Chapter 12 #2
The rumble in his throat intensifies. A moment later, glass clinks against stone.
The chair creaks, his outline shifting, his shadow looming as it unfolds.
He stands there for a heartbeat—two—like he’s trying to talk himself out of being the one to concede.
But eventually, he steps into the starlight, his mouth hard, a single lock of silver hair falling into his eyes.
All my internal workings go silent. Even my heartbeat, along with everything else—the sky, the stars, the world. Time itself, probably.
He looks so…different tonight. Anguished and hungry and alive, like the wine has stripped the deadness from his eyes.
“You’re so stubborn,” he says.
“Yes,” I breathe.
“I hate that about you.”
My chest hitches, because he doesn’t sound like he means that. He sounds like he’s pleading with me. “Too bad,” I say. “It’s my favorite thing about myself.”
He steps closer, forcing me to crane my head. His gaze burns as brightly as the stars, and it travels downward, a caress across the hollow of my throat. It’s the first time he’s seen that part of me, I realize, and a shiver coasts along my skin as I pull the dressing gown around my neck.
But that only diverts his focus back upward, to my mouth. My lips tingle, as if his attention has weight, heat.
“Shadows take me,” he says. “You’re beautiful. I think I hate that even more.”
My breath fails entirely. Ishanna’s blood, but he’s well and truly drunk. Clearly. And yet this might be the first honest conversation we’ve ever had.
“Good,” I murmur. “I hate you, too.”
A glint warms his eyes. “Why? Because I’m beautiful?”
My throat seals itself shut. I didn’t mean it that way, and yet I can’t help but catalog the details I’ve refused to see before—the symmetry of his features, the hard cut of his jaw, the way starlight clings to the planes of his face as if desperate to know what they feel like.
His mouth, somehow both brutal and soft…
I drag my gaze away before I can finish the thought.
But that doesn’t silence the quiet detonation taking place beneath my skin. I think I’ve known he’s beautiful, on some level, since he first strode through my father’s receiving hall. I’ve just never let myself acknowledge it, never let the word form fully in my mind.
After all, beautiful things shouldn’t tear people from their homes. They shouldn’t send their mates into deadly forests.
The king standing before me has done both. He’s both beautiful and terrible, and I hate that my treacherous body doesn’t seem to know the difference.
“I don’t hate you because of what you look like,” I say. “I hate you because you ruined my life.”
“Mmm. I did. And I won’t apologize for it.”
A bitter laugh scrapes at my throat. “Good. I don’t want you to. If you’re going to destroy me for your own selfish purposes, at least have the conviction to stand by it.”
He leans in, blocking out the starlight. “I do.”
“Then I hope, when this is all over, it will have been worth it for you.”
An endless pause stretches between us. “It won’t. Chances are, you won’t succeed.”
I pull back, stung. Not that I don’t already know that, but… “If that’s really what you believe, then why’d you choose me? Why’d you even bring me here?”
A laugh drips from his lips, this one familiar, tinged with cruelty. “Because. I had no choice.”
My jaw locks. He said as much the night he fought the Shadow, and I didn’t agree with him then any more than I do now. “Of course you did. You could’ve left me alone. You could’ve let me stay in Aethrolia.”
He scoffs. “Is that what you think? That I could’ve spent two hundred years trying to find you, only to turn around and leave again when I did?
Do you think any man has ever done such a thing, in the history of the fae?
In the history of mate bonds? Do you really think I could have smelled that incredible fucking smell just once, and never again? ”
My lips part, his words stunning me into silence. I try to drag my gaze from his, but I can’t. I can only wait beneath his stare, entirely at his mercy. “I… But… You just said you hate me.”
He snorts. His eyes bore into mine. “Yes. I hate how beautiful you are. I hate your stubbornness. I hate how fiery and determined you are.”
I don’t speak. I don’t know that I even breathe. “Is that all?”
He exhales through his nose. “No. I hate that you aren’t afraid of me.
I hate how you make me feel, the things you make me think about.
I hate that my Shadow hurt you. That I had to wonder whether you were all right for eight days.
I especially hate that whenever you’re around, some dead thing inside me tries to hope.
I hate that I have to kill that part of myself, over and over. Drown it at the bottom of a bottle.”
My heart does a somersault—trying to escape him, or close the gap between us, I can’t tell. Maybe both. “What’s wrong with hope?”
“What isn’t?” He practically bends the words in half, he loads them with so much disdain. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you learn how dangerous hope is, how cruel. Because nothing hurts like hope does, Princess. Nothing.”
A tragic chord rings through me. How gut-wrenching, to think he’s never once had a dream come true. That every wish he’s ever made has slipped through his fingers, leaving him broken and alone and afraid to long for anything different.
Not that my wishes have come true, either. But I haven’t lived long enough for that failure to destroy me.
“So what you’re saying,” I venture, “is that you hate me because I make you feel something? After you’ve spent centuries teaching yourself not to?”
His eyes harden. “That’s not what I said at all.” But his mouth twitches, betraying him.
My hands curl at my sides, a defensive measure. If I don’t hold on to myself, I might reach for him, and that would be a disaster.
“What did you used to wish for?” My whisper floats through the dark, twining toward him in lieu of my fingers. “When you came up here and looked at the stars?”
His eyes narrow. “What do you care?”
“Just tell me.”
His jaw tightens. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“It doesn’t.” He bares his teeth. “I never got to have it. I still can’t.”
My chin lifts. “Then if it’s really so meaningless, tell me what it was.
” I don’t know why I care so much, only that he must have had a heart, once—I’m sure of it, now.
He can smother its fire, dampen it with drink, but he can’t extinguish it completely.
If I pressed my hand to his chest right now, I would feel the faint glow of buried embers, starving for air but still clinging to life.
“No,” he bites out.
I study his face. Goddess, my entire being bends toward him, his hold on me magnetic. But if he won’t talk to me, I refuse to feed this ache in my veins for another moment.
“You know what?” I toss back. “Fine. Don’t tell me. Goodnight.”
I spin away before I can succumb to his pull. I make for the door, dodging the telescopes along the way. They stand like sentinels, their brass trimmings gleaming faintly.
“Wait.” Amriel hurls the word at my retreating back. “You can’t just leave.”
I don’t answer.
His voice dives to a growl. “I said stop.”
My stride falters, my body momentarily bending to his command, but I shuttle every last ounce of will into driving myself forward. “No.”
“Do not turn your back on me,” he warns.
“Or what?” I fling over my shoulder, because he’s not the Shadow. He won’t take chase.
But footsteps sound behind me, proving me wrong. I up my pace, diving for the door and yanking it open.
Amriel has already caught up. His hand hits the wood and pushes, slamming the door shut again. His enormous body presses against my back, hemming me in.
“Let me out,” I say, matching his growl.
“No.”
I spin, only to find myself caged by his size, by the arm still pinning the door shut. “Why not?”
“Because,” he spits. “Because…”
I lift an eyebrow in challenge. He stares down, his chest heaving, his eyes sharp with anger and…something else. Something that steals the breath from my lungs. Something raw and painful and utterly defenseless.
“Tell me what you wished for,” I say, my voice pitched low. “Or I swear to Ishanna, I’ll walk out this door and never speak to you again.”
He flinches.
“Tell me,” I warn. “Give me one reason not to hate everything about you.”
He grinds his jaw, then slams his palm against the wood, making me startle. “For you,” he snarls. “All right? I used to wish for you. I’d come up here and wish on a shooting star and ask for the same thing, every time. You. My mate. And look how that turned out.”
My pulse sputters and dies. Just ceases to exist, stranding me here with nothing but his words, resounding inside my head.
I used to wish for you.
My eyes prickle, the sting stitching me to the moment. Good goddess, but no one has ever wished for me. Not my sisters, not my father. I’ve only ever chased their approval and gotten exactly nowhere.
Now the floor tilts, tipping me forward. I counteract the pull by inching backward against the door, but I can still feel the precipice beneath me, my toes edging out over nothing. “So you did get your wish.”
A broken laugh catches in his throat. “No. I asked for someone to share eternity with. But you don’t want to be here.
You can’t wait to go home. And I’m…ruined.
My life isn’t a life, anymore. I’m nothing and no one, half of me missing, this pain eating away at me, second after second, minute after minute, day after day and year after year.
” He cuts himself off, catches his breath.
I stare up, something deep and wide shifting within me.
“And shadows take me, I can’t do it anymore.” His voice drops to a strained whisper. “I can’t. I can only send you into the labyrinth and wait to see what happens and hope for death at the end, one way or another.”
That nearly yanks my heart from my chest, a hard wrench that has me biting down on a cry. “Death? Why death?”