Chapter 33
thirty-three
I fell asleep with my arms around my head, as if that was somehow going to keep the thoughts and the images of everything I’d seen that night away from me.
It didn’t, but at least when sleep claimed me, it was bliss. It was nothingness, just an endless void for me to exist without feeling like I was being torn apart limb by limb, like there were flames inside me, claiming my ashes, and ice freezing every drop of blood in my veins at the same time.
But it didn’t last, the sleep.
The shadows came, crawled all over the walls of my room, and I felt them even in unconsciousness.
My eyes opened and my heart took a pause, limbs locked for a good moment, until I heard the whisper.
Reality had been having a different feel to it since that ball, and maybe that’s why I wasn’t surprised in the least to hear my name being whispered out by the thin air.
I sat up slowly to find the room I slept in empty, and the shadows I could have sworn were crawling on the walls weren’t there—but one of the entrance doors was open just slightly .
Nilah, whispered the air, and even my movements felt different to me—when I pushed the cover off and jumped out of bed, the temperature of the floor against my bare feet, the way the air felt when I moved closer and closer to the door.
There were no shadows anywhere that I could see other than those cast by the lights. The windows showed me the sky was still dark, and the guards who were supposed to be just outside my door at all times weren’t.
Come to me, said the whisper next, and maybe I imagined it. Maybe I was in a dream right now, but it was Rune. I knew his voice, even when he spoke to me from somewhere I couldn’t even see. Even when his whispers popped up in my mind out of nowhere.
It was Rune, and the guards were somewhere down the hallway, too. I heard them, heard the footsteps, the calls—and the whisper, come.
I obviously wasn’t going to sit around and wait to make sure it was really Rune calling for me. If there was even the smallest chance that he was somewhere waiting for me, I’d take it.
Taking in a deep breath, I closed the door behind me, and I ran barefoot on the marble floor, dressed in only a gold-colored nightgown made out of silk and lace that covered very little.
If I were to stop and think for a moment, I’d have put something else on—even just a blanket around my shoulders.
As it was, I only kept going, following the whisper to the very end of the hallway.
The guards weren’t the only ones around the corner across from the main stairs. Someone else was with them, and I stopped by the wall, closed my eyes and focused on my ears to try to determine if I could make it to the stairs without being noticed .
They spoke, the fae, about something falling and breaking, and they were searching for something, too. The voice of a woman sounded in my ears as she demanded to find it at all costs, even if it took them all night.
I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, but the whisper in my ear was louder than ever when it said, come. Now.
It was Rune. I believed it with every fiber of my being, and so I moved again, shot for the stairway, too scared to even look back, to try to see what they were looking for in the other hallway around the corner. Terrified someone would see me, call my name, tell me to stop, or follow me.
So fucking terrified of even the air going down my throat.
By some miracle, nobody called my name. No footsteps behind me—nobody came running to stop me or follow me or ask me where I was going.
I took the stairs two at a time, and I had no clue where I was even headed, only that the stairway was clear and there were no guards and no workers and no nobody, just me.
Then the whisper when it told me to stop.
There was a good chance that none of this was even real, but the voice said stop, and I did.
The voice called my name, and I followed it on whichever floor I’d stopped, down a dark and empty hallway, and toward a set of doors I’d seen before.
They were the doors to the queen’s throne room, and one of them was open.
I stopped, put my hand against the wall to my side, closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. A trap, a part of me insisted. It was a trap set by the queen, and I was going to fall in it if I walked through those doors .
Except I was already here, wasn’t I? And nobody was coming after me by the sound of it. Nobody could see me, and nobody knew where I was.
If it was a trap, so be it. But I was going to at least look inside that room and see if I’d lost my mind, if I was in a dream, or if Rune had really called for me, everything else be damned.
With my hands clenched in fists, I took one last look around the deserted hallway, and then I went for the open door.
God help me, the image of the queen’s face was in the center of my mind, but I slipped through the opening on my tiptoes anyway and stopped just inside.
The room was soaked in moonlight, filtered through the stained-glass windows in pale gold and silver. It painted the floor as if with stars, which mirrored the constellations drawn on the domed ceiling.
The queen was not here.
Instead, at the top of the dais, just to the right of the Seelie throne, stood Rune all by himself. Never moving or speaking while his shadows curled around his hands like smoke.
He wore black pants and his black shirt was undone. When he turned to me only halfway, he looked like something unhinged, barely holding on.
It’s Rune, said the voice in my head as if to calm down my racing heart. I hadn’t heard things—it had been Rune who’d called for me. And now we were here, in the queen’s throne room, all alone.
He didn’t say my name, didn’t even tell me he was glad I’d made it as he stepped down from the dais slowly.
“Do you have any idea,” he finally whispered, “what that did to me? ”
The memories rushed through my mind—the dress, the mask, the ball, the people.
Lyall with my arm around his. Claiming the first dance. Smiling at me.
Lyall putting his hands on my shoulders, kissing me.
The memories anchored me in place as he strode over to me with his head down, watching me with those dark eyes under his lashes, his hands completely covered by shadows as the lights flowed close to the tall ceiling, far enough to give him plenty of them to work with, I figured.
I swallowed hard. My voice shook when I said his name. “Rune?—”
But he didn’t let me speak
“Watching him touch you like you were his.” The words were laced with poison as they reached my ears, and he was there, coming closer by the second, making a mess out of me even before he touched me.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head.
“Like he had a right to you,” Rune spit, and he didn’t stop until the tips of my toes touched his boots, and he was deep in my personal space, looking down at me through those bloodshot eyes.
I looked up at him, waited, completely surrendered.
Then his hands closed around my cheeks, his shadows gone, his touch gentle and rough at the same time. Fuck, he was so close I could feel the heat pouring off him.
“Say it,” he whispered. “Tell me you’re not his.”
“I’m not his .” The words slipped from my lips the very next second. It was one of the truest things I had ever said in my life, so it wasn’t hard.
Rune froze in place for a moment, his eyes on mine almost like he was surprised. Like there was a part of him that still doubted this— us .
He didn’t anymore, though. Now he fully believed it, and I saw the color flash in his eyes a second before he slammed his lips to mine.
Finally.
Rune kissed me like he wanted to break me open. His hands gripped my waist, pulling me in so hard I gasped, and then I was moving—stumbling backward, locked in his hold, my back hitting cold marble as he pressed me against a column with a growl.
He never once took his lips off me, and it was everything I always dreamed of, every second of every day when we were apart.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw this, I heard his moans and felt his hands on me, tasted him on my tongue.
He destroyed me without even trying—and we were only just getting started.
The world beyond this room was completely forgotten, which might not have been very wise of me, but it was Rune. If there was a reason to be worried, he would be, and if he wasn’t, I trusted him.
That—and I really had no more room left in me to fear. God, I needed a break. I needed to be Rune’s again so I could slip into my own skin after feeling like a damn stranger for days.
Rune gave me exactly that.
He lifted me up like I weighed nothing, and I automatically wrapped my legs around his waist. He carried me with ease all the way across the room again, up on the dais one step at a time, until we reached the seats near the two throne chairs.
My heart almost broke out of my ribcage when he sat me down on the velvet seat, and I looked up to see the tall backrest that ended in a pointy tip like it was a damn weapon. To my left, the queen’s throne was right there, close enough to me to touch.
“Rune, that’s her throne,” I choked, though he had fallen to his knees in front of me, arms locked around my waist tightly still as he dragged his mouth along my jawline, down my throat.
“It will soon be his,” he whispered, and I knew he meant Lyall. I could only cry out when he licked the soft spot behind my earlobe, then brought a hand to my mouth to stop myself from moaning.
“That’s okay,” Rune continued as he planted kisses on my chin and cheeks and lips. “Let him have his throne. I have you.”
The way he said it. The look in his eyes that were so vibrant now, so blue and silver and alive.
Something inside me twisted, a wild thing that thrived at his words, that grew the size of the sun inside me, nurtured by the way he meant what he said. Like I was as worthy—no, more worthy than a throne. A kingdom. The whole damn world.