Chapter Sixteen
The coolness of Roze’s gloves bites into my skin. He grabs my wrist with his other hand and twists it behind my back just to the point of pain. Then he comes close to whisper in my ear, and his icy breath caresses my cheek.
“Do not scream,” he whispers in a voice that is entirely different from the one he used in the ballroom. Gone is Prince Charming. This isn’t even the sarcastic prick I know from school. This is the Prince of Nightmares.
“Do not struggle,” he continues. “And don’t even think of alerting anyone to what you have just heard or the conclusion which you have surely just hastily drawn.
” He exhales a rattling breath that tickles my skin.
With a voice like the edge of a knife, he says, “I will explain everything once we’re back in Vandenberghe.
Until then, you will be silent. You will be still.
You will be obedient. Is that understood? ”
Even though every instinct is screaming at me to run, to fight, to punch him again, I nod.
He carefully removes his hand from my mouth. I glare at him through the darkness. “Anything else, Your Highness?”
He grabs my jaw roughly, lifting my face close to his so that his breath is on my lips. “I told you to be silent. If you can’t obey that order, I’ll have to do something about that unruly tongue of yours, Sinclair.”
His nose nearly brushes mine as he whispers the words into my mouth, the threat of them on his breath. The air between us is pure loathing, and my head feels heavy with it. Black dots speckle the edges of my vision.
I hate myself for ever dancing with him, ever smiling at him, ever looking at him with anything other than pure disdain.
Murderer.
Queen Killer.
When I don’t reply, he smirks and says, “Good girl,” and drops my face roughly. He grabs my arm and drags me behind him down the corridor.
There are a thousand things I want to scream at him all the way back to Berlaise House. The Queen is—was—awful. But we’d made a deal with her. We had a plan. Now he’s made me complicit in yet another murder.
As we turn down the hall that leads to my room, I spot Saint Waffles sitting like a dutiful sentry outside my door. Relief floods me as he turns his head in my direction and bounds into my arms.
I make a sound between a laugh and a cry as his scaly skin rubs against mine and his cold nose sniffs my face for signs of injury.
“Good boy,” I whisper. “Did the mean corpse hurt you?”
He whimpers, his lip tucked sadly under his fangs.
“Key, Sinclair,” Roze demands, holding out a gloved hand.
I glare at him as I retrieve it from the hidden pockets of my skirt and shove it into his hand.
He’s acting like he’s completely unaware of how furious I am at him, the anger rolling off me as he unlocks the door to my room.
I follow, and Saint Waffles gives him his attention for the first time.
He drops from my arms as soon as we’re in the room and turns on Roze, a low growl rattling from his little gargoyle throat.
Roze lowers his eyelids at Waffles. “Have you also decided I’m the enemy?”
I close the door and face Roze. “You’ve made yourself the enemy.”
He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose with those gloved fingers. “For someone with such an impressive academic reputation, you do tend to jump to irrational conclusions.”
“Don’t do that,” I snap. “Don’t talk down to me. You killed—” I struggle to produce the words. “You killed—”
He cocked his head. “Killed whom?” he asks, coming closer. “Whom did I kill, little witch?”
The pure lethality in his eyes is evidence enough for me.
“You killed the Queen,” I whisper, forcing myself not to break eye contact. I’m a witness to two of his murders, two of his acts of treason. He’ll be executed, and so will I. If he doesn’t get me killed first.
Roze steps away, shrugging off his coat and laying it on the chair next to my desk. “I told you what I was.” He shrugs—actually shrugs at the idea. “She was going to kill you. Now you’re safe.”
“Is this a game for you?” I ask, folding my arms over my chest. “No, really. Is this fun? Do you get off on killing people or something?”
He turns toward me, the look in his eyes sharp as knives.
“Do you imagine that I wanted to kill my mother?” He paces closer, backing me up until my thighs hit the edge of my bed.
“There was no choice, Sinclair. It has been three days. We have found nothing. Another thorn is gone, and we’re that much closer to death. ”
“Yours or mine?” I shoot back.
His gloved hand whips out and grabs my jaw. It’s a violent move, but his grip is restrained. He brings his face close, silver eyes consuming me. “I killed my mother. I killed her. For you.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” I breathe.
“You didn’t have to,” he says, and his expression is almost mournful. He releases my jaw, but he doesn’t back away.
“I don’t understand. Why make a bargain with her only to …” I can’t finish my sentence.
“I want to know what happened to my father. So did my mother. I’m sure some part of her wanted to know if we might learn something she hadn’t.
But … one thing you should know about her—she always gets what she wants.
And she wanted you dead. We’ve made no progress, and I thought I might …
plead for more time. But I suspected what it might lead to …
what I might have to do. I was right. She refused. ”
He sweeps a hand through his hair, looking away for the first time.
“My mother, as you know, cannot kill meigas. She needs me to work around her curse. But last night at dinner, when she played with your mind, I knew her power was growing. She wanted to frighten you.” He looks back at me.
“She gains power through fear. The more she is feared, the more powerful she becomes. Her plan was to gain enough strength that she could control me like a puppet … Then she’d have you disposed of—by my hand and against my will. ”
I suck in a breath. “So you killed her.”
He nods. “So I killed her. Before she could force me to …”
“To kill me.”
He swallows. “Yes.”
I look down at my feet. “So … she’s dead. And … we’re free. From all of it.”
He nods. “I believe so.”
A breath breaks loose from my lungs, one I’ve been holding for three days, and I let myself fall back to sit on the bed.
We’re silent for a long minute. I stare at my feet.
“How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
I swallow. “Kill her,” I whisper. “You don’t have a speck of blood on you.”
He’s a remarkably efficient assassin. I was too caught up in my own terror to reflect on it at the time, but the way he killed the guard in the sanctuary … He was quicker than quick, clean and calibrated. He moved like a shadow.
Roze studies me for a long moment, and I can see the thoughts stirring behind his eyes.
A decision is being made. He turns and sits himself at my desk and flexes his hand, studying it as he speaks.
“Did you wonder why my mother chose me to be her assassin? There’s a reason she has me kill for her, when she could easily order one of her groveling guards to do it.
” As he speaks, he removes the glove, pulling at each finger one at a time.
He does it slowly, deliberately, so I can watch every move.
“I was not born the way my sisters were. At the end of the war, Castelle launched a surprise assault on my mother’s home province, Septania.
They burned it to the ground. Every home.
Slaughtered every man, woman, and child.
Burned my mother’s family’s estate, the monastery where she learned her magic.
“As you know, one of her abilities is a kind of … creation. When she saw what Castelle had done to her home, she poured out her grief and hatred for the Kingdom of Death on the land … and it made me.”
I’m no longer breathing as I watch him pull his glove completely from his hand. Waffles is on his feet again, a low growl in his throat.
I watch Roze’s face carefully. His lips form a thin line.
“I’m not … real, Sinclair. Not the way you are. I am an incarnation of her hatred.” He looks up at me, a slow, sad smile spreading on his lips. “See? It’s no wonder you loathe me. You really can’t help it.”
He lets his glove fall to the surface of the desk. “I know enough of magic to know that you’re not supposed to make things like me. It goes against nature.”
I stare at his bare hands. I haven’t seen them before now—fingers that are long, pale, and elegant, like those of an artist, veins snaking down to his wrists and under his sleeve.
I look up to his face. Irises of shattered crystal have turned a dusty gray. I’m holding on to the post of my bed—I feel like if I let go, I’ll shatter too.
“Do you want to know why I wear these gloves? Why I don’t touch people?” he says, his voice low and dangerous.
I watch his jaw work, and I know he’s deciding whether to tell me, whether it’s worth it to bare this part of himself. And I’m honestly not sure if I want him to. This feels dangerous, like reaching into a serpent’s nest, even if some masochistic part of me wants to.
“I’m cursed, Viola,” he whispers.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say my first name before. The way it sounds in his voice when he’s like this—raw and ruined—stirs something in me that makes me want to join him in the dark place he’s in. To revel in it, hide away until the world is kinder.
“Cursed?” I repeat.
He nods. “Too real to be an illusion. Too illusory to be truly alive. So instead, I live a … half-life, not truly here, not truly not. Just pure hatred, made flesh.”
My feet—and possibly my heart—carry me toward him before my mind catches up with what I’m doing. I stand before him, positioned between his knees where he sits at my desk. He looks up at me, his brows knit together.
“You’re real,” I whisper, like it’s a secret. “You’re as real as I am. Flesh and blood and bone. You’re not your mother’s hatred. You’re your own.”
I know it. Deeply and truly. Despite the evidence, he is not what he says he is.
Unexpectedly, he stands, so close that there’s barely any space between us. He reaches a hand toward my cheek, and I think I might faint as he ghosts his bare fingers over my skin.
He leans close, and in his eyes, under his dark lashes, I see a boy who is lost.
“You don’t understand,” he says. His voice is perilous, and I have just an inkling that I may have made a grave mistake.
“You see, this is how I kill them. My touch is poison. I carry daggers to make it quick, to make it merciful, but they aren’t necessary.
With my touch, I can kill any person, meiga or not, without leaving a single mark on their body.
I could render you unconscious with a flick of my wrist.”
He makes that exact motion, barely avoiding my cheek.
“If I were to do more … say, if I were to kiss you …”
I suck in a breath. His eyes are pinned to mine. I’m so afraid, I think I might sink to my knees. But there’s another emotion there too—something warm and sticky and wicked that I won’t name.
“You would die,” he whispers.
A tremor passes through my entire body. A depraved thought occurs to me—that a death like that might be quite lovely, that a kiss like that might be worth the price.
I take a deep breath to regain my composure.
“But I touched you,” I say. “I put my hand over your mouth. And a few days ago, when I punched you—”
He nods, still staring. “You’re stronger than most, and meigas are harder to kill than others. That’s how I really knew what you were. I guessed about the shadows, but when you touched me … When you hit me in the face that day in the Commons, I knew with absolute certainty.”
I think back … to the bite in my palm as I silenced him with a hand, to the sting in my fist after my knuckles connected with his nose, to the heady, weightless feeling I get when he comes close.
My breathing shudders as I take his breath into my lungs.
Oh.
He leans in closer now, the tips of his shoes touching the tips of mine. “I wonder—”
His nose nearly brushes mine, and I dare myself to meet his gaze, to look back into his eyes, so dark they’re almost charcoal. I can see every individual eyelash, every thought, every hesitation, and every reckless decision.
His lips brush mine, just barely. Immediately, my shadows break free from my fingertips, and darkness fills my blood. My vision goes fuzzy. I am swimming somewhere between reality and dreams, in the valley of the shadow of death.
Against my mouth he whispers, “How much of me could you handle before I took your life, Sinclair?”