Chapter 8
Chapter
The question sits on the edge of my tongue.
I swallow it before it becomes another
burden for her to carry.
“Miss Sunday?”
He breathes my name as if it’s the very thing filling his lungs, and my knees nearly buckle.
Even though his voice is muffled voice through the mask, it’s deep. Resonant. Familiar. Like that of a voice I knew some time ago. The voice of a friend.
Except the person before me isn’t a ghost. He’s a knight. And not just any knight. He’s the masked murderer of Castle Ruin, the one father refers to as Death.
I freeze beneath the weight of his gaze, though it is little more than a fleeting thing. Like a falling star through the night sky or a moment of shared laughter, his eyes don’t linger for long, darting away each time they meet mine.
With any other person, I’d assume it was disgust that made it hard for him to look at me. But the flush creeping into what little of his cheeks I can see suggests something else entirely. Something I don’t quite understand.
Nerves grip the base of my throat, forcing me to whisper around them.
“Yes?” I manage.
“I—you…”
And there it is again, that breathless whisper. Only this time, his voice sounds hoarse. Unsteady.
He looks about as uncertain as I feel. His chest lifts and falls rapidly beneath my palm.
It isn’t until his eyes drop to where my hand still lingers on his chest that I realize…
Oh. “Oh!” I begin to pull away when he catches my wrist.
I gasp, my eyes locking onto where his gloved fingers gently wrap around me, the heat from my core now coloring my cheeks.
Slowly, and without daring to release the breath I’m holding, I look up at him. His piercing green eyes find mine. Only this time, they don’t dart away. They stare back, mirroring my surprise, as if he is just as shocked by what he did as I am.
Then he blinks, remembering himself, and the warmth I swear I saw vanishes. Or maybe it was the realization of whose arm it was that he held. Whatever the reason might be, his face falls, my arm drops, and there is little time to process it before my mind is whipped back to reality.
Or rather, a tantalizing, somewhat perverse version of it.
The dark knight before me unfastens the clasp that lay low around his neck, letting his heavy wool cloak fall into the swell of his arms. His masked features hide all but the bridge of his nose and eyes full of strange longing.
They wander down the length of my body, his throat working when they find the peaks of my breast upright beneath my rain-soaked dress.
I suck in a breath when he reaches for me again.
“You’re shivering,” he forces out, looking far more offended by the cold than I. He wraps his cloak around my shoulders, and I shudder.
One glance down at my bluing hands shows they are, in fact, trembling. No thanks to my new gown.
“This dress leaves a lot to be desired.” I play my discomfort off with a shrug, but the dark knight is not so easily pacified. In fact, he looks downright bothered.
“The dress—it’s…” He tugs at the collar of his tunic, as if it’s the reason for his stutter. “It isn’t…”
He trails off, seemingly at a loss for words.
I peer down to where his eyes have narrowed.
Oh. “Oh my.” I suppose the raging inferno low in my belly made it hard to notice the dress has gone completely see-through.
Then again, I haven’t noticed much of anything since we’d collided, least of all the torrential downpour.
Even now, pelted by wind-strewn droplets, I’m too stunned to speak as he struggles to fasten the clasp at my own neck with unsteady hands.
It’s only then I realize he’s trembling too.
I stare, utterly transfixed by the way his hands seem to shake more as they near the skin heaving over the top of my dress. Almost as if I am the one who has him so shaken. Me. The beastly princess of Castle Ruin. Striking a nerve in the dark knight.
A small smile dances across my lips. It’s highly certainly, of course, but when all you’ve ever been is a disappointment or a point of ridicule in men’s eyes, it’s hard to dismiss the idea that I might have evoked something new.
Though the masked knight adjusting his cloak around my shoulders hardly feels like a stranger.
His gaze, however fleeting, burns with an unspoken passion.
Or maybe it’s just fear.
I shouldn’t care to know either way. I’m to be married after all. I should leave well enough alone, accept the gesture for what it is—an act of obligatory kindness—and bid him farewell.
That would be the sophisticated thing to do, Sunday.
“Do I frighten you, Sir—” I pause, realizing I don’t know the dark knight’s real name. Calling him the masked murderer to his face certainly doesn’t feel right. “Commander?” I reach, falling flat. Yet again.
The knight’s eyes flicker up toward mine for only a second before returning to where his fingers finish fastening the last hook-and-eye closure around my neck.
“Frog,” he finally answers, his voice gruff through his iron mask.
“Frog?” I repeat the word slowly, convinced I must have heard him wrong. But he nods in reply.
I thought my name was different. Sunday was given to me simply because it was the day I was born on. My mother didn’t see fit in growing attached to the child whose life was destined to be chopped up and pieced away.
But Frog? What reason would a mother have for naming her child after such a creature? Unless…
Frog must see the question written all over my face.
“It’s just what my friends call me. I’m not actually a frog,” he says.
A shy smile breaks free from where my teeth have bitten into it, and I chuckle. A small, almost unnoticeable noise at first, but as the seconds tick by, I’m pulled into a gale of laughter.
I don’t know if it’s the nerves or the strange tickling in my belly, but whatever it is has me doubling over.
“I’m sorry,” I wheeze, trying and failing to compose myself. “I can’t imagine what you must think of me.”
“No. You can’t,” he whispers. When his dark brows raise a hair at the fall of my features, I’m not sure I was meant to hear it.
What does that make—three times tonight that I’ve acted out of accord? Well. It’s nice to know that if this marriage doesn’t kill me, humiliation is sure to do the trick.
Frog spots the disappointment rolling through my shoulders before they even drop. “That’s not—I didn’t mean that I—” he stutters, when a violent scream shatters the already crumbling moment.
Like metal striking against stone, it pierces the night air, louder and louder until suddenly…it stops.
“What in the realm was that?” I ask, stepping toward the wet sound of pained cries.
Frog cuts me off. “Get back inside. Please,” he gently orders. Or was he asking? Honestly, it sounded more like a suggestion.
I know I should obey, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m right where I’m meant to be. I might not be a knight or pontiff, but I’ve spent enough time with Gally to know a few things about mending. And by the sounds of it, knowing even a little could make a difference right now.
My mind made up, I move to step around him, but he cuts me off, blocking my every move before I can make it. Trapping us in a dance I swear we’ve done before.
“Miss Sunday.”
That name. I cock my head, eyes searching. Only one person has ever called me that.
“Do I—”
“Yes,” he blurts before the question can fully form on my lips.
“Yes?” I blink, heart pounding in my chest.
“Yes. You do…” he answers softly, lowering his gaze as though afraid of what I might see in it.
I step closer, like a moth drawn to a flame. I reach for the warmth of a distant memory, of a friend whose presence felt much the same. Could it be?
“Are you—”
“Frightened.”
“Frightened?” A pit opens in my stomach as I slowly realize he’s not referring to the screams. “Oh.” I breathe, staggering back a step. “I see.”
Frog draws in a breath like he’s about to say more, but this time it’s me who turns away.
“You should go.” I urge.
With my back toward him, I wait until I can no longer hear the gravel crunch beneath his feet as they walk away, leaving me to confront a truth I’ve tried to avoid.
It isn’t the rot, the ruin, or even the revenge of an evil queen that haunts my people’s dreams.
It’s me.