike, quietly wrestling with the interminable line of buttons on my dress.
So controlled. So patient. So impossibly… restrained.
I'd mistaken that restraint for a lack of feeling, assuming there was nothing beneath the surface simply because he never allowed it to show.
I'd convinced myself his composure meant emptiness, when perhaps it had always been the opposite—that everything lay buried beneath it, held so tightly in check that I'd mistaken silence for absence.
The Ambrosia hadn't changed him. It had simply loosened the grip he kept on himself, revealing, if only for a few precious moments, the male hidden beneath a lifetime of unyielding discipline.
If this was who he was beneath it all, then what had happened to him? What wound had festered so deeply that revenge had become more important than everything else?
I'd accepted that monsters simply existed, never stopping to ask what had made them.
"Rìan," I said gently.
He grunted, but didn't look up.
"Truth," I prompted.
His eyes closed briefly, as though he regretted ever telling me he'd never lie to me. When he opened them again, he gave a curt nod.
"What was it like in the Veil?"
His fingers never faltered, continuing their patient, methodical progress as though he hadn't heard me at all.
And yet I felt the answer before he spoke it—in the slight tremor in his hands, the subtle roughening of his breathing, the way his entire focus narrowed onto the column at my back like a drowning man fixed on a distant shore
I regretted asking almost immediately. I slid my fingers absently along the bodice of my dress as the silence lengthened, wishing I could pull the question back and swallow it.
"Dark," he said quietly.
The last button slipped free.
I caught the front of my dress before it could fall, clutching the fabric to my chest, but neither of us moved away. The mirror held us both. Here, in the softened reality of its reflection, I could meet his eyes without ever having to face him.
"It was a prison in every sense of the word. My body ceased to exist. My magic was stretched beyond its limits, woven into the Veil itself until all that remained of me was… consciousness."
I remained utterly still, unwilling to risk whatever fragile thing was unfolding between us. I knew, somehow, that these were truths he’d never laid bare to anyone before.
"It tore at me. Constantly. Every moment." He swallowed. "Time... lost all meaning. A heartbeat could last an eternity, while centuries vanished without measure. There was no sun. No sleep. No dreams." His mouth twisted into a bitter line. "No escape."
His chest rose slowly before he released the breath.
"There was only awareness."
The words settled over the room like ash.
"Until one day… there was you." His eyes caught mine and refused to let go. "A spark in an endless night. So impossibly bright that, at first, I convinced myself I'd imagined you. But you came back, again and again."
I fought the burn gathering at the back of my throat, and refused to look away.
"I reached for you every time, but you couldn't see me, couldn't feel me. All I could do was catch the brilliant thread of your magic whenever it brushed against the Veil—searching for a way back, even as mine searched for a way out."
Leaching. I'd watched the mortal lands wither as their magic slowly bled back into Elantis, never realizing my own had also been reaching for it all along. Reaching for the home it remembered—and finding him.
"I knew what you were the moment I felt your magic.
" His voice iced over. "Knew you'd somehow evaded the Moiraithe.
That I was condemned to hang forever between life and death because you alone had escaped it.
" Loathing thinned his lips, but I knew it wasn't meant for me.
“And worse still, I knew who you must belong to.”
A long breath escaped him, carrying the bitterness away with it. His shoulders slackened, something like defeat settling into their broad line.
"But you were the first thing I'd known in an eternity that wasn't darkness."
His hand hovered for the briefest moment before his fingertips traced the bare skin of my back once more, my dress hanging open beneath them like the wilted petals of a flower.
"My only chance at freedom."
He held my gaze.
"So I took it."
I swallowed, fighting the swell of emotion rising inside me.
"Did you know?" After everything he'd just confessed, the question felt impossibly small as it left my lips. "That we would bond?"
He looked at me with such quiet sorrow that I had to resist the impossible urge to turn around. To touch him.
"I suspected it," he said. "And I used you anyway."
His hand slipped from my back, and the loss of it felt like the last sliver of moonlight disappearing behind a cloud. "Is that enough truth for now?"
"Yes,” I whispered.
He nodded once, almost to himself, and stepped back.
An unexpected ache opened inside me. I didn't want him to go.
Slowly, almost hesitantly, I turned to face him.
In the soft glow of the room, we simply looked at one another. His gaze caressed my face, tracing the curve of my cheek, pausing for the briefest moment on my parted lips. My heart pounded so fiercely I could feel it in the soles of my feet.
I let myself look too. I filled my eyes with him—the proud line of his nose, the dark curls at his temples, the fullness of his mouth. Not the feared Dark Prince. Not the villain of whispered stories. Here, that man didn’t exist.
He broke the moment first, dropping his gaze and shaking his head as though to clear it. He took a step back, then another, retreating toward the door.
"Goodnight, Eidra," he said.
"Goodnight, Prince."
He huffed, a small, private smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. He liked the way I said it—without contempt.
He dipped his head. When he lifted it, those dark eyes collided with mine one last time, silver flecks scattering like stars in an endless night.
And I drowned in them.