Chapter 20
ALEK
Iblinked, and the morning transitioned into day, only to convert into night too quickly. I hadn’t even had a chance to come up with a plan. It was like my mind was being consumed with four words on repeat:
A reason to hope.
To hope. To fucking hope. That was what he’d said to me.
I’d expected to get kneed in the ribs. That was no surprise. And I’d expected to get reprimanded for possessing him—for being possessive of him, but I hadn’t expected whatever that was. I hadn’t expected…hope.
I wished I could say it hadn’t shaken me. Hadn’t punctured the surface of my skin like a long needle. But it penetrated so deeply that I had nothing to say in return to his hope. And when he followed up with, “So, it’s settled. We’ll do it tonight,” I still said nothing.
I simply stood there, nodding in agreement, struggling not to have a theatrical mental episode while waiting for further instruction. Like a damn puppy.
The time had come, and my whole body was a kindling blowing too close to a fire, itchy with anticipation as I busied myself with shuffling a deck of cards.
It gave me an excuse to pretend like I wasn’t keenly aware of Feloré’s every movement as he lit various candles around the room, folded back the covers of my bed, and placed a basin filled with water onto my nightstand.
Now he was standing idly, unbuttoning the cuffs of one of his sleeves. Well, one of my sleeves. He was wearing my favorite shirt, and the dark blue color looked stunning on him. So stunning. I hated that for me.
“Take your shirt off,” he said. “Lie on the bed.”
I blinked hard as my stomach muscles tightened at the casual command.
I’d been smoking extra in anticipation, but no amount of drug-induced mental fog could fool me into thinking this was a good idea. It was a terrible, terrible idea, and I was a reckless idiot for allowing it.
But I rose from the desk and unfastened the ties on my tunic. He wasn’t even watching me. He was fluffing a pillow, but his heartbeat quickened when I peeled off my shirt, like he was acutely aware of my every movement, too.
“Tell me, human,” I said, tossing my shirt over a chair. “Is this really going to work? Or is this all just some elaborate plan to get me shirtless?”
He flashed me a look, careful not to let his gaze dip down my body.
I grinned. “Because you could’ve just asked.”
A hint of fiery heat danced in his eyes. “Why would I need an elaborate plan to get you shirtless, Prince? When you respond so handsomely to being bossed around.”
I licked my lips to hide my budding smile as I slipped the cigarette from behind my ear between my teeth. “You think so?”
“You don’t realize that about yourself? Fascinating. Must be a royal ego thing.”
Beautiful, wicked little person.
“Speaking of your ego,” he said, nodding to the cigarette, “use a candle. Do not conjure a flame in your condition. It’s absurd.”
I rolled my eyes skyward. Then I kept rolling them the whole eternity and a half it took to circle my bed so that I might use a damn candle to light my cigarette like some kind of a toiling peon. At least it brought me closer to him.
“Excuse me, little human,” I said, bumping his shoulder. “I think I’ll use this one right here.”
He glared. “I have lit a hundred candles around this room. You’re intentionally trying to—” He scrunched his face tight when I blew a long stream of smoke into it.
“Trying to what?” I asked, grinning as he blinked his lovely eyes open. I was so much taller than him. What fun it was to showcase it at this angle, especially when I could rest a hand atop the canopy of my bed and loom over him. “Ruffle your delicate feathers?”
“Alek, oh dear.” He pressed a cool palm against my forehead. “You are sicker than I thought.”
My eyes rolled shut as his touch whipped through my body like a windstorm. I leaned all the way into it. I couldn’t even help it.
“Foxes don’t have feathers, Prince of Novithia,” he whispered. “They have fangs.”
A grin had started to tilt my lips when he shoved me onto the bed, making me wince at the sting of pain up my side.
“Like I said.” He wasn’t trying to be sexy, but something about his tone was ruthlessly so. Especially as he said, “Lie on the fucking bed.”
I half-winced, half-chuckled as I stretched out on my side facing him, scattering ashes all over the black sheets.
“I need something sharp,” he said, twisting around the room. “I searched your room back when I wanted to stab you and couldn’t find anything.”
“But you did stab me, human.”
“Yes, but the servants have since swept up all my weapons. Do you have anything else? Or shall I break another mirror?”
Irony, the twisted cunt she was, would like to point out that I was really about to hand a proper weapon to the creature responsible for this chaos.
I held his gaze the whole time I leaned from the bed, pulling open my nightstand drawer. Beneath the hidden compartment was the box where my blade lived.
I lifted the plank of wood to reveal the specimen where it lay tucked in a satin case like a tiny coffin.
“Good gods,” he breathed, one hand hovering over his chest. “Good gods.”
“That sharp enough, darling?”
“Can I…touch it?”
Fucking touch whatever you like, human. “Please.”
He wiggled his long fingers into the satin to carefully cradle my blade in his hands like it was some fragile thing and not a slayer that had tasted centuries’ worth of blood. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And he never would again. It was a post-war relic, a wootz steel, edged in silvery raw diamonds with an ivory handle intricately carved to resemble the sacred Hacerium tree. I didn’t use it for hunting as it was truly priceless.
Yet somehow, it felt particularly fitting for this occasion. The blade intended to cut the human so he could wash away my pain with his medicinal blood.
“How old is this?” he asked, weighing it in his hands.
“Three hundred years or so. Maybe older.”
“What is this part made of?” he asked, smoothing his fingers over the handle.
“Angel bone.”
His gaze zipped up to mine.
“That’s why it’s so strong. They used our skulls to pour their wine.” I flitted a hand around the air. “We used their bones to forge our weapons.”
He blinked hard at the knife for a long time. Then he shook his head like he was trying to shake it clear. “You know, it’s always been difficult to believe they really existed. But I guess this is proof, huh?”
“Oh, they definitely existed,” I said as he sat upon the bed, gently placing the knife onto the nightstand. “Nearly drove us into extinction.”
He dipped a washcloth into the basin of water and wrung it out.
“They were brutal. As brutal as us. Fierce and mesmerizing fighters.”
He was squinting at my wound, his lips pulling downward into a frown. “And yet, they still lost the war.”
“Well, yes, but not because they couldn’t fight.”
He gently dabbed the washcloth against my side, trying to wipe it clean with the easiest of strokes, his frown only deepening at whatever he saw. “Then why?”
“Because of you, of course.”
“Me?”
“Well, not you. Humans. They lost because of the humans.”
The look he was giving me… It was like he had no idea to what I was referring, but that’d be impossible. It was the most prominent theory out there. Everyone knew what really happened with the angels.
Then it hit me.
The reason he looked lost was because he probably was. All the books on the Great War were banned from humans, just like all the philosophers had been strictly limited to printing their theories in Vultaen only.
I wet my lips. “What do you know of the Great War, Feloré?”
“What do I know about it?” His gaze searched the walls. Then he shrugged, returning to my side. “Just that the vultae won because they’re stronger. And that all the angels and a massive number of people got killed.”
And there it was. Gods, it almost saddened me to tell him. “What if I told you that humans did not fight in the war?”
His eyes narrowed. “Yes, they did. They fought alongside the angels.”
“Humans didn’t fight,” I said, shaking my head, “because the angels wouldn’t let them.”
“Wouldn’t let them?” His head jolted back an inch. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You should’ve fought by their sides. Together, you had the numbers and the heart to beat us, but they wouldn’t allow it. Refused to let harm come to you. They wanted every last one of you coddled and protected. It was their one fatal flaw.”
He blinked. “That cannot be true.”
“Oh, it is,” I said, nodding. “Not only that, but they locked you in camps and cages where you couldn’t leave if you wanted to. They did it all in the name of love. They did it all to keep you safe.
But what they actually did was hand us an already imprisoned population of humans. Not much has changed.”
He didn’t budge. He just stared blankly at me like he was staring right through me.
“Are you okay, my love?”
He suddenly inhaled deeply, as if awakening from a daze. “Yes. Yes, it just reminded me of someone, is all.”
“Who?”
“Hmm? Oh, no one,” he said, dipping the cloth back into the water, pinkening it with my blood. “No one important.”
I narrowed my eyes. A part of me wanted to pry, wedge a finger inside the crack in his shell until it shattered to pieces, but I had to be patient. One didn’t win the secrets of a fox by force. That took cunning.
I nuzzled against the pillow, sucking in a drag of smoke. “You are quite the doctor, hmm?”
He snorted.
“Why do you laugh, Snow Fox? You do not think your hands possess the skill required to be a doctor?”
“It is not that,” he said. “I was chosen to be a concubine. Your given lot in life is permanent. As permanent as this metal through my tongue.”
My gazed zipped to his mouth. I was struck with the sudden urge to forge some metal cutters out of thin air.
It was because of that feeling I got when I thought about it. A damn possessiveness flaring in my gut. I didn’t want to think about him as a concubine. If the idea of sharing them was supposed to be arousing, then why did I feel so fucking infuriated?
“What age were you?” I asked.
“I don’t know, fourteen, maybe,” he said, peering closely at my side. “Fifteen. One of the maidens at my orphanage escorted me into a room where a vultus I’d never seen before sat at a table. He barely looked up from his book long enough to say, Well, this is an easy one. Whore.”
My eyebrows shot up. “That was it?”
“That was it.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“How did I feel,” he repeated quietly, more to himself than me, like he’d never been asked that question. “I suppose I felt grateful I’d get to learn how to read. The whores are the only ones in an orphanage who are taught to read.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of A Magnificent Constitution, of course.” He spread his palms over my wound. “Why else?”
My heart. A little piece of it broke.
“But you don’t survive by following the rules, so I read other things. I bent the rules.”
“Like what? What’d you read?”
“Anything I could get my hands on. I’d trade things for books. Things I’d find on the street or things I’d stolen.”
I switched to Vultaen as I asked, “Is that how you learned to speak Vultaen?”
“No,” he answered in Vultaen. “My parents taught me—” He gasped, slapping a hand over his mouth.
I blurted out a chuckle.
“Shit,” he whispered. “Shitfuck, Alek.”
“Shitfuck, huh? It’s so poignant. Did your parents also teach you that?”
“No, I don’t, um. You know.” He cleared his throat, shaking his head. “I don’t—”
“You don’t what, darling? Speak fluent Vultaen? Read and possibly write it, too?”
He was sucking his lower lip into his mouth, but a smirk was growing. Gods, it was cute. “How did you know?”
“Oh, I stalked you outside the washroom. For a really long time. I got a cramp from standing there so long. I regret nothing.”
At that, he chuckled.
“No.” I gasped, perching up on my elbow. “That was it? That was the thing that finally made my fanged fox laugh?”
He instantly squashed his laughter.
“Oh, baby.” I clicked my tongue. “That’s adorable to think you can take it from me, but it’s far too late. I’ve already seen it. I have seen your smile.”
The prettiest pink flushed his cheeks.
“Which means it’s mine now.” I grinned as I whispered, “To think about whenever I fucking wish.”
No one else deserved his smile. Just me. Mine.
He huffed a little, wiping his hands on the cloth, doing his best to ignore me, but I could almost swear, the remnants of that smile—which was mine—still lingered around his full lips. “Okay. So, here’s what—”
“Darling, no, no, that won’t do. You must speak to me in Vultaen,” I said, inching a smidgen closer to him. “Let me hear you speak it. Let me see my native tongue on your human lips.”
He flashed me a look.
“Oh, come on. You act as if this is the biggest law you’ve broken since you’ve been here.” I winked. “It is not even in the top five.”
He dragged his gaze from me, gripping the knife and hovering the blade over a candle to sanitize it. Then he said in perfect Vultaen, “I’m going to hold this to your throat the whole time.”
My cock reacted, swelling before I even had a chance to think. But no. No, I did not want a knife against my throat.
Did I?
“So, don’t fucking touch me if you know what’s good for you,” he continued in Vultaen, his dialect so different than mine. Rugged. Sensible. Cutting straight to the flesh. “I can either save your life tonight, my charming prince. Or I can end it.”
I glanced down at the blade, then up at him.
“Do you understand?”
I sucked the remainder of my cigarette, swallowing the smoke, willing it to numb me as much as possible, but I’d never quite been put to the test like this. This was it. It was do or die. It was now or never. It was run or it was this.
A sense of finality washed over me as each one of my nerve endings sparkled alive. Then I nodded. “Do your worst.”