Chapter Twenty-Five
At least Roze looks as bad as I feel.
He returns to the tower sometime after I do—I’m not sure how long. Time seems to have turned funny. I might’ve waited for him for five minutes or five hours. Either way, I spent the entire time staring at the wall, the memory of Kole’s dead eyes plaguing my brain.
Roze leans against the doorframe, his skin pale and clothes rumpled. And he’s covered in blood.
“I’ve taken care of our undead guard problem,” he says. He sidles over to his desk, and I notice a slight limp in his step. He draws a flask from a drawer, and I don’t want to ask what’s in it as he takes a long swig. He hunches over his desk, breathing deeply.
“What did you do?” I ask, thinking of the professor. Did he find her before me?
“Belladonna believes you’re dead,” he says, and turns to me. His gaze meets mine, but his eyes are distant—the cold indifference of a born killer. Saints, how I wish I could do that—kill and feel nothing. But then again, Roze excels at masking his true feelings.
“What happened with the undead guard?”
He lowers his head. “When my mother commanded me to kill you, she asked for your heart as proof of your death. I put the guard’s heart in a box, gave it to Belladonna, and told her it was yours. Removing the guard’s heart seems to have stopped him.”
I wrap my sweater tightly around myself. “And Belladonna believes you?”
He pauses. “Bella is cunning. I don’t know whether she believed me. But regardless, she’s put the supposed heart of the Queen’s killer on display in the grand entrance.”
My stomach sours.
“What about your mother?”
“My mother’s spirit is with Belladonna. My hope was that she would be convinced as well, that she would consider my orders fulfilled and the magic binding the tattoo would be broken.”
I glance at his covered arm, the sleeve speckled with dark blood. “But?”
He sighs. “The tattoo remains.”
I swallow. Every time hope is dashed it feels like the fall of a blunt axe on my neck—our necks. Swing after painful swing until death finally decides to claim us.
We both look at the floor without really looking at it. Roze steadies himself with a hand against the chair by his desk, and it’s only then that I realize his gloves are off, long fingers wrapped around the chair back. The fingers of a musician, fingers still caked in blood.
I imagine those fingers on my cheek, on my neck, tangled in my hair …
“I can’t do this,” I murmur. I’m not sure what I’m referring to.
He pulls his gloves from his pocket, tugging them back over his fingers. I think I’m relieved. I was staring at those fingers the way one watches a snake swallow a mouse, fascinated and scandalized.
“What can’t you do?” he says. His tone is low with exhaustion.
Of all the things I feel like I can’t do right now, I choose the simplest. “I can’t stay in this tower, waiting for our time to run out.”
He grimaces, but there’s a fracture of empathy in his eyes. “You step outside this room, and she’ll find you. The guards are everywhere. My mother’s power can reach you anywhere.”
I clench and unclench my fists. “I never wanted my powers. All I’ve ever wanted is to learn and to do something with my life that matters, that …”
That makes up for what I did.
Tears burn my eyes. Shadows press at my fingertips, and I beg them both to go away. Roze is watching me closely, like he’s just now trying to decipher what I am.
“You don’t owe the Kingdom anything,” he says. “No matter what happened.”
I shake my head. He’s wrong. I owe it everything. I know what my shadows are capable of. Now more than ever.
He crosses the room to me. I try not to look at him—my captor, my savior. But he puts a gloved hand under my chin and lifts my eyes to his.
“I will get you your life back,” he says. His voice is low and strained. “I promise. You deserve to exist without fear.”
I almost falter. I almost fall into him.
It would be so easy. I feel raw and exposed, like a wound, and I want to wrap myself up in Roze to stop the bleeding.
I want to plunge so deeply into him—his body, his words, his soul—that I forget the boundaries between us, that I lose all sense of me and him, and we just become us.
My voice comes out a reedy whisper, “What if I am something to fear?”
He shakes his head as he scans my face. His breath is close enough to make my head feel fuzzy. The scent of him—spice, winter, apples, and something else that I now realize is the scent of his poison. He’s dangerous in the loveliest way. Elegant peril.
“If their peace is disturbed by your existence,” he says, “then they never deserved peace.”
His words spear me, break me like a battering ram. Because he’s wrong.
“I left the tower,” I admit.
He blinks. “What?”
“I needed to find Professor Borges, so I went down to the caverns—”
“Viola.”
“I told Kole that I’m a meiga.”
Roze stares. “You told … Kole Belcamp … about your magic.”
I bite my lip. “Yes, and—”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
His eyes flash. “Lucky him. If he had, I’d wrap his intestines around his neck and shove them down his throat until he choked and died on his own entrails.” He sweeps away from me back toward the bookshelf. “And I’m not in the mood for another mess.”
I cringe, even if a part of me longs for that protection. “You hate him that much?”
“I didn’t give a damn about him before. Now he knows your secret. Now, he’s a threat.”
I close my eyes. I’ve cried them dry. Now they just burn. “Roze,” I whisper, letting the words leak from me like ink into water, like poison into wine. “I killed him.”
He stops, his hand caught midair where he’d been about to skim the spine of a book. The back of his head is still—no indication of any emotion, any reaction whatsoever. I stare at his snowy locks, desperately wishing I could read his mind through them.
“So,” he says in a voice low and careful, “not a threat, then.”
It’s a joke that lands like a punch to my stomach. “Please don’t—”
“How did you do it?” He turns, and his face is cold—not judgmental, not sympathetic or approving, just stoic.
“I didn’t mean to.”
He snorts. “Obviously.”
For some reason, that makes me bristle. “You don’t think I could? If I really had to?”
He falls casually into his armchair, looking up at me with that aristocratic expression that makes him look especially punchable. “Darling, I think you’d put your own head in the guillotine if you thought it’d make someone else’s life easier. That’s just the problem.”
“You’re wrong,” I screech, the conviction of my words straining my already raw throat. Every cell in my body feels wide awake, and shadows swirl around my fingertips.
He raises an eyebrow. “A little killer, are you?”
“Meigas are dangerous. Look what I did to my brother!” I shout. Darkness swirls around my fists, streaming to my ankles in dark tendrils.
Roze doesn’t balk, even as the shadows pool at his ankles, licking at the hem of his pants. “You were a child. It was an accident.”
“That doesn’t make me any less of a monster,” I spit. I feel like a monster now. Like I might grow claws and teeth at any moment and become the darkness itself.
“It does.” He stands from his chair, buttons his bloody jacket, and takes a step toward me—a show of trust, or possibly a death wish.
“I’ve lived my whole life with a mother who is a real monster.
Believe me, Viola, it does.” I stare at him through my grief and rage, and the expression on his face is soft.
Unguarded. I take a deep breath, and my shadows begin to taper.
“I don’t want these powers,” I whisper—my silent wish since childhood.
“I know,” he whispers back, like we’re children sharing a schoolyard secret. “Neither do I.”
He reaches toward me, takes my face in both his gloved hands, and leans his head toward mine, like he wants to touch our foreheads together …
but of course, he can’t. “You’re no monster, Viola,” he whispers, quicksilver eyes piercing the darkness in mine.
“Although,” he says with a smirk, “as someone who’s been on the receiving end of your right hook, you are rather vicious. ”
My lips twinge upward of their own accord.
For a long, quiet moment, we stand there. I grip his forearms while he holds my face, fabric separating true touch. But for now, it’s enough. It’s as much comfort as either of us will get.
Eventually I pull back and wipe my eyes on my sweater sleeve. Looking for a way to change the subject, I ask, “If your mother was such a monster, how did your father survive her?”
Roze takes a step back, slides his hands into his pockets, and shrugs. “I think Mother might have been kind once. But apparently, that was before I was … created. I don’t remember it. I believe their relationship was at least cordial in the beginning.”
“But it wasn’t love.”
Roze frowns, turning toward his desk, and begins to remove his bloodstained outer clothing.
“A form of it. Although perhaps there are better words. Theirs was an arranged marriage. For my father, I’d say he …
esteemed Mother, at least at first. But mostly he agreed to marry her because she was the princess of a small kingdom that had thus far refused to assimilate into Aragoa, and it gave us an advantage in the war for them to marry.
But Mother … for her I’d call it an obsession. ”
I lift my eyebrows. “Obsession?”
He nods. “She was a formidable woman. She always got what she wanted, except with my father. She never quite had all his attention, and it drove her mad. She went to greater and greater lengths to please him, and the more she pursued, the more he pulled away. She became parasitic, eating away at everything he was, his very will to live, until he was … Well, I’m sure you remember what your King was like in his final months. ”
I do. He’d attended fewer and fewer public appearances, always looking wan and distant, like his body was there, but his mind was somewhere else.
I study Roze. “And which are you more like? Your mother or your father?”
He freezes, then slowly looks over his shoulder at me, a hard glint in his eye. “What do you think, Sinclair? Do I look like someone who will settle for anything less than having everything I want?”
I swallow, but I’ve spent enough time around Roze now to know how to see through his intimidation. I step toward him, and he watches me carefully. “I think you’re neither. I think you’d rather lay your own life down than slowly leach the life from someone you claim to love.”
I reach out and take his hand. He stares down at our joined hands in surprise, the dark leather contrasted against my skin.
“You’re nothing like your mother,” I whisper. “And you’re better than them both.”
Roze sleeps on the chaise, and I settle into the bed after he assures me with a sly grin that his sheets won’t kill me. It feels strange to be in his bed. I imagine him lying in the black silk at night, always alone, always in the dark.
Any discomfort I had about sleeping there vanishes when I tuck myself in. This bed is exquisite, more comfortable than anything I’ve ever slept on before. That’s not saying much—I moved from my bed at the orphanage to the one in Berlaise House. It’s soft and cool and it envelops me like a cocoon.
From my place under the covers, I watch as Roze readies himself for sleep, undoing the buttons of his shirt.
I shouldn’t look.
It’s rude.
But I do anyway. I bite my lip, feeling my cheeks burn at the sight of his pale chest and the taut leather straps still securing a myriad of knives over his sleeves.
There must not be an ounce of fat on him, all of him hard ridges and planes.
He reminds me of the knives he has bound to his body—solid, silver, sharp …
absolutely lethal. The body of an assassin.
He turns his face suddenly toward me where I’m tucked under the covers, and a devilish grin spreads across his face. “Should I wear something more modest, Sinclair? Your blush is up to your hairline.”
I glare at him from beneath the covers. “I was just imagining what it would be like to strangle you with those leather straps.”
He throws his head back and laughs—airy and aristocratic. He crosses to the chaise and drawls, “I could make a joke about breath play, but I don’t want to offend your virginal ears.”
I blush down to my toes and hide my face in the blankets up to my eyeballs. “How did you know?”
“What, that you’re a virgin?” He throws himself down, long legs draping off the edges of the chaise. “I didn’t until you just confirmed it. It was a well-informed guess.”
“You’re a prick.”
He chuckles lightly. “There’s no shame in it, Sinclair.”
I’ve spent my teen years throwing myself into academia partly to avoid my tangled feelings about relationships and intimacy. Thoughts of romance—of sex—bring up a knotted mess of emotions—longing to be finally, fully wanted but fearing that my shadows will keep anyone from coming too close.
Better to keep such desires to myself and in the dark, where they belong.
“Are you not a virgin? You can’t touch people.”
He shrugs. “True. But I’ve found creative ways around that.” He cocks an eyebrow and winks. “The gloves help.”
The blood drains from my face. He barks a laugh at my expression and settles himself farther back onto the chaise.
Moments later, he murmurs into the dark, “Good night, darling.”
Three little words, but I replay the sound of them over and over in my head as I fall asleep.