Twenty-Two
T he journey home seemed to take a thousand hours, each stride of Cin’s mount feeling as though it brought them one step back for every two forward.
All the while, he could think of only two things: the feel of his chest in that very moment, flat yet unrestricted, and the equal parts hope and dread of his future.
At this rate, by the time he returned home, he would have been missing for nearly twenty-four hours, so far as his family knew.
He wasn’t certain how much he could push his mount—it was, despite its magic, still a beast made from living creatures, creatures who could tire, and then who knew what would happen to their magical form—so he let it choose its own pace, slower and slower as the day went on.
Not that it mattered, he told himself. His stepmother would already be furious.
He could imagine Manfred storming around, demanding of his siblings everything that Cin regularly provided, which Floy would refuse while Emma tried to step up, only to make matters worse instead of better.
Cin decided that if the house was still in one piece by the time he arrived, he’d be grateful.
Louise could levy whatever anger she wanted on him—he’d take it all in exchange for the flatness of his new chest. Every time he remembered the slide of his hands across it, he felt giddy all over again.
The moment he’d been free of the dark depths of the forest, he’d paused.
With cautious fingers, he’d pressed at the spaces between his ribs.
No pain.
Not a spear, not even an ache, not even as he’d taken his fullest, deepest breath in years, laughing it back out with hands wrapped against his sides. It was a state he hadn’t felt in years. His cackle had ended in a sob of joy, and he’d quickly stripped off his layers.
Beneath his undershirt, fresh, pale skin lay perfectly draped over two masculine curves of muscle; the nipples he’d once despised for their size and protrusion now sat perfect to each side of his chest, smaller and taut.
He was handsome . It hadn’t been important in the moment—he’d have accepted anything he’d been offered so long as he could climb and run and not worry about a binding igniting his latent pain, but this—this was a chest he’d be excited to show off to someone.
To someone in particular.
In his sleep-deprived delirium, Cin felt himself flush at the thought.
Everything they’d done together had been hasty and clothed, but any entanglement where Cin stripped to the point of revealing that much of his bare skin would imply something more than fingers and mouths.
Two weeks ago, that would have scared him— yesterday , that would have scared him, too, though he’d never have even imagined it possible.
But he’d been in Prince Lorenz’s arms, had the prince give up more for him than Cin had any right to accept, and that kindness, that sacrifice, made the idea of opening his body for the prince—not simply in his fantasies, but in reality too—exhilarating instead of terrifying.
Even if it meant nothing but a moment of pleasure. ..
That thought hurt, and Cin forced himself to push past it. Even if his deal—and his desire—kept him at the prince’s side, he’d be no more destined for a partnership with Prince Lorenz than he had the night prior, or the weeks before that. The prince would marry, and it would not be to Cin.
It would be for the best. Cin would be carving out space for Prince Lorenz, pulling himself away from the family who was missing his presence at that very moment. His was already not a good or pious life, even without that selfishness.
He tried not to dwell on that as he passed out of the border forest, back though the strange towns and into those more and more familiar.
By the time the Reinholz estate appeared on the horizon, the sun was twinkling its last. Cin’s stomach groaned, reminding him just how many, many hours it had been since his last meal.
God, he hoped someone had put food on for dinner.
His flock-creature shivered out of from beneath him, shaky and abrupt.
He stumbled onto the path, barely finding his balance as his flock headed for the nearest trees: for the same sleep and food that Cin desperately needed.
Only Lacey and Ragimund stayed, just long enough to nuzzle against Cin’s neck before weakly flying off to join the others.
“Thank you,” Cin whispered in their wake.
Beneath his transformed bosom, his heart ached from joy.
He could feel Perdition’s little body still warm against his chest. She cooed softly, but when he tried to let her join the others, she barely managed to stand from within her sling, so he tucked her back against his chest and pulled his cloak over her.
Cin steeled himself and walked around to the back door.
The kitchen was dark. So dark, and cold, in fact, that at first it seemed as though no one had touched it since the night before.
As Cin crept across the chilled stone, though, he passed by the hearth.
A tiny whirl of ash streamed up from its edges.
Cin stopped to press his fingers into the thin layer of soot and no pain sparked in his sides.
There had been a fire here, one which must have consumed the remaining wood Cin had left the night prior, but no one had bothered to clean the remains after.
He turned, and his foot hit the solid side of the cook pot—left haphazardly on the ground. Cin grimaced. They had certainly tried to cook something in it, though by the coarse grim layered on the bottom, it hadn’t gone well. No one had even bothered to soak it, either.
As he moved through the kitchen, it was like stepping into a haunted version of his life; into a house not quite his own, inhabited by a family he could recognize the shapes of, but not the faces.
Grime on the counters, an apple core tossed to the floor, every surface cold and careless in the darkness.
At this time of evening, the space would usually have been alive with Cin’s post-meal preparations, a crackling fire dancing off his busy hands as he cleaned and prepped for the coming day.
Instead, there was a ghostly version of his home, disrespected and distressed.
At least they had tried, he wanted to tell himself. He wanted to, but somehow—somehow he couldn’t. Not yet, not while his heart burned like a tiny fire had been born under it and his bones trembled from deep within. Right now, he was angry. Irrationally, uselessly angry.
Cin held his breath and moved into the house proper.
Beneath the creak of the old wood, he could hear a whisper of his family’s voices, growing ever clearer.
Ever harsher. Making his way down the hall, he caught the flicker of very low flame reflecting from within the second parlor, and the haunting murmurs turned fully to frustrated hisses.
“You were the one who dropped it last!” Floy said.
Manfred managed to grind out his words in a snarl even worse on the ears than his usual. “And I put it out .”
Somehow Louise matched him in tone and emotion without losing an ounce of her usual conceit. “Not before it burned a hole in my floor.”
“I can—” Emma tried to insert, but every other voice snapped back a harsh no , in varying levels of anger and dismay.
The flickers of the hearth’s tiny fire in the parlor sputtered to the sound of curses, then steadied. It had to be nearing embers now.
For one fleeting second, hope swelled in Cin’s heart.
Maybe now, now they understood how much Cin was worth.
Not in Louise’s back-handed way, but with genuine respect.
He was holding their family together. They’d all known it to some degree, but now, perhaps, it had sunk in just how much effort and care and skill it took for Cin to do what he did for them.
And if they could understand that now , then later, when he spent a little time each week at the castle…
But Cin stepped into the room and reality rushed back in.
“Cinder-Szule!” Louise’s dramatic gasp of both Cin’s given names might have been mistaken for joyous surprise in the moment it took her face to transform. “Where in God’s green earth have you been , child?”
Cin opened his mouth as Floy and Manfred both began to insert their own frustrations, but Louise wasn’t finished. She spoke over them all, storming toward Cin with her skirt lifted in one white-knuckled fist, the flickering embers in the hearth casting eerie shadows across her features.
“You were given a responsibility! One you claimed you could be trusted to handle . Yet we return from the city to find the house locked, the fires dying—your poor brother had to break into our own home! Because you chose to go dallying somewhere!”
“He broke the window frame,” Floy added, and Cin couldn’t tell if it was a taunt at him or at Manfred.
It felt like neither, like nothing. Cin was just so tired of it all.
Deep inside him, he knew his bones were trembling, his heart surging in a panicked rhythm, but his mind was elsewhere, untethered and.
.. not unbothered, but one step removed from the bothers of his own body, like a nerve had been snapped from between them.
“I didn’t intend to be gone so long,” he said, and somehow he sounded the right amount of distressed, despite the slow, steady drone of his own inner voice.
“I went to the woods, to see about magic for my chest and— And I got it. But it just took longer than I thought.” A white lie, he realized, only after the words were out.
But it was as close to the truth as his family was likely to understand.
“You left for magic?” Louise made a sound almost like a laugh. “Just thought, well, today seems a good day to run into the woods alone, without a word, and leave my siblings and parents to suffer!” She stamped her foot.