Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
Elara
Idon’t turn around immediately. I let the wind bite my cheeks and the scent of turned earth fill my nose one last time, grounding myself against the sudden, cloying smell of mourning flowers. When I do turn, he’s leaning against the gnarled trunk of a tree.
Not Death. Vale.
Twilight catches the sharp line of his jaw, bringing out the tense shift of muscles there. Arms crossed over a chest clad in midnight-blue velvet, he looks exactly as he did the day he stepped between the headstones of my family’s plot—arrogant, impeccably groomed, annoyingly handsome.
A devastating facade.
“Dressed up for the occasion, I see,” I say. “Doesn’t the costume feel a bit tight around the shoulders?”
Vale’s green eyes narrow slightly on the fading light tracing the horizon, then they find mine. “I prefer a form that doesn’t send mortals screaming into madness. It simplifies…conversation.”
I step away from the fresh grave, the hem of my funeral cloth dragging heavily in the stiffening grass. “Why bother? I’ve seen what’s underneath the silk.”
“I daresay you haven’t just seen it.” His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile, not quite a snarl. “You have also…felt it.”
I don’t flinch.
I refuse him that reaction.
The memory ignores my refusal. It crawls up my legs, a phantom frost settling high on my thighs where his hands had been. I remember the shock of ivory gleam, a construction of bone and decay that had thrust into me with agonizing pleasure.
I shove the thought into the dark place where I keep my screams. “One less reason to keep up the pretense, then,” I say. “What shall I call you from now on? Lord Death? Just Death?”
“I am quite fond of Vale.”
“Obviously,” I grind out, waving a hand at his too-shiny black curls, his too-perfect face. “Why not take him off, hmm? Why not show me your true form?”
His eyes flick over me. Not the way a man takes in a woman, but the way he measures a problem. They linger a beat too long on my mouth, though—perhaps on the slight tremble there—then drop to the grave mound.
“Presume,” he finally says, “that the way you screamed, fled, cowered, and hid under a table serves as a perfectly adequate reason.”
Heat flares under my collar, hot and sharp, burning away the lingering cold. I hate that he saw me reduced to a scrambling, terrified child, hiding from the very thing I’ve spent my life burying.
“I’m sick of the fucking masks.” I take a step toward him, forcing him to look away from the dirt and back at me. “Do it. Drop the theater. If we’re going to talk, I want to talk to the thing that created the curse sitting on my head, not the pretty puppet it used to seduce me.”
“Seduce you?” He pushes off the tree, moving with that fluid, determined grace that screams predator, no matter how fine the velvet that wraps it.
“If I recall correctly, Elara, then you came to me.” His voice drops, shedding the polite veneer for something darker.
“You came to my room,” he murmurs, stopping inches from where I stand rooted.
“You pressed those small, gravedigging hands against my chest and practically begged to be ruined.”
My breath hitches, traitorous and loud in the quiet graveyard, but I hold my ground against every instinct screaming to run. “I came for instruction.”
“Is that what you’re telling yourself?” A smile touches his lips, slow and wicked.
He reaches out, a finger tracing the line of my jaw.
“Do not rewrite history because you’re frightened of the ink, little queen.
I remember the way your pulse hammered against my mouth.
I remember the way you unraveled.” He lowers his head, his lips hovering beside my ear, his breath a cool whisper against my skin.
“I remember how you sounded when you came on my cock.”
My knees weaken. The heat of him—or the cold pretending to be heat—radiates into me. Flashbacks hit me like physical blows: the slide of silk falling away, the arch of my back, the guttural sound I made when he filled me.
“Stop,” I whisper.
It isn’t a command. It’s a plea.
He ignores it. His thumb brushes the hollow of my throat, finding the frantic beat of my pulse.
“If anything, you seduced me with your…blatant disregard.” He catches my wrist, bringing my palm up to his mouth, his lips grazing the calluses earned from the shovel this morning.
“You move through the architecture of my existence with such ease. You stand in the center of my domain, amidst the worms and the decay, and you look so perfectly, terrifyingly at home.”
The tension snaps tight, gravity pulling me toward him while my body flushes with unforgivable tingles. Until my eyes drift past his shoulder. To the mound of dirt.
Tingles turn to a death chill.
I reach up and grab his wrist with the force of a woman who hauls dead weight for a living and yank it away. “You’re mistaken.”
He blinks, the seductive haze faltering. “Am I?”
“When I came to you, I came to Vale,” I hiss. “Because I was starving for anything that wasn’t death.” I drop his hand like one drops a corpse. “Don’t mistake my desperation for desire, you lying, scheming monster.”
The temperature plummets until frost crystals bloom on the grass beneath us with little clinks and clangs, the remaining curve of his mouth straightening into a line so thin it’s almost invisible. Something startlingly human flashes across his eyes before it’s swallowed by an abysmal anger.
“Says the biggest liar of them all.” His voice drops, losing its human cadence, vibrating against my ribs with ruthless force. “How about we drop this farce, and you simply tell me what it is that you demand.”
What I demand of him? Why would he think I have any leverage…
“What?”
“Oh, please. You and Kael? Quite the performance.” A brittle scoff slips out of him, terrifyingly bemused.
“Out of sheer curiosity, at what point did you two decide to collaborate against me, hmm?” The words are almost conversational.
Until his hand snaps up, fisting in my hair at the scalp and yanking my head back, letting pain prickle across my scalp.
“Was it when I was gone dealing with that foolish little farm girl? Was he whispering promises about your brother’s life if only you’d spread your legs like a good little whore, letting Death fuck you? ”
I wince, about to deny it, but his other hand grips my chin, forcing me to look at him.
“And the curtain… Oh, the curtain!” he shouts.
“That stroke of theatrical genius. Kael’s suggestion, wasn’t it?
” He laughs, a sharp, humorless bark. “Come to think of it, you must have plotted it that night, after I left you shivering beneath the table. Oh, how cunning. I left as you demanded, and you…” He stops, his expression twisting, something ugly and raw breaking through the nonchalant veneer.
“You ran right to him, and I was left the fool once more.”
For a heartbeat, I just stare at him while my mind scrapes itself raw against the echo of his words. “When a mortal fools Death,” his voice drifts from our past, “Death must grant a wish.”
Something lifts inside my core, the meaning of those words clicking into place with the same cold certainty as rigor sets into bones. But of course! To him, it must have looked rehearsed—Kael crowning me, shoving the knife into my hand, timing the cut while Vale was a step too late.
Given the chaos of all that transpired since the greenhouse, he’s convinced that Kael and I had plotted this all along. That we cheated him.
That I fooled Death.
Which isn’t true. Not at all. If anything, I was about as clueless as him, but I’m not so stupid as to confess that. If Death’s humiliation buys me a wish, I’ll damn well take it!
I stop fighting his grip, stop trembling. I let a cold, gravedigger calm settle over my face—the kind I use when the grieving scream at me for things I can’t change.
“Took you long enough,” I say.
Vale freezes, releasing me. His rant dies in his throat, pupils blowing wide as he searches my face for the lie and finds only the hard surface of my resolve.
Then he scoffs, the last of twilight gleaming off his black curls. He rakes a hand through them, a gesture too mortal, gaze going to the horizon once more before he looks back at me.
“I didn’t know what to make of what I was witnessing until the very moment you opened his throat.
” His jaw works, the muscles bunching tight beneath the skin.
“It’s no small confession for any man to admit he’s been made a fool, yet it’s a particular humiliation for me, when the laws that bind me do not allow my foolishness to pass unpaid.
” Tilting his head, he shifts nearer, his eyes narrowing on my lips for the shortest moment before they find mine. “What, Elara, is it you demand of me?”
“How can you not know what I demand?” My wish requires no thought, no consideration, that excitement expanding at my core a guiding force. “Lift the curse. Destroy the crown and take your damn heartstring back.”
“Denied.” The word is instant.
“What?” That expansion in my chest comes to a halt, shriveling under the pressure of a forced inhale. “You just said—”
“The crown exists because of a wish—made by a king long forgotten, protected by laws mortals cannot fathom.” Vale steps into the space I’m trying to defend, his nearness a suffocating weight.
“Did you really think it would be that easy? That you could simply wish away centuries of debt with a single breath?” He dips his head, his lips grazing the shell of my ear, his voice a mocking caress.
“I cannot grant a wish that directly contradicts a prior binding.”
My chest tightens, the hope that had flared just seconds ago brittling into ash. I want to slap him, pound my fists against that velvet coat, but I force my arms to remain by my sides. Anger is useless if it’s blind.
Think, Elara. Think.
What do I demand?