Chapter Sixty-Four
M y eyes jolt open.
I’m in the small room in the Grey Keep, and the embers in the hearth glow orange. Blake sleeps on the chair, with his head dipped onto his chest. I’m breathing too quickly, and I try to calm myself, terrified I will wake him.
A thousand emotions rattle around in my chest, but the one that slices through is a cold, icy fear. At some point in his lifetime, Blake called Night his master.
I need to get out of here.
Blake’s eyes open. I’m restricted by the bedsheets. My pulse thrums beneath my skin. It’s loud. So loud. I know he can hear it. I turn my body to stone, as if I can block out the sound, but it beats faster, faster. Faster.
His midnight hair is disheveled, and strands of it curl over his forehead. His shirt is unbuttoned at the collar. He looks relaxed, with the fire in the hearth flickering low behind him as he sits in the chair. He seems unthreatening. Vulnerable. I wonder how carefully he practiced his act. Or perhaps lying just comes naturally to him.
He’s working for Night. He has been all of this time. He’s been looking for me.
I’m always pretending , he told me once. I should have listened more closely.
I know he’s acting now. I can see it. His hands tighten on the arms of the chair. His back ever so slightly straightens. I feel that coil of wariness as it tightens around my soul. For so long, he has felt like a spring, wound tight. I think this is the moment when it finally snaps.
I know his secret.
My pulse becomes a cacophony in my ears.
Does he know that I know?
He stares at me, and there’s the hint of a challenge in his eyes. Say it , he seems to dare me. Bite.
My breathing quickens. I need to get away. I need to warn Ryan. James, too, I suppose. I need to warn the whole bloody kingdom, and my people, too. I need to stop him from using me to release his master. My gaze darts to the door, but I know he’d catch me.
I force myself to relax. To release a breath. To smile. He hasn’t hurt me yet, so he must be waiting for something before he makes his move. I have time. There has to be more time.
I can pretend, too.
“I had the strangest dream that I was being chased through a forest,” I say. I settle back down on my pillows. I’ll put him at ease, wait for him to go back to sleep, then I will run.
He blinks. Once. Twice. “That sounds frightening.”
He shifts in his chair, and I try not to flinch. He puts his foot on the edge of my bed, and I think it’s to barricade me in. But then the bottom of his breeches rides up. Too late, my eyes dart to the exposed flesh, and I realize his intent.
The mark I saw there, when I hid beneath his bed, is no ordinary scar. A key with two crescent moons in the bow has been burned into his ankle—the flesh around it is angry and mottled. Elsie and Alexander had Night’s mark inked onto their wrists, but this... this is different. A fresh wave of horror crashes over me as I remember the book of drawings depicting Night’s monsters. They were branded like this, too.
He’s showing it to me. He wants me to confront him.
I look away hurriedly, and pretend I didn’t see.
He sighs and slides his foot back to the ground. His boot hits the floor with a thud.
“Let’s not play this game anymore.” The way he says it—as if I am the tiring one, as if I have been caught doing something wrong—stokes a fire inside me that flushes away some of the coldness. “Let us be honest, for once.”
“Honest?” The word tears from my lips. “You want to be honest?”
“Yes,” he says as my gaze darts toward the door. “I know what you’re thinking, so say it, and I can explain.”
Power coursed through my veins earlier, but I feel anything but powerful now. Even if I understood how the power of the moon worked, what could I do with it? Turn him into a wolf, and make him an even bigger threat?
I clench the sheets. “You can’t hurt me because of the bond,” I remind him.
“That’s not the reason I won’t hurt you.”
“You’ve been working for Night.”
I wait for him to deny it. I want him to deny it. “Yes.”
My breath catches. My soul splinters. My fear spikes. “The rumors that someone was trying to free Night and create him an army, they were about you. You’re the Night Prince.”
“Yes.”
My pulse is beating so quickly now, it drowns out the sound of anything else. Adrenaline surges through me. Run. Run. Run.
“Aurora, we don’t have time for this. Don’t—”
I lurch across the bed toward the door, and the bedsheets tangle around my thighs. The glass of water on my bedside table spills. He grabs me around the waist, and throws me back onto the mattress. I open my mouth to scream, but he pins me down and clamps his hand over my mouth. He climbs on top of me, and his thighs clench against my hips. His scent floods my senses. I grab his wrist and curl my fingers into his bone. I taste the salt of his palm. Bite, Bite. Bite.
“ Don’t. ” The wolf flashes in his eyes, feral and beautiful. “ Listen. ”
His essence floods me, dark and powerful and suffocating. It strokes and coaxes and is laden with such intense dominance that I almost whimper as I try to push it away. Something inside me wants to yield to it, to submit.
He is using the àithne, like before, but fear cools my blood. He is more powerful than he was letting on the last time he did this. All this time, I thought it was Callum who was holding back with me. I see now it was Blake. Sweat beads on my brow. His words, spoken in his chambers at Madadh-allaidh, come back to haunt me. When the time comes, little rabbit, I will give you everything I have. I promise.
Is this it? Is this his glorious defeat?
“ Stop fighting, Aurora. Listen. ”
My own power rises to meet his. I reach deep inside of me and grab his shadowy fingers. His grip tightens, and I gasp as I’m held within his grip. Still, I think I could fight him off. As the telltale dots appear across my vision, and my breathing becomes rapid, I know that all I need do is let go.
I think he knows it, too. I think he’s giving me a reason to acquiesce to him, a way for me to pretend that he forced me into submitting to him. Because he knows my truth, even if I can’t stomach it.
I want to know what he has to say. I want to trust him. I want him to tell me this is a mistake, and that I wasn’t wrong to save his life.
So, that traitorous part of me stills. Obeys. Submits.
I pretend I don’t want to. I even let out a soft whimper against his palm. The corner of his lip twitches, as if he knows my game. I sink back into the sheets, and stop writhing beneath him. When I blink up at him, my body softens and becomes pliant.
His shoulders dip with relief.
“Are you going to scream?” he asks.
I shake my head, and he pulls away his palm.
“Good girl.”
I’m breathing fast. So is he.
“I’m going to tell you the truth, Aurora, and I need you to listen carefully, because I fear we don’t have much time. Are you listening?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Good. I’m not one of Night’s Acolytes. I’m not some fool who dresses in a dark cloak with a symbol inked onto my skin. I’m much worse than that. I’m one of Night’s prisoners, just like the serpent you killed, just like the monsters you have heard of. The prison I’ve pulled you to in my dreams, that was my home for a time. You’ve realized that, haven’t you?”
“The brand on your ankle,” I say.
“Yes. He brands all his prisoners with his mark. The acolytes copy it, as if they could ever know what it means.”
He leans back so he’s kneeling over me, and I can’t settle my unsteady heart or the beast that has awoken in my chest. I’m still gripping his wrist, I realize. For some reason, I don’t release him. His pulse thrums, agitated, beneath my fingertips.
“My soul belongs to the God of Night,” he says. “So do the souls of the others who were trapped in the cell beneath the palace with me. You asked me once whether I’d killed the Maester of Healing. I told you that wasn’t the right question. Do you know now, what the right question is?”
I inhale a shaky breath as I piece together everything I know, everything he has told me. Dread runs, thicker than blood, through my veins. I nod, the movement stifled by the pillow.
“Ask me,” he says.
“How did you escape?” My words are quiet, barely audible as the wind picks up outside and the sea roars against the cliffs. It’s as if the weather is reacting to the turbulence inside me.
A shadow flickers across his face, and that cold, endless ache that I felt from him when he kissed me, floods me. I feel as if I’m drowning.
“I didn’t. In the cell beneath the palace, I died.”
My heart stops. A powerful, unreadable emotion erupts from my soul and mingles with his darkness. “I... I don’t understand.”
He smiles, but there is nothing warm in his face. “That was Night’s big trick. He covets desperate souls, and I was so very desperate. I made a bargain with him—I asked him to give me the power to escape from the Maester, and to set the others free. In exchange, I would give him my soul. He honored his promise, I suppose. He gave me my freedom in the form of death. Only, instead of my soul going to rest, he took it for himself.”
Words bubble then die in my throat. I know, with certainty, that what he’s telling me is true. I feel it with every nerve in my body. My skin is as cold as his eyes. I don’t know what to say, how to react to such horror. That traitorous part of me wants to comfort him, just like I did when I found out what had been done to him in the palace. Like then, I realize the horrors he has undergone make him even more of a threat to me.
“I thought I knew torment. I did not. Not until I became Night’s plaything. I would have done anything to gain my freedom. I was dead for months, but it felt like a lifetime that I was trapped. Over time, I realized Night was as desperate to get out as I was. I made him a new promise. If he let me go, I would give him what he desired. The dream you witnessed, the memory, it was the night when Elsie prayed to him because our father was going to kill her. I told him I could use Bruce to our advantage, and get a footing in the Wolf Kingdom. He agreed to let me go.”
“How? Night doesn’t have the key.” Night doesn’t have me.
“Night used Ghealach to do it. The walls of his prison are thinner on the night of the full moon. Not thin enough for him or any of the ancient prisoners to escape, but thin enough for me to slip through. He took me to her cell. I was so sure she’d find a way to stop me from leaving, but as I passed by her, she spoke to me.” His eyes burn into mine. “She said, ‘My heart is your salvation.’”
My fingers dig into his wrist.
“I thought the Heart of the Moon was just a rock. I thought I could use it to barter for my freedom, even if it meant unleashing horrors upon the world. Because the next time I die, I know what eternity will look like for me. I have no love for the Kingdom of Wolves, or the Kingdom of Men. One abandoned me, the other tortured me. What did it matter to me, if they both burned? But I didn’t know, when I made that promise to Night... I didn’t know that it would be you.”
“When did you realize?”
“I started to suspect the more I got to know you. I was fairly sure on the night of the full moon when you didn’t shift. When Alex took you, then I was certain.”
I take a deep breath. “And now you know?”
“I cannot let you go.” He says it as if it’s so simple. And some deep, aching part of me wants to believe him. But giving me to Night is the only thing that will save him from eternal torment. Blake has lied to me, time and time again. He pretends, and manipulates, and deceives.
Earlier this evening, he coaxed me into breaking the bond, and it hits me that if everything he is saying is true, the bond could be the only thing stopping him from handing me over to his master. Anything that happens to me will happen to him, too.
His chest deflates as if he feels my hesitance. “I know I haven’t given you much reason to trust me. But I believe that if Night, or any of his army, got their hands on you, you would be tortured and killed in order for you to release enough power to break the walls of his prison. So if you don’t believe that I don’t want to hurt you, then at least believe that my own self-interest will compel me to keep you away from the god I serve. But I need you to believe one of these options, and quickly. Because Alexander’s soul belongs to Night, too, and now he’s dead. He has told Night where you are. I saw it, just now, while I was dreaming.”
My breathing quickens. My blood cools. A part of me knew more acolytes would come for me, yet I thought I would have more time to figure everything out. Slowly, he climbs off me, and stands at the side of the bed. I sit up.
“I know what you want, little rabbit. I heard you talking to James. You want an army, and a kingdom, and a crown. I can give you your vengeance. I will drop your father’s head at your feet, if you ask it of me. You need to evade Night, and no one in this kingdom knows him better than I do. I can help you. I will help you. But we need to go.” He glances at the window, which rattles in the wind. “Night’s Acolytes, the beginnings of his army, any other prisoners that might have slipped through the hole in that prison wall... they are coming.”
I swallow down my rising fear, and cling to some hope that we still have time. There has to be more time. “We need to tell Ryan and the others—”
“No. They are coming for you . If you want to keep them safe, we need to go, now. We’ll draw them away. Just you and me.” He holds out his hand for me to take.
“Callum—”
“Fuck Callum.” There’s an uncharacteristic sharpness in his tone.
I shake my head, because I’m so sure that his game is not yet over. “And what do you want in return for your help, Blake?”
He cocks his head slightly. “There is something I want above anything else. You know what that is, don’t you?”
His eyes bore into me with such intensity that my breath hitches. The air in the room suddenly feels hot and thick. My skin prickles as the bond vibrates between us.
The dream I walked in on flashes through my mind—me on the bed, the flush of his cheeks, the way his face looked as he pushed me down onto the mattress. I blink the vision away because it’s too dangerous to look at. “You want... you want your freedom.”
“What you want, in exchange for what I want,” he says, without confirming or denying my statement. “A simple bargain.”
I look at his hand, still outstretched. Nothing is simple when it comes to Blake. I feel as if I’m making a deal with the God of Night himself. But Blake already has my soul. What more can he take from me?
Those dangerous dimples crease his cheeks. “Come on, little rabbit. We need to go. Now. They are coming.”
Goddess help me, I put my hand in his.