CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“You’re not focusing.” Thomas’s words were clipped and cold.
“I’m trying!”
We’d been practicing the exact same water pillar exercise for an hour. Caleb had already disappeared to sweep the area, eager to escape the frustration building in the air between us.
A frustration I still wasn’t quite sure where to direct, despite knowing exactly where it came from.
Prince Thomas was, quite clearly, ruining my life.
“Try harder.”
My nostrils flared.
I’ll show him.
Make him regret ever taking me on.
I wished I’d never met him. Wished he didn’t cause all this turmoil inside me. Wished I could go back to how it was, when David was enough, and I was satisfied with enough.
Anger curdled my stomach, climbing up my throat. My fingers clenched, my eyelids tight, as I held both arms straight before me over the pond.
“Lyra!”
I opened my eyes, gasping at the pillar of water rising before me, reaching twice my height. I staggered back, tripping over myself. The rock dug into my calves as I hit the ground.
The pillar wavered, collapsing slowly at first, and then all at once. Water surged toward us.
Thomas repeated my name, but my body was frozen in shock. Water gushed over the edge of the pond, forming a wave that would knock me over.
I was pulled into his arms just as the water hit, burning as it flooded my nostrils and tore at my legs. Thomas’s grip held me steady as the tide surged around us. It lapped at our waists and splashed our faces.
When the water finally receded, I coughed into his shirt.
I paused.
His damp shirt.
It clung to his skin, letting through the warmth I’d yearned for so long to feel.
My fingers clenched around the soaked fabric.
“Are you alright?”
His chest was heaving beneath my hand, his face dripping water onto my shoulder. My pulse pounded in my ears.
This can’t be happening.
“Y-yes.”
“I can’t believe you did it.” Rather than release me, his arms tightened around my waist. The muscles he’d earned from years of basic weapon training were more evident than ever.
My tongue felt thick in my mouth. “I-I did.”
The sound of his heartbeat softened to an even rhythm as my ear pressed against his chest. Water rolled down my nose, my calves, my neck, sending tingles up every trail left behind in the cool night air.
I sighed into him.
He loosened his grip and pulled away.
My body ached in the empty gap left behind, shivering in the cold. His dark eyes were aflame as they wandered down my silhouette. My thin nightgown clung to my skin. I sat up and crossed my arms in front of me.
He stared for a long moment before shaking his head. He moved to grab his coat from the rocks. “Here,” he said, holding it out to me while averting his gaze toward the pond. I scurried forward to take it. “It’s soaked, but it’s better than nothing.”
I nodded, daring glances at his figure, at his defined arms and calves. “Thanks.” Despite the freezing fabric, my insides warmed the moment I wrapped Thom’s coat around myself.
His eyes drifted down to my engagement ribbon, which hung limp but clung tight. He reached forward, playing with an end of it. I held my breath.
“They make these very well.” He twisted it to examine the knot on the underside of my wrist. “I can’t believe it survived the watery assault.”
He looked at me once more, something more complex than amusement lingering in his features.
It looked like unkempt wildness, like the eyes of unbridled horses racing across open fields.
Like desire.
I tried to focus on breathing. “I… I should return to my quarters, Thom.”
He smiled at the nickname, bowing his head. He clasped his hands behind his back, as if forcing them to behave. “I would have to agree.”
“I’ll return your coat as soon as it dries.”
“I’m not worried about my coat.” His fiery gaze lingered on mine. I struggled to swallow and turned away. His scrutiny and emotions tangled with mine until I could no longer tell one from the other.
I pulled his coat closer around me, sneaking back into the palace and down the servants’ wing.
Even as the ribbon around my wrist tightened, my pulse thudding against the knot, as if my very body was trying to break free.
“What’s this?”
My body jerked awake, my chest heaving as I escaped a dream that lingered on my skin like a final breath, yet another replay of the events from last night.
Events I shouldn’t have let happen.
My hands flew to my hair, pushing down askew strands. I hesitated when I saw what Anna had in her arms.
Thomas’s coat.
Disappointment had seeped into every line of her face.
“Lyra?”
The tremble in her voice made my heart crumble. “I can explain.”
She sat next to me, the jacket folded in her grasp. Her fingers etched over the embroidery that lined the pockets. “You’d better.”
And so I did. I told her everything, things I never in my life expected to tell a girl like Anna, whose sneer had once seemed permanently fixed to her face. But ever since Ella left, my roommate’s features, her soul, had begun to thaw, and I had no one else to tell.
I revealed what Thomas had done for Asha. What I had done for Stephen. I shared about the agreement I’d made with him, his three rules we’d followed. I demonstrated a few of my newest magical abilities, recounted the water I’d brought almost as high as Thomas had for his peers in the spring.
And I told her about David. All of it, even the stuff I had yet to admit to myself.
“You have to end things with David,” she said.
“But I love him.” The words floated from my mouth, and I pressed my lips together.
“Hmm,” she said, clutching Prince Thomas’s coat to her chest. She inhaled the coat, which now smelled more of algae and water lilies than it did of Thomas. “Did the prince really cradle you in his arms?”
My cheeks heated, even as my lips pulled up. “Yes.”
“Why can’t this sort of thing ever happen to me?”
I laughed, and after an eyeroll, Anna joined me.
Her eyes began to grow watery
I placed a hand on her arm. “Are you alright, Anna?”
She dabbed at a corner of her eye. “I’m fine. It’s simply… my life is not going the way it was supposed to.”
“Hey,” I said, raising my hands, “If anyone can relate to that, it’s me.”
And within the privacy of a budding friendship, she told me of the pain that simmered beneath her skin, of the ache of high expectations, of the stabbing wounds that bled inside her as rejections piled up.
Of her desire to be a mother, floating further from her grasp as years passed without interest from suitors.
We spent the morning delaying our duties, trading tearful laughs and secrets, and when the time for lunch came, I wrapped her hand in mine, her soul in mine, and a part of my heart—the part that ripped when Ella had left—began to patch itself together.
I’d never expected this to happen, to find a friend in a snarling face. But my life seemed determined not to go the way it was supposed to.
Maybe it was time I let it.