17. Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Arhythmic rumble vibrated on my legs as I woke.
The room was dark with only thin shafts of light streaming through the shutters.
Sometimes, lying in the dark was peaceful.
Sometimes, it was like being gripped by panic incarnate.
Not the dark, but what it represented. Nothing. A place no one would remember you in.
I hadn’t died. But I’d felt the terror of those cool fingers reaching for me.
I hadn’t died.
I tamped down the panic threatening as I gripped the shell around my neck. The thrumming of my heart steadied, and I forced myself to breathe.
I kicked off the cool bedsheets only to stumble as the rumble I found had been coming from a grey cat that scattered itself somewhere into the dark.
“Crazy cat,” I mumbled as I crashed a knee into the bed frame, trying to dodge as the creature scarpered. My tired fingers fumbled for the latch on the wooden shutters, and bright, midday sunlight poured into the room, making my eyes hurt as they struggled to adjust.
A bell pealed somewhere in the distance. The city was alive. Unaware of anything other than its own duties. The bay glinted as the sun sprinkled itself across her waters. No hint of the dissonance of earlier.
Celeste had given me a part of her. And I didn’t know how to speak to someone after that.
“Hellooo?” Audrie’s voice came into the room. “You’re awake! I thought I heard something. Where’s Turnip?”
Maybe I hadn’t fully recovered from my injuries. “Turnip?”
“The lazy lump of cat that wouldn’t leave your bed.”
As if on cue, the grey ball of fat and fur barrelled past and out the door.
“Turnip?”
Audrie shrugged. “I found him in a basket with a turnip and some raspberries. Didn’t think he could carry the pomp of a fruit so … Turnip was crowned!”
Despite the morning I’d just had, I laughed. Audrie had a way about her that just refused to be smothered by the confines of her society. She was chaotic, quiet and loud all at once.
And good for my soul.
She placed a silver tray on the end of the bed, and I took up a cross-legged position opposite her on the mattress.
“Lemon fondant cakes. They’re my favourite,” she explained as she popped a whole one into her mouth, her lips struggling to keep the crumbs from going everywhere. “My friend Ashen introduced me to them.” She extended the selection to me, and I pinched one off the plate.
They were good. And I was hungry.
As I chewed, a silence stretched out between us like a bolt of fabric tumbling away. Audrie was looking at me through doe-eyed lashes.
“So, what do you remember?”
“Not much,” I lied. The exact colour of my own blood on the dark stone mixing with the puddles of seawater, hung as vividly in my mind as an oil painting.
“Is it still sore?”
She must have known I had been injured but didn’t know the details.
“No. I just—I don’t want to talk about it. I can remember the pain, but it’s gone.” I picked at the cake and mulled it over, wondering why she wanted to know more about it all.
She’d stopped eating, though, and was looking at me as her lips twitched.
A little strained, I sighed. “Audrie. What is it?”
“It was only … It’s just, today … three men. They were attacked. It was at the docks,” she said, picking at another cake.
I blanched.
Three men.
I didn’t need to ask who did it. I knew the answer to that in my heart.
“Men?” I tried to act surprised. I didn’t know why I was lying to her. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit to my part in all of this.
Audrie nodded. “Three of them.” She stalled and swallowed. “Why were you out there all alone?”
A cord of tension pulled in my gut.
“Kaedian. Lord Kaedian,” she corrected.
I waved a hand as if to say Forget his damn title.
“He found you … I don’t know what happened, but Gavrin … He was raging this morning as he left Lord Kaedian’s study. He told me afterwards.”
I needn’t have bothered lying to her then. Shame rose up in my throat like bile.
She faltered and I took her hand. Her hazel eyes shifted with the memory of whatever Gavrin had detailed.
“He’s …” I fumbled for words. I wasn’t sure Audrie was the right person to ask, but I had tried asking Kaed directly about why people cowered before him.
Maybe they just instinctively knew to shy away from a dangerous animal.
“His magic. He’s powerful? More than most?
” I knew the truth of it as I said it. The unmistakable taste of power dripped from Kaed when he so much as entered a room.
It rolled off him like storm clouds rolling over hills and smothering valleys.
I recalled the first time I’d really noticed his fae being after he’d flown me away from the meadow.
The elemental and aethereal power that sang deep within him.
It was more of a chant, a hymn to the forgotten gods. Ancient and unknowable.
Audrie nodded and sniffled. She was visibly shaken by the event. And that was the normal response.
She didn’t elaborate, and I couldn’t push her.
For having just been attacked, I was surprisingly fine. And perhaps, a little bolstered by the knowledge that those men were in a worse state than I was.
Resolve took root inside me; it steadied me. I was done paying the price for everyone else’s terrible morals. Everyone I’d come up against recently had wanted something from me. I was done.
I might not know who I was or meant to be, but I wasn’t anyone’s victim.
But Audrie should never have had to know about this. Because of me. I didn’t know how to fix what she had learned. To scrub it from her mind. She was so full of fire and adorable chaos, and she never should have had to be exposed to something like that.
“This is my fault.”
Audrie shook her head. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Where … where is Kaed now?”
I wasn’t sure why I cared. Maybe something had softened in me from what Celeste had done.
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
That wasn’t an answer, but I picked at a cake while another silence filled the air.
Audrie didn’t meet my eyes as she spoke. “Where were you going?”
I hung my head and couldn’t look at her.
“I really was just curious,” I said, feeling oddly childish.
“I … I’ve never been to a place like this.
And I know it’s silly, but—” I looked up to see Audrie’s bright eyes patiently waiting, not judging.
“I just wanted to see the sea. It felt different to be near it. Like a part of me had been missing until I saw it.”
I expected Audrie to laugh, to mock me. But she just smiled.
“I don’t think I belong in a place like this, though.” My fingers fanned over where the cuts had been just last night. I hadn’t really considered that danger was real. It was always imaginary until you came face-to-face with it.
And last night just highlighted how ill-suited I was to fae cities. Or meadows. Bleeding Crowns.
“Seeing Celeste’s magic—” My voice cracked a little. “Only reminded me of that. I’m … I’m not like them. I can’t heal.” My finger traced an errant thread in the bedsheets.
“Healing magic is rarer than you’d think. At least offering it is,” she continued. “Emotions favour violence and anger over peace and compassion.”
My face was going to end up permanently scrunched to look like a gargoyle on a weather-beaten building at this rate. I had thought all fae could offer healing, heal naturally. Showed what I knew about “my kind.” I blinked before I could roll my eyes.
“My studies,” she explained, “they cover fae history. Including magic-wielding.”
My eyes sparked at that. But I felt the shimmer of my excitement die as I saw Audrie’s expression. It was hurt in her eyes as she looked me over.
“Will you tell me about your studies?” I tried to soften my words.
“Are you going to endanger yourself again?”
“I wasn’t trying to get attacked. It just happened.” I leaned in, but she pulled her hand out of mine.
“Walking around here—anywhere—you’ve got to be careful.” Her voice was softer than I had any right to be privy to right now.
“Audrie, I’m not helpless. They were just—”
“You. Need. To. Be. More. Careful.” Her arms folded. “This isn’t like some small town. It’s not safe. People go missing all the time.” A stern look crossed her brow. I wasn’t sure she pulled it off. “People aren’t always kind to … people like you.” The echo of Jon’s words hit me.
She was right. This was so far from anything I knew. Not that Shadowfall had been particularly kind to me, but it was only after I left that I’d really landed myself in trouble. And frequently, it seemed.
While I pondered that, Audrie stood and began a tight pace back and forth.
“I have a bargain with Kaed, but I am still very much his prisoner, even if it doesn’t feel like it always.” It felt strange to admit any of this to Audrie. She was under his roof. But there was something in her that I couldn’t deny. I knew she was a friend to me.
I scoffed at the whole situation. Nothing about this situation was normal.
I was a prisoner in a room of silk and finery.
I was healed by a kind soul and kept by a dark one.
I was sitting, eating lemon cakes with the sweetest person I’d ever met.
And I was ready to leave at a moment’s notice for parents and a family who didn’t want me, a village that didn’t spare me a thought, for a future I wasn’t even sure still survived.
“Maybe he’s not as uncaring as you think.” Her eyes were unguarded, like she truly could believe that, as they dipped to search mine.
I laughed. “Oh?”
“See?” She pulled open an armoire.
Gowns. Lots of gowns. They spilled out like rivers of a rainbow in every shade of blue, green and lavender. Silk and velvet and jacquard.
“He’s picked this one for tonight.” Audrie held up a sea of fabric.
A wispy dark-blue gown of fine tulle and silk that swayed like clouds in a breeze.
The gown was scooped low and open at the shoulders, and two pieces of fabric were tied off at the nape.
Shimmering amethyst beads danced along the hem and all through the skirts.
“Tonight?”
“The garden party.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but then a vague recollection from the conversation in the study hit me. But I was struggling to piece the days together.
“I thought Kaed wasn’t invited to parties?”
“Having impending nuptials is improving his invitation rate.”
I hated to admit that he had been right. It seemed doors were beginning to open to him with our betrothal.
I’d thrown the midnight blue dress Kaed had chosen to the ground. It made a uniquely pretty heap and moved like flowing water between my fingers, but I wasn’t wearing it. It didn’t matter that it was exquisite layers of gossamer and shimmering spider silk. He’d chosen it. I wasn’t wearing it.
Instead, I’d opted for a black gown with a high neck and central split section showing off a daring amount of cleavage.
But the open back with gold chains that dangled down to skim the small of my back was what made this dress.
This one had no shimmer, it was more like an endless darkness.
I opted for thick gold cuffs on both wrists, each featuring a ruby.
My stomach twisted as I fitted the cuffs. Even just one of the pieces I wore could be traded for an entire flock of sheep back home. Or a barn of feed and hay. It was unnerving to be thrust into such wealth.
Staring at the mirror, I wasn’t sure I recognised the person who stood before me, draped in elegant night.
I felt unbalanced. I wanted to hate Kaed for being so keyed up over the attack. It hadn’t been my fault, and yet he had looked like he would break something in his jaw from the tension roiling inside him when he’d escorted me from Celeste’s. But I felt grateful to Kaed for saving my life.
And I hated that.
A hard knock at my door sent a bolt up my spine.
Not Audrie. She would already be in the room, trying on clothes or rearranging furniture at this point. My skirts were silent as they trailed the floors. I wasn’t prepared for the devastation that hit me upon opening the door.
Kaed stood, broad-chested, arms folded in a structured leather chest piece with subtly winged shoulders, looking like iniquitous night clad in black.
He was imposing. Powerful.
His shoulders were solid to begin with, not hulking like Gavrin’s, but in this, he looked like a destroying god before me.
I didn’t know if my eyes roamed up or down, but they were lost in everything.
His hair was coiffed high and tumbled forward between his eyes. No part of his facial scar was hidden. And I was shocked to feel I liked it that way.
Neither of us spoke.
Kaed extended a hand and put the other behind his back.
But gods … when he moved his arms … there was a sectional cutout that exposed the carved plane of his abdomen.
To top it off, there were two red smudges of make-up just where he liked to pinch the bridge of his nose. The effect was a dramatic, furious statement.
“We match,” I said, far too breathy for my own comfort.
What part of me was misaligned that I couldn’t ignore the shattering beauty he wore on him the way the ancient gods wore divinity?
I hated that he had this effect on me.
And I hated that I’d discarded the navy dress in favour of his counterpart in black.
As he stood before me, Kaed was everything I wanted to taste and everything I shouldn’t.
What would it feel like to belong to someone like that?
To truly be by their side and not just play at it.
More than a role to cover the truth of the situation.
In actuality, we couldn’t be farther from each other in our roles in this life.
But we did match. Black. Daring to expose our skin across our chests. Even the red rubies I’d chosen complemented his red eye make-up.
I don’t think I’d seen anyone who made me ravenous before.
I wasn’t even sure why that feeling rippled across my skin.
He was intriguing to be close to; his fae aura sang from him and wove around me.
And he was beautiful to look at, in a sort of destructive way.
Look too long, and you might forget where you came from, where you were meant to be.
His eclipse took you in until the sun and moon were no longer the most powerful things in the sky, but darkness.
But I’d never tell him that. Looking was acceptable.
I bit my lip and decided I would, for once, allow myself to enjoy the sights.
Just the sights.
“I liked the one I picked … but this is better. Much better.” His words cascaded over every inch of my exposed flesh, and I hoped he didn’t notice the involuntary way my skin pebbled at the compliment.
I quashed the feeling and lifted my chin.
Enjoy just the sights. Not the male.
I was here. For now, at least. Dressed in finery, readying to attend a party with a devastatingly dangerous escort. So what was the harm in looking at the view while I was imprisoned here?
With an uncharacteristic smile on my face, I took his hand.