Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Relentless pounding rouses me awake.
My throat burns and my tongue is too large for my mouth, and the pounding grows louder with each passing minute.
I let out a pathetic squeak of annoyance, burrowing my face into the down pillow, but no matter how I move, the noise clatters like someone’s taken an iron pipe to the inside of my skull.
I want to lose myself again in the emptiness of unconsciousness, but the ache has drawn me too far into waking. Now, memories stab through me like jolts of electricity.
Niko on his knees, sinful and worshipping. The decadent warmth of his touch. The cool bite of a blade.
Words whispered so softly against my skin, I may have imagined them. Adytum. Adytum.
My heart wrenches and my eyes fly open. I sit straight up, wrestling out of a thick comforting and kicking it furiously to the ground. The movement only exacerbates my aching head. With each painful blink, each dry swallow, the pounding grows louder.
An after-effect of blood loss, perhaps. Or maybe, it’s the sound of my rage ratcheting tighter and hotter through my veins as I take in the room around me.
The rich ebony wood curving above the bed; the lush carpets and velvet sofas; the large desk scattered with intricately drawn maps of worlds I’ve never seen; the violet sparkle of waves beyond the bay of windows to my right.
I’m aboard the Indomnitus.
The last time I woke here, it had been to the slimy feel of Pan’s stare. It is not his grass-green gaze I find now, but the abiding onyx of the ship’s true captain.
“Sleep well?” Niko drawls.
His long body is slung over an armchair he’s pushed up against the side of the bed, his death lazing about his head.
He is dressed in the same clothes he wore at the Lunaedon minus the waistcoat, and while the attire had given the impression of sharp collection then, it is the opposite now.
His silk shirt gapes open at his collarbones, the fabric beneath his unbuttoned vest as rumpled as the curls sticking up in a wild halo.
A bandage is wrapped haphazardly around his left hand, loose and ineffective, like he could barely be bothered to tie it.
His eyes are rimmed with red, and his face appears even paler than usual beneath thick streaks of black and scarlet blood. My blood. As we stare at each other, it occurs to me that for once, the Carrion king’s disarray does not soften his edges. Instead, it prickles beneath my skin like a warning.
It is as if Niko has allowed the armor of his civility to slip, revealing a glimpse of the true creature that lives beneath.
Feral. Cruel. Desperate.
And even now, with my body still echoing with the pain he’s caused, something in me is called to it. I wish to the star above it wasn’t.
I clear my throat, wincing slightly. Then I do it again, if only to use the discomfort as a reminder; a fortification against the effect Niko has on me.
“You got your ship back from Pan.”
Niko’s mask slips a little further at the mention of his enemy, his death spearing into the air like spikes. His reply is little more than a growl. “Yes.”
I swallow again. His eyes follow the movement. “How?”
He drags his gaze from my throat to my eyes. “Death will always claim what belongs to it, Willa.”
Niko had claimed me once, as surely as death claims life. And in the end, it was meaningless. A spark of fury ignites, and then explodes, until I see nothing but red—until I hear nothing but his empty promises. Adytum. Eternal. Love.
He doesn’t flinch when I paint my jeweled gladius in my hand, nor when I launch myself at him. His only reaction is the soft flare of his eyes when I mimic the blade over his throat in a pointed reminder of what he’d done to mine.
“Well,” he says with a humorless chuckle, eyes skating hungrily over me. “I see we’ve upgraded from the cutlery.”
I tense as his ribbons skate up over my arms, ready to fight them off. But even as the pain of them stings my skin, his death makes no move to stop me. It winds around my wrists, pulling tighter. Beckoning me, and my weapon, closer.
“Go on then, Darling,” Niko urges gently, the lilting sonance of his accent eliciting a warm shiver up my spine. Though his tone is irreverent as ever, I find only grave acceptance in his gaze. “I deserve it.”
He deserves death and more. Our relationship has been defined by pain since the moment we met.
I deluded myself into believing it could be anything more; believing we could carve something beautiful from the agony.
I spent two lifetimes learning you cannot make a home out of a heart—two lifetimes surviving by my instincts to run away from anything that got too close.
But it is those same instincts that betray me any time the Carrion King is near. And without their anchor, I am left floundering.
The blade trembles in my hand as the weight of my despair crests over me.
“You tricked me.” The words are small and I hate the way they crack, like Niko has not only shattered my heart, but my voice as well. “You used me.”
His expression fractures just as acutely as my words, and I savor it. Why should I be the only one to live with the wounds of what we’ve done to each other? Why should I be the only one to be gutted by memory? To be tortured by the broken promises of what could have been?
My shadow stirs at my back, its approval sliding over me like hands over my shoulder. We will drink his pain and grow stronger on its essence. For a lord of death’s suffering is surely the ripest.
Niko’s gaze flickers to my shadow, before slowly sliding back to my face. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“Which part?” I snarl, pressing the blade firm enough that onyx blood beads at the tip. “The seducing or the stabbing?”
“The seducing,” he replies, as if this is obvious.
I let a furious breath leak through my teeth. “Am I supposed to be flattered that you didn’t mean to seduce me, but you meant to slit my throat?”
“I didn’t,” Niko answers quickly. “Slit your throat, that is…Marina did.”
“Well, in that case, all is forgiven!” An absurd laugh scrapes up my throat.
“Willa—”
“No!” I snap furiously. “You should have just stabbed me through the heart, Niko. It would have hurt far less than you getting on your knees and making me think…making me think you still—”
I cut myself off before I do something stupid—like letting my tears fall and showing him how he’s broken me.
“Can you blame me, Willa?” Niko’s words are a dark caress. His eyes rove hungrily over me, his expression near reverent, as if our bodies are entwined in a lover’s embrace rather than an enemy standoff.
“For setting me up to steal the island out from under me? Are you kidding, Niko—”
“—for stealing a taste of you,” he interrupts, “when I have been starved for so long.”
My blade bobs with his rough swallow, and his ribbons tighten around my wrists. Whether to drag me or the blade closer, I’m not sure. I only know that when I try to draw up the rage that has kept me safe for so long—the anger that has burned brighter with every betrayal—it’s nowhere to be found.
And without the heated armor of fury, the devastation crashes over fully over me. It dives into my lungs, presses against my ribs, blinds me in its depths.
I put entire worlds between us so I’d never feel like this again, and I am still back where I started: holding back tears because he is choosing the kingdom over me. He once promised to put me above all else, to worship only me, and I hate him for making me believe it.
“My whole cursed life I have never been chosen. I have been hurt and used up and abandoned. And I thought—” My eyes blur, and I swipe at them with a muttered curse.
“I don’t know why, after everything, I thought you were any different.
You told me you came back for what’s yours. I should have just believed you.”
My sword hand shakes, and more blood trickles down his throat. It is the same color as the tattoos swirling over his skin, and I think how apt it is to stain his favorite stories in blood, just as he’s stained mine.
“I did. I came back to save the only beautiful thing in this world from ruin.” Niko’s ribbons draw tighter, snaking around my waist in the same manner his arms had in the moments before he betrayed me.
I try to shrug them off, but his expression, so eager, so fractured, freezes me in place. “Willa, the island is—”
He cuts himself off with a curse at the sudden, violent shriek of my shadow. It wrestles against the weight of his death, just like it had when he’d ensnared me in the Crocodile. I groan as it digs its claws into my skin; as it burrows deeper and deeper to escape the touch of Niko’s magic.
Pain radiates through me as it slashes against my heart like the tresses of a whip. The gladius slips from my hand and clatters to the floor.
The King of Carrion watches my struggle with something near horror.
His tongue slides over his lower lip, and for a moment, he appears entirely unlike himself.
Indecisive. Regretful. His fists curl in his lap and his jaw tightens, like his stillness will be enough to keep the words from pouring out.
With a sharp breath, he yanks his death from me and wraps it around his own wrists. And though my shadow settles in its absence, its hunger still burgeons deep in my belly.
I can hardly see beyond its wants, even as Niko says, “I told you anchoring yourself would take everything from you, but I—I didn’t know how true those words would become.”
His ribbons circle his temples, shame and death twined around him like a distorted crown.
But when he lifts his head to meet my eyes once more, I find only pure madness.
“You are losing yourself piece by piece to this island, Darling.” He tilts his head, tracing every detail of my face.
“I saw it the first moment in the Crocodile.”
His words release a deluge of emotions careening through my veins. “Maybe that’s because I’ve been doing this alone!” I shout, stepping away from him. But I find it no easier to breathe, as my shadow sidles up behind me to wrap around my throat.
Shame fills my mouth like bile, and I choke on its acid.
“You were supposed to rule at my side and you left me.” The shadow grows in time to the expanding hollow in my chest. “And now you swoop back in and dare to judge the toll it’s taken?
The title you forced on me? If I’ve ruined the beauty of your precious island, you only have yourself to blame. ”
Niko’s eyes flash. “Willa, that shadow—"
“Is mine!” I shout. As if in demonstration, the shadow billows through me.
And this time I don’t fight it. As its malignant hunger fills every dark crevice, I realize Pan was right—it feels good.
It slides between the cracks in my heart, fortifying it against Niko’s promises.
It slips from my eyes, so there are no more tears. Only darkness.
He is just like the rest of them, my shadow whispers. He cannot abide the truth of you. He only wants to strip pieces of your power.
Ravenous hunger rolls over my tongue and rattles against my bones. It slips into the golden pool of magic behind my heart like droplets of ink, staining the light of possibility with the malevolence of reality.
“Leave Letum, Niko. Before I’m forced to show you just how dark my shadow truly is.”
“Willa, wait—”
The Carrion King reaches for me, but it’s too late. I gather my shadow and my heartbreak and my rage—the only pieces of myself still large enough to grasp—and paint myself far away from Niko.
A moment later, I am stumbling over the soft grass of the Grove.
I sink to the ground beneath the twinkling lights of the tree-city, pressing my head to the damp forest floor.
The will-o-wisps float down from the branches to tangle in my hair, the comfort of their soft hum buzzing in my ears as I kneel, vulnerable and exposed.
I stay like this until the icy scent of Niko fades; until I breathe only the scent of earth and leaves.
And then I allow the tears to fall.