14 #4
“Could I? And then? You left me no other choice, Melody. Not if I wanted to see you again alive. I could hardly let you return to the human world and die. Not over the fate of that witch.” His words are tinged with a sudden fury, his eyes burning with lilac fire when I whirl toward him.
“Couldn’t you, huh? Not your fucking problem.”
“Not my problem?” he seethes, his fangs fully bared. “I thought you dead at first. And then I find you and you look—” He catches himself.
I scowl at him.“I look it? Say it. I look like a corpse.”
A muscle feathers in his strong jaw. “She should have taken care of you.”
“Taken care of me? What do you all think I am? A child? That Blair is some kind of nursemaid? Maybe it’s time you accept that maybe I age a little bit faster than the average elf and don’t reach my adolescence with three hundred years.”
“Very funny,” he bites out.
“Wasn’t meant to be. I’m a fucking woman and no one’s property. Send Caryan my greetings when you crawl back to him, because I don’t give a fucking shit about your archaic rules.”
Aris has wriggled out of my arms, and I cross them in front of my chest. Riven looks livid and I think he will say something, but then he just looks away again.
I let out a hollow laugh.“For a moment, I thought you did it for me, you know,” I say, then I shake my head and march toward the vortex.
Riven grabs my arm before I can reach it, yanking me back. Because I’ve lost so much weight, I stumble.
For a second, he looks horrified.“Forgive me.”His eyes widen and he lets go of me, as if I’m a hot iron.
Then he says, a touch less angrily, “I did also do it for you. You know that. But you need to understand that my priority was to see you alive and keep you that way, since I seem to care more about your life than you do.”
“Yeah, because being a prisoner is being alive?”I snap.
He glances down at the building, his throat working before he says, “You would not be. You would stay there, like a student. Avandal as a city is beautiful. This is more of a real life than you could have ever wished for.”
Right. Because until Caryan and Riven found me, I had been Lyrian’s prisoner. His words are true, I know they are, yet…
“Whatever you did to convince him, Melody—it worked,” Riven adds, as if this would somehow make things better. Easier. As if should somehow sound victorious.
“So you’re telling me I’m on the winning side of this? That he hasn’t planned this all along?”
Riven clenches his teeth at my tone, but his voice is softer when he says, “Caryan has changed because of your absence. Things haven’t been exactly… easy since you left.”
At his words, I feel as if someone has impaled me on a stick and is twisting it.
I look down to my feet, the crickets wild around us, here, close to the hedges of night-blossoming flowers. No trace of Aris. He’s conveniently gotten lost to give us privacy, I know.
“He said he…punished you.”Hells, I barely get the words out.
Riven’s eyes widen and, for a second, I see the man who’d been so open with me once. Who let me see all of him, who laid his aura bare. A man I didn’t get to know better because I ran from Caryan.
“You think that I am worried for myself?”
“No. But I am for your sake. He said that he hurt you.”I cannot read the darkness in Riven’s face.
“He did, Melody. And keeps doing so, even if not in the way you’re imagining it.”
“What…what does he do?” Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve stepped up to him and taken his hand. I need to touch him. I’ve needed him for the better part of the last year.
Riven stares at his hand in mine.Then he draws in a long breath, “He…shuts me out. He shuts all of us out.”
“Because you helped me,” I whisper, that imaginary knife twisting back and forth in my stomach. Riven gently pulls his hand back, then straightens, and I feel suddenly cold without his warmth.
“Please, accept. I do not want to be sent to hunt you, Melody. I don’t want to chase you and drag you back to him. And you know he can force me to. Will force me to. I do not wish to see you in chains again, or worse, be the one who puts them on you.”
Because Caryan orders it. Or Riven refuses and dies…because he once swore an oath to never harm me. The oath to me, stronger than the bond to Caryan. But it would kill him if he refused Caryan’s orders outright.
I swallow down my anger, all my other emotions, and follow his gaze to the glistening building below. It looks beautiful from afar, something torn out of a fantasy movie. A white building with delicate arcades and windows that stretch over two floors.
I could do this. For Blair. For Aris. For Riven too.
I know I already made that decision, that I would stay and obey—yet I try to keep up the fantasy that I chose my fate a little longer. That this is somehow my decision and not something Caryan is forcing me to do.
That this is, indeed, the best alternative, because either I’d die in the human world or Caryan was going to find me. And, face it, once Riven knows where we are, Caryan would have an easier time just tracking my scent. He would find me and, weak as I am, I would not be able to outrun him.
I force air down into my lungs as the familiar feeling of being trapped closes in on me.
This time, I’m not in a cell, plunged in darkness, but it damn well feels that way to me.
My brain makes little difference when it comes to that.
A cage is a cage, whether the bars are invisible or not. Gold or iron.
“Fine,” I say. “I need to go back and convince Blair to come. No word about the bargain to her, though. Please. She’d be hurt.”
Riven dips his chin once in a nod. Then he asks, “When should I come back?”
“Give me a day or two.”
He clears his throat. “I think he might be expecting a decision much sooner. Especially if you want to bring Blair too.”
I wave a hand. “He does what he pleases anyway, so why bother asking.”
Riven stares at me for a moment longer, as if he isn’t quite sure what he’s seeing.
I raise my eyebrows, daring him to contradict me, but all he does is look away.
“You made a wise choice, my little star,” Aris talks into my head a second before he brushes up against my leg.
He’s shifted into the form of a cat, a blue-and-gold-furred cat, with a tail that looks suspiciously like that of a mouse hanging out of his mouth before he swallows it whole.
He only morphs back into his baby-dragon form once I stalk toward the vortex.
“Where have you been off to?” I ask to distract myself from the pressure in my chest, right behind my ribs.
Riven doesn’t follow me, and I don’t know why I even expected him to. I snatch Aris up and then step into the black energy.
“Mice. I got hungry,” Aris chimes too lightly into my mind while the world once again warps and bends around us.