Chapter 42
Forty-Two
- CYRUS -
Three years ago
It’s been a year since I gave Marcella The Mirror in Millton.
Every other week I’ve called her to my office to slip her a new letter from her family.
The book itself provides a way to transport the letters without suspicion from anyone else.
I haven’t been able to offer her a chance to write back, only informing her family that due to privacy and safety reasons, she couldn’t.
When, in fact, it was only a doubt I had. That I could be providing an opportunity for her to spill secrets that could jeopardize the castle and the kingdom. But with each passing week, each gentle smile she only has for me when I hand her the letters, I can’t help but soften my doubt
I can trust her.
“I don’t have a letter for you this time,” I tell her when she walks into my office and closes the door.
Surprise and disappointment wash over her features before it’s gone. Another thing she’s only shown to me. Rather than the constant mask of cold contempt, I can sometimes gauge what she’s truly feeling. It’s been an act of trust in itself. One that urges me to do the same for her.
I motion to my desk, a pen and paper already waiting for her. I spent a ridiculous amount of time angling the paper, positioning the pen for her. Painfully overthinking and hoping I got it right for her.
She drags her attention back to me. “What is this?”
I smile. “I want you to write a letter back to them.”
Her mouth drops open, eyes flicking to the paper. Covering her mouth with her hand, she walks over to it. Eyes wide and misty. She stops at the chair, swinging her attention back to me. “But I thought—”
“Write it, Marcella.” I dip my head to the table.
Her smile shakes, and she takes a seat. I turn my back, mindlessly skimming the bookshelf to give her some privacy.
Once I’ve chosen a book and taken a seat, perched my boots up on the ottoman, and read through a few pages, the scribbling of her pen stops.
Then it drops to the table. I look up at her as she folds it, her hands shaking as she does.
When she lifts it up in the air for me, I rise, placing the book on the ottoman.
I take the letter from her. “I’ll have it sent tomorrow.”
She rises out of the chair, bottom lip quivering before she bites it. When she walks around the desk toward me, I set the letter underneath a stack of my papers to hide it for the time being.
“Why?” she asks simply.
I meet her gaze. Honestly, I say, “I don’t know.”
Right before she hugs me, I notice her eyes are glossy with tears refusing to spill. I wrap my arms around her, setting my chin to the top of her head before I lean my face down and pull in her scent.
As if that will be enough. As if it will ever be enough. Because truthfully, it wouldn’t. I would need an entire lifetime—more—to be with her. To touch her, kiss her, love her. Maybe even a lifetime would never be enough to immerse myself in her.
An eternity would do.
How have I become so wholeheartedly hers over this last year, and yet she cannot see it? That I’m so desperate for her to call this place her home?
I had thought that, after Johanna, I’d never feel like this again. Or at least, couldn’t allow myself.
Now look at me.
She lifts her cheek off my chest and turns her head toward me, backing up slightly to look me in the eyes.
Those brown eyes. Soft and gentle, far from what I first observed when she came to the castle and worked her way up the ranks.
She’s fierce—that much is true. Intelligent. Ambitious. She never backs down from a challenge, nor shows any signs of fear.
I’m the fearful one. And foolish. I couldn’t possibly give all of myself to her. If she so much as suspects that I’m not fully man, that there’s another part of me I can’t control…
She’d be gone.
I shouldn’t be committing myself to these grand gestures. It’ll only confuse the both of us, and yet I can’t help it. It’s not fair of me to want her.
It’s selfish.
Especially now. The beast had lain dormant for most of my younger years.
When I first fell in love with Johanna over a hundred years ago, we hadn’t known what I do now.
Back then, we didn’t know the effect of the dragonblood given to me as a newborn would equate to my immortality. And something worse.
A dark beast living within me.
It goes against the laws of nature—human blood and dragonblood melded into one new body.
I was young, foolish, and hopelessly in love.
The day of our wedding, when I slipped the Blood Ring onto her finger, she wasn’t prepared for what she would see.
Wasn’t prepared for the amount of power within it.
We thought we had a plan that could take down King Aaric by using the Blood Ring to unlock the tombs underneath the castle and free the sun dragon.
But instead, that first day she saw something she shouldn’t have. She saw the afterlife—the White. Even after she took the ring off, she couldn’t shake the psychosis. Nor the white hot pain that ebbed and flowed within her.
She was in agony.
I woke in the middle of the night to find her out on our balcony. Balancing on the railing. Led by delusion, she jumped before I could stop her.
Consumed by grief, I almost jumped with her. Feeling that life itself had ended the same night she took her own.
But that’s the funny thing about magic. Magic calls to magic, yes. But pain also calls to magic.
The beast awoke within me, creeping out of the shadows before I could end myself.
And since then it’s been a constant battle to keep him at bay.
He’s drawn to other magic, so we’ve kept the Blood Ring locked away.
Just as we’ve kept our Seers in separate rooms away from me, over the last hundred years.
For fear of their magic calling upon mine, and tempting the creature within me to feast on it.
And that I wouldn’t be able to stop the creature from breaking free.
So began the search for those most educated scholars in dragonary.
A Lady Bethany from Silkwood was the ideal pick.
I met her at the Dragon Academy as a professor thirty years ago.
She was the top of her class for dragon breeders.
The council and I all agreed that once the time came, she would be recruited to my Close Circle.
That she would eventually be needed. Because as soon as the beast within me finds its prey, it’ll be over for me.
That hunger would overpower mine, and I’d have no choice.
Yet standing here with Marcella…I can’t bear it. I can’t fathom a reality where I would choose anyone but her. Is it really that selfish of me to want her? To be in love with someone from afar?
But as she blinks those lovely brown eyes up at me, staring deep enough I’m sure she’ll see the beast beneath, her fingertips gently graze my chest. “What? What is it?”
I’m thinking a thousand things, but at the forefront is my wish that she’d not be so subtle about her touch on my chest. That she’d lean completely into it. Would drag those beautiful hands anywhere on my body she’d want them to be.
She drops her hands to her side.
Disappointed, I follow the line from her empty hand, up her arm, to her mouth. Stuck there, reminiscing about my dreams of how soft they’d be. Fantasizing about all the ways I could kiss her, and all the scenarios I might be brave enough to ask her if she’d let me.
“I-I’m sorry. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?” she asks. “I shouldn’t have touched you without permission—”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” I respond gently.
A sharp pull of a breath into her lips sounds as her eyes widen. Her voice is painted with nervousness. “Then…what is it? What are you thinking of?”
“Truthfully?” I chuckle nervously, flicking my gaze to her eyes again. But she isn’t looking at my eyes.
No.
She’s looking right at my mouth.
You’re overthinking this…you’re too wishful. She’s only intent on what you’re going to answer.
But as she slowly drags her focus from my mouth to my eyes, her lips are parted as she tilts her chin up subtly. I can see it in her eyes. There’s no mistaking it. No masking it.
I take my chance.
I allow myself to lean my forehead down onto hers as I fight to contain everything I want to say to her.
In a string of helpless, raspy words, I whisper, “I’m thinking of all the ways I’ve wanted to kiss you.
All the things I’ve lost in time to say.
How mad I am at myself for how ridiculously, pathetically, I long for you.
For your touch…” I lift my head off hers to look at her expression, “that even the slightest brush of your fingertips has me aching for the next time I might feel you again.”
She gently cups my cheek, those brown eyes serious. We stay locked for a moment, waiting for the next move. I grab her wrist as I dip my chin out of her grasp, and press a soft kiss to her palm.
“Cyrus,” she breathes, thick lashes fluttering at my touch.
Unable to stop myself, I press slow kiss after kiss down her palm, to the inside of her wrist. When I open my eyes and take my lips off her, she slips out of my hold and presses her body into mine.
She pushes up onto her toes, grabbing me by the back of the neck, drawing me down to her.
Tilting her chin up until our lips tease one another. We share a single, staggered breath.
Our proximity is too much for me to resist. I break the last barrier between us and press my lips to hers. Gentle at first, yet the shock of it has me almost buckling under the sweetness of it. Of her. My shoulders sag, my hands finding the sides of her jaw. To hold her for this moment.
All my dreams and desires melt into this single heartbeat.
She’s as soft as I could’ve ever imagined. And when she rests her hands on my forearms, just as eager to move her mouth over mine, I sigh into her.
Marcella.
How I never want this moment to end.
As we spend the moment kissing and deepening with each movement, she tugs me into her.
Her hands seize the front of my coat, and she begins to walk us backwards until she gently bumps up against the bookshelf.
She hops up on the counter, guiding me between her legs.
Holding me to her, she tilts her head and parts her mouth, flicking her tongue against my lips until I open for her.
I sigh against her as our tongues slip over each other, her fingers digging into my scalp, and she presses herself up into me. A wave of desire crashes over me, strong enough I’m almost lost to it.
The beast tucked in the depths of my soul growls.
I pull back away from her.
Her eyes pinch in pain. Mirroring the own ache in my chest at having to drive a wedge between us.
I whisper on ragged breaths, “We can’t do this—this’ll get out of hand.”
She opens her mouth, but nothing comes. Instead, her face falls to the ground, and I’m so tempted to grab her chin and tilt it back up to me so I can see her expression. So I can kiss it away.
But wordlessly, she pushes me back gently with her fingertips, hops off the counter, and leaves.