Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
Elara
The spring glistens from afar.
Brine rides the air long before the stone’s mouth reveals itself: an arch of rock torn open like a wound, with scrub along the ridge, brittle and dry.
In front of me, the king’s lantern sputters as he picks his way down the uneven slope. The wet breath in the air dislikes flames, shivering the light down to a nub and leaving most of the half-cave in darkness.
Like the library trunk.
My toes curl in my boots. Someone wants the past buried, its proof stripped from sight. But proof of what? An older heir? Something else entirely? And who?
Vale, perhaps? He’s too composed, too careful not to let on that he knows more than he says. But then again, the king hasn’t been very forthcoming, either. And Death? If the curse was his design, then who’s to say he doesn’t still guard its truth, keeping the rest of us chasing shadows and—
“Miss Elara.” The king’s voice cuts through the current of my thoughts.
I blink, almost startled.
A few paces ahead, he stands by a boulder that marks the water’s edge, his gaze flicking over his shoulder. “I asked if this spot is to your satisfaction.”
“It’ll work.” Moonlight slicks the surface of the pool in trembling silver, the water shifting with every sigh of wind that whispers past the wide mouth of the cave. “Sorry. I was just…thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.” His tone is softer than usual, with a thread of amusement woven through. “For most, at least.”
“Then it’s a miracle I’m not most.”
“You most definitely are not.” The words carry a warmth that doesn’t belong in a cave. He looks away quickly, as if he regrets giving it. “I remember the water being pleasantly warm.”
“There’s sulfur in it.” Pebbles grind under our boots as we wobble toward where the water laps at the white-dusted stone edge. “Not the most alluring smell, but your skin will be as new tomorrow.”
“Superior to all my healers and previous caretakers.”
I flick my eyes starward and make sure he sees it. A lie, and we both know it. The crown heals him faster than any salve ever could. Still, it’s doing less work now that he’s slowed trying to destroy himself. Flesh filling back into muscle. Straightness crawling its way into his spine.
“I can get in here.” He eyes the shallower end of the spring, near a boulder slick with minerals. The air hums faintly. When he tries to step onto the ledge, his boot slides.
“Careful.”
He huffs, half laughter, half frustration. “I shall regret having made this concession.” His cloak goes first, folding neatly beside the boots he’s now slipped out of, then his fingers go to the ties at his throat. “Least when I drown.”
“Try not to,” I mutter. “My good graces with Miss Hampshire are hanging by a thread already.”
The shirt peels off, and despite my best efforts to look at the cave wall, my gaze snags.
It drags over the cords of lean muscle drawn tight over broad planes, the faint lines of healed scars trailing down his ribs.
When he rolls his shoulders back, the flex pulls shadows across his abdomen, tracing each ridge until it disappears into the narrow dip of his waist.
A waist that drops its trousers.
My breath hitches, jamming somewhere in my throat. I force my eyes to the ground, to the pebbles, to anything safe. But the image is already burned there—skin, strength, and vulnerability all mixed into a shape that is terrifyingly male.
“It is warm.” He steps into the water until it laps his calves, then his thighs, mercifully touching linen that clings low at his hips. “Warmer than I remembered it to be. Perhaps I—” He slips, hand darting for the nearby boulder to steady himself, if barely. “That was close.”
My pulse drums. He’ll drown with how weak he still is.
Yet here I stand, rooted by a panic that has nothing to do with deep water and everything to do with the man standing in it. Vale’s words haunt me. His breath, close. His naked body, closer.
I breathe down my jagged nerves.
At his next wobbling step, I finally move. “Wait.”
The command comes out a bit sharp, and his head jerks at the sound. I’m already at the edge, kicking off my boots. Cold pebbles bite the soles of my feet as I step forward. The first lap of water licks my ankles, climbs, turning the hem of my dress dark and heavy.
“You will soak yourself through,” he says with an arched brow. “Then you’ll catch a cold on the way back, and I’ll be forced to care for you. Wheel you through the gardens. Force water down your throat.”
His jest nearly coaxes a smile, but I’m too busy gathering my courage. My apron falls to the stone behind me easily. The dress comes next, my fingers fumbling only slightly with the ties before the fabric slides from my shoulders in a whisper and puddles at my feet.
I join him in my white underdress. The water curls around my calves, my thighs, then hips, cloth wrapping its weight around me until even breathing feels deliberate.
He leans on my arm as much as I lean on his as we move together along the boulder. “There,” I say, nodding at a ledge beside it. “Sit.”
“And to think there were times I scaled mountains,” he murmurs.
I settle behind him, the water climbing only a little higher—just above my breasts. “You still can, so long as you keep on climbing.”
“And yet I seem to make no progress.” He opens his eyes and stares at the cave wall where moisture glitters like trapped stars. “Seems I am merely…enduring.”
I hesitate for a second, giving myself time to choose my words wisely. “Enduring is easier with company.”
I let the words hang between us like bait, expecting the usual snap of teeth—his scorn, his dismissal, the quick lash that keeps me at a distance.
Instead, he remains still.
No bark. No bite.
Something about him has shifted. Softer at the edges, like the rage burned itself out in his chamber and left a man behind, raw enough to be quiet. Or maybe it isn’t the outburst at all…
My pulse flickers. Is he opening because he means to, or because the door was forced and he’s too tired to slam it shut?
He shifts after a while. “So I heard.”
I scoot up beside him, bringing my knees up in the water.
“When my brother and I were young, we used to climb an old watchtower. I would have frozen halfway up every single time if Daron hadn’t been there to guide me to the next ledge.
He always went first. Always made sure the stone held.
” I pause, watching his delicate profile, looking for any tension.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in a palace.
Did you have friends when you were young? ”
“Princes rarely have true friends,” he says. “Kings have even fewer.”
“What about other children to play with?”
An older brother to shove him up a ledge, perhaps?
For a long moment, he just watches the steam curl off the water. “There was the stablemaster’s son,” he says quietly, the memory seeming to ease the line of his shoulders. “His half-sister, too. We would hide in the haylofts solely so the guards would have to come find us.”
He pauses, and the steam seems to swallow the small, phantom smile that had touched his lips. “That ended the year I turned fifteen.”
My mind drifts to the marginal note, the counsel to keep the prince under lock and key. “Why?”
“To quell my rebellion against rites and traditions.” He drags a hand through the water, watching the dark waves it sends across the surface. “Whatever poor king the alleys call me out as, my father would’ve agreed. He himself never failed to remind me that I made a miserable heir.”
Something sharp twists behind my breastbone at the old pain in his voice. “Was there no one else to carry the burden?”
“No. There was not.” He lets out a harsh, dry sound—a laugh stripped of all humor. “Had there been… Saints, I doubt I would have given up the opportunity to slaughter my father back then. I was angry. Young. Not fully in control of my—”
He flinches. A sudden twist seizes his shoulder, his teeth clenching around a hiss.
My spine straightens. “Pain again?”
“It’s this damn shoulder,” he grinds out. “The muscle keeps snatching.”
“Let me.” I reach out, my fingers hovering over his wet skin.
He hesitates. For a second, he looks at me with pure suspicion—why is she so eager to touch?—but the pain wins. Or maybe the loneliness does.
Either way, he nods.
I press my palms to his upper arm and begin to knead gently, working slow circles into the muscle that’s hardened with tension. “It’s just a knot.”
His breath leaves him in a slow, disarmed exhale as I press deeper. He leans back into my hands, sinking into the touch.
“Is that…too much?” I ask.
“No,” he rasps, his head lolling to the side, exposing the line of his throat. “It feels…strange.”
“Strange how?”
“Strange, because we shouldn’t be this close.” He reaches back, his hand finding mine under the water, covering my fingers. “Strange, because I have this damnable urge to be even closer.”
He slowly turns in the water, the movement creating a current that drags my dress against my legs. His fingers lift out of the water, glide up along my arm, following the path of my touch to its source, his palm landing on my cheek, warm and sure.
Blue eyes meet mine, moonlight lifting the last of the clouds from them and bringing out their depth. “Thank you.”
His voice is low, soothed into something I’ve never heard from him. Gentle. Intimate.
As intimate as that sweep of his thumb across my cheekbone. Back and forth it goes, slowly lighting my nerves like struck tinder.
“Of course,” I whisper, and curse the way my voice thins. “Your Majesty.”
His gaze drifts down to my mouth. The barest parting of his lips mirrors my own breath catching. His head tilts. Leans. Draws toward me. Hovers.
Then he lifts his eyes to mine again, stormed over with something hungry and aching. “Kael. Say it. Say my name.”
A thick swallow. “Kael.”
The name lands between us like a heartbeat, the warmth of his breath grazing my lower lip. The space between our mouths shrinks, thins. His thumb grazes the corner of my mouth—a question made of skin and heat, asking me to give what he would never just take.
A kiss.
My heart slams against my ribs. Instead of triumph, a sharp, cold spike of terror drives into my belly.
I picture it: the weight of him pressing me backward into the steam, wet skin sliding against wet skin, hands roaming where they shouldn’t. The sheer reality of it crashes over me, stripping away the plan and leaving only the primal fear of being touched, of being taken.
His lips lower some.
The cave presses in.
The water feels like a trap, making me flinch. It’s a violent, reflexive jerk, my face ripping away from his grasp as I scramble backward. Water splashes loud and harsh, shattering the moment.
He freezes.
I’m breathing hard, chest heaving, my back pressing against the cold, rough stone of the boulder. “I-I can’t.”
The words are a ragged whisper, but in the echo of the cave, they sound like a scream.
He rises slowly, the water cascading off his chest, the hunger in his eyes replaced by a shuttered, brittle stillness. “Elara?”
“I’m sorry.” My voice shakes. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to hold the pieces of my composure together. “It’s not… I just can’t.”
I turn away, hands shaking as I push damp hair from my face, trying to steady myself, trying to breathe, trying to be anything but the frantic mess I suddenly am.
Behind me, water ripples. “Of course,” he says, but the gentleness is gone. It sounds flat, like resignation. “You owe me no apology for my appalling constitution.”
“Kael, wait.” I spin around, finding his expression already closed off, all softness gone from his demeanor. “It wasn’t you. I didn’t mean to—”
A lift of his hand wards off my words. “I understand enough.”
My mouth opens.
Nothing useful comes out.
My tongue feels thick, glued to the roof of my mouth by shame. I want to explain. I want to tell him it isn’t disgust; that it isn’t him, that it’s the panic chewing through my ribs like a starved rat.
But he’s already turning away, wading toward the edge with stiff, purposeful movements.
I am left standing there, dripping and shaking, lips closing around apologies that no longer have anywhere soft to land.
Kael gathers his cloak from the rocks, steps behind me as I emerge from the water, and drapes it over my shoulders. He tucks it gently against my ribs, his hands steady, even as the space between us ices over.
“We should return,” he says, his voice devoid of the warmth he held only moments ago. “Before the cold grips you.”
After I slip into my boots, we walk. Wool drinks my shivers. Our footsteps echo, the sound gnawing at the silence between us until I can’t bear it anymore.
“I didn’t mean to push you away,” I start, voice small.
He doesn’t slow. “Please stop. I beg of you.”
The words aren’t cruel.
They’re worse…pained.
“I wasn’t disgusted,” I try again, desperate to salvage the trust I just shattered. “I was—”
“Do you smell that?”
“What?” My mind is too tangled by this strange question to separate scents. “Salt?”
“Pear.” His voice lifts. Not in joy, but in relief. In distraction. Anything to speak of something that isn’t…us.
He steps off the path toward a patch of wild growth. Behind a thatch of dark leaves, half-hidden, hangs a single pear. Wrinkled, misshapen, but unmistakably whole.
He plucks it with a twist of his wrist, turning it in his hand, the moon catching its curve. “Strange,” he murmurs. “I thought they’d all been cut down.”
“Who cuts down fruit trees?”
“My mother.” He turns the fruit once more, thumb tracing the wrinkly skin. “She was allergic. Pear. Roses. Most things that flower. I was…eleven when she made my father clear them all. Perhaps twelve.” A faint, humorless smile. “I didn’t think they could still grow this close to the palace.”
Allergic. To flowering trees. Roses.
Roses.
The greenhouse flickers in my mind, the severed shrubs clinging to life along the glass, the plaque bolted to the stone. Why would the king have gifted a greenhouse full of roses to a severely allergic Ophelia for the birth of Prince Kael?
Unless it was for a different queen…
Unless it was for the birth of a different prince…