16. The Pull #2
Over her shoulder, Lazaros rolled his eyes, though the smirk tugging at his mouth ruined the effect entirely. He lifted both hands in mock surrender, collected his own bow, and stepped well back, ceding the field to me with the air of a man who valued his head exactly where it was.
“You were spying on me,” Alexandra accused, tipping her face up to mine, not remotely bothered by the prospect.
“I was admiring you,” I corrected. “There is a difference.”
“There really isn’t.”
I caught her chin between my fingers. Then I tipped her face up to mine and let a little of the morning’s fear show through.
“I didn’t like it,” I said quietly enough that my voice wouldn’t carry. “Waking to find you gone.”
Her smile faltered, just slightly.
“Atlas, I only went for a…”
“I know.” And I did. I knew it was nothing, knew she had only wanted air, and no doubt found my brother here.
Had most likely asked him to teach her, and he had taken it upon himself to get her something suitable to wear before putting a bow in her hands.
I could see it all playing out this way as clear as day, yet it changed nothing.
“I reached for you, and you were not there, and for one moment I didn’t know where in either world you had gone.” My thumb brushed the line of her jaw. “I find I don’t care for that feeling at all, Alexandra, so I would appreciate you sparing me of it in the future… yes?”
It was spoken softly. Gently, even. But there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was.
A warning not to do it again.
I held the rest of it behind my teeth. The part of me that wanted to make it an order.
To demand she swear she would never again slip from my bed without waking me, never again leave me to surface alone into a cold and empty room.
She was not a thing to be commanded, my Alexandra, and I knew it.
So, I swallowed the demand whole and let the quiet warning stand in its place, and trusted her to hear everything I had not said.
She studied me for a long moment, something softening in her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Next time, I’ll wake you.”
It was not a promise to stay, but it was enough.
For now.
“Now, nock another arrow, my little escapee,” I told her and turned her gently back toward the target with my hands at her hips.
She did, with that fierce little furrow of concentration I adored, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. I stepped in close behind her, close enough to feel the warmth of her back against my chest and reached around to settle my hands over hers on the bow.
“Your stance is good. My brother taught you well.” I drew her drawing elbow up a fraction, my mouth at her ear.
“But you are aiming where you want the arrow to go. That is your mistake. You must aim instead at where it will go.” I tilted her aim up, and a hair to the right.
“Higher. There. Now breathe out and let it go on the empty breath. Not before.”
“You’re very bossy for an archery instructor,” she muttered with not an ounce of bite in her words.
“I am very bossy for a great many things,” I murmured back, and felt her shiver against me. “Now. Breathe out.”
She did.
And on the empty breath, she released the arrow.
It flew straight and clean and true, and buried itself dead in the centre of the target with a solid, satisfying thunk.
The bullseye.
For a heartbeat, we both froze, staring at it, as though neither of us could quite believe it. And then she erupted.
“I did it!” She whirled around in my arms, her face blazing with a joy so bright and so complete it stole the breath clean out of me. “Atlas, I did it, I hit it, did you see that! It hit the middle, that was a bullseye!”
“I saw, little warrior,” I said, laughing, as she flung both arms around my neck, and I brought her up off her feet to spin her. The bow knocking awkwardly against my back and neither of us caring in the slightest.
She was still babbling, still glowing, doing a small and entirely undignified victory dance against me the moment her feet touched the ground again.
And as for me, I held onto her and watched with the helpless certainty of a man well and truly lost. That I had never in my long life seen anything half so delightful as Alexandra Clavis hitting a target for the first time.
And how desperately I wanted to keep her.
“I’d like to see Riley keep me from a bow now,” she declared, and even the mention of that name couldn’t dim the grin she turned up at me.
“I shall buy you a hundred bows,” I promised her. “I shall commission the finest bowyer in The?kós and have one made to your exact height, so you need never wrestle with one of my brother’s again.”
“Don’t tempt me with a good time, Your Majesty,” she teased back, and it was, I thought, the single most attractive thing she had ever said to me. The most memorable, of course, was when she declared her love for me.
That had seized my heart.
We might have stayed out there the whole morning had her stomach not chosen that moment to growl, loud and entirely without shame, into the quiet.
Alexandra pressed a hand to it, mortified, and I laughed outright.
“Come,” I said, taking her hand and tucking it into the crook of my arm. “Before you waste away on my watch and start an entirely new war. Let us find you something to eat.”
She fell into step beside me easily, flushed, happy and warm against my side. I led her back in through the eastern doors and into the cool of the castle, toward the kitchens. Entirely content in a way I had not been in longer than I could remember.
Which was, of course, precisely when she stopped.
We had reached a narrow stretch of corridor where a single plain door was set into the stone, unremarkable in every way, iron-banded and old. And Alexandra had simply…
Halted in front of it.
Her hand had slipped from my arm as she stood there, head tilted, staring at the thing with an expression I couldn’t read at all. As though some sound only she could hear was drifting up through the wood.
“What’s down there?” she asked. Quietly. Distantly.
“The cellars,” I replied with a slight frown marring my features.
It was true, but it wasn’t all that was down there.
Which is why I didn’t tell her that those same worn stairs wound far deeper than any wine store.
Down past the very foundations of the castle and to the old prison cells hewn into the bedrock where, for a thousand years, my house had kept the things it most wished the world to forget.
She blinked, and whatever had held her seemed to let go of her all at once. She gave a small, self-conscious laugh and shook her head, as if at her own foolishness.
“Ignore me,” she said. “I’m just hungry. Come on, feed me before I gnaw my own arm off.” And she walked on, tugging me with her toward the warm bread and wood-smoke smell drifting up the corridor, already laughing again at something else entirely.
But I didn’t move.
Not straight away.
Because I had been watching her face when she stilled before that door. And whatever had caught hold of her there, whatever had reached up out of the dark and quietly snagged her attention, it hadn’t looked to me like idle curiosity at all.
It had looked like something was calling her.
And for the life of me, I couldn’t work out what, so very far beneath my castle…
Might possibly need answering.